Of course a computer would beat a man at a game set by logical rules. What else could you expect? I read recently about Bobby Fisher's genius at chess, and that the modern chess game had settled into how one played chess openings. Fisher was so disgusted with this that he developed Chess960, in which the row of pieces behind the pawns were set at random, and then mirrored on both sides. Chess played in this way would depend, presumably, on how one applied the ideas of each piece rather than the ideas of openings. But perhaps a computer would beat even Fisher at Chess960. And so what could one truly expect of a Korean champion at Go. Hubris on his part was a little strange, although understandably so, a kind of xenophobia.
And so I imagine that a computer could someday, if given the benefit of physical form, shoot a basketball more accurately than Larry Bird, hit a baseball more truly than Ted Williams, smite a man more soundly than Muhammad Ali, run the track more swiftly than Usain Bolt, dribble a football more supremely than Lionel Messi, or ride a motorcycle more unerringly than Valentino Rossi. All this is admitted. But this is nothing, for these do not comprise the essence nor the beauty of sport. A computer, by definition not subject to human limits, could never comprehend the way the game is played, that is, by humans. Thus it could not possibly see the things that a man must see to triumph over another, imagine and develop tactics which can be applied in unison, and finally, play the game in totality as it must be played so that one man and one side can fairly be said to have beaten another team of men. In other words, human institutions, whether of sport or otherwise, which depend inherently on the limits of man and thus the maximisation of man's abilities in competition, cannot possibly accommodate or tolerate the introduction of such a thing as a computer, and yet remain human institutions. But perhaps here we argue merely on the back of definition. So we must come to some point in all this, and it is this: it is only meaningful for humans, and not computers, to perform operations not inherently based on logic or on calculations. The universal computer may be able to perform any task given to it in program-data form, and perhaps someday it will be able to apply that logic at the most fundamental levels, but even then, it could never be as a human is, and that is, to live in a world where logic is perhaps a necessary condition, but never a sufficient condition. Even as to this necessity it is not clear: some believe in God, who by definition could not be forced into logic, some believe in the indescribable, in the paradox of the beginning of existence, as in Eastern philosophy.
At this moment I hesitate to think that a computer might play the violin more stupendously than Jascha Heifetz, or write a novel more eerily magnificent than Juan Rulfo did. But I will accept that a computer could mechanically do something as good as, if not better, than the masters, and I accept that given a transcription of Liszt's Liebestraum or a script of Pedro Paramo a computer might credibly pseudo-compose something not too distant from these. Nonetheless it seems to me that such a process could not even begin to describe beauty, creativity, or imagination, or any of the wonderful things that humans have done since we first looked up at the stars, down below at the sands, and out across over the hills and oceans. No computer could ever dream. No music playing into the microphonic ears of a computer could ever evoke the precocity of one's childhood days, of one's wistful longing for home, or for one's cherished loves. Per George Dyson, no computer could ever point out to another which clouds looked like strange, forlorn cats. (Here however I hesitate to say that no computer could ever see in a flash of insight past the apparent theoretical limits of its own logical framework.) For we are fundamentally different from computers, for although I suppose even computers, of digits and data and near-omniscience and formlessness, have limits, their limits are fundamentally different from ours. No computer would ever sit as Descartes did beside his fireplace and wonder whether he was in a dream world created by a devil of peculiar malevolence. Cogito ergo sum applies to us, ratio simpliciter applies to them. Man is a political animal, as Aristotle once wrote, and that is what separates us from all other animals. Computers are neither political nor animals, and that is what separates them from us. In some ways that is a rather simplistic way to sum up, but it remains, in my view, fundamentally significant.
To my mind our response to life in the modern era is to never forget that we are the ones who dream, who believe, who love beauty, who inspire and are inspired, who imagine and who create. We must grasp this closely and firmly, this the very fire that Prometheus risked his liberty to give to us, his beloved people. The history of the universe will record that out of life, the modern human walked the earth about 66 million years after the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, the last of the great extinction events, that in 1936 the mathematician Alan Turing wrote a paper which would provide the theoretical architecture out of which the universal, programmable computer would first be developed, the ENIAC, in 1946, consisting of "17,468 vacuum tubes, 7200 crystal diodes, 1500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and approximately 5,000,000 hand-soldered joints", that it was used to perform post-war calculations for the hydrogen bomb (probably in relation to implosions and fluid dynamics), that in 1997 a computer beat a world champion from Russia at chess, and presumably, that a computer will achieve many other things besides. But this I believe: it will not be stated there that the computer was ever the equal of a man.
p.s. On the Manchester Small Scale Experimental Machine, or the "Baby": the first random access memory equipped computer (see http://goo.gl/mQA5m3):
p.p.s. When reading this essay again I think it is quite clear that I have given computers the benefit of certain doubts, but not others. In other words the assumptions I have taken, collectively speaking, put me in something of a middle position: I accept that computers can do more than merely follow instructions, but I do not accept that a computer could ever produce, say, a generally informed value judgment. Somewhere in there lies the concept of what it means to be "thinking". It is one thing to be given orders, it is quite another to be given objectives. But I suppose if computers were given every opportunity to do so, it would be silly to bet against their never being able to "make the jump". Conversely, I think that my essay ends up exploring what is, interestingly enough, significant about being a human being. Whether a computer should aim (or be aimed) to be more human-like is perhaps an interesting question in itself. After all, we are path-dependent in a very strong and important sense: we are the products of eons of adaptation, a process of conversation, if you like, between our environments and our genes. Without belabouring the point, a computer has neither. Obversely, why should anyone ever want a computer to give him an answer that might properly have come from a human? In other words, there seems to be to be a very important teleological (i.e. purpose-based) inquiry that ought first to be examined when it comes to the question of the future of computers. I hope however that I have, in these words, demonstrated this to require more than a merely practicalist examination.The first program to run successfully, on June 21st 1948, was to determine the highest factor of a number. The number chosen was quite small, but within days they had built up to trying the program on 2^18 , and the correct answer was found in 52 minutes, involving about 2.1 million instructions with about 3½ million store accesses.F.C. Williams later said of the first successful run:"A program was laboriously inserted and the start switch pressed. Immediately the spots on the display tube entered a mad dance. In early trials it was a dance of death leading to no useful result, and what was even worse, without yielding any clue as to what was wrong. But one day it stopped, and there, shining brightly in the expected place, was the expected answer. It was a moment to remember. This was in June 1948, and nothing was ever the same again."
