Is It an Artist?

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
Saturday, January 25, 2003
If a Machine Creates Something Beautiful, Is It an
Artist?
By DYLAN LOEB MCCLAIN

Ask most chess grandmasters if chess is art and they
will say unequivocally, "Yes." Ask them if chess is
also a sport and the answer will again be yes. But
suggest that chess might be just a very complex math
problem and there is immediate resistance. 

The question is more than academic. Beginning tomorrow
in New York, Garry Kasparov, the world's top-ranked
player and the former world champion, will play a $1
million, six-game match against a chess program called
Deep Junior. It will be the fourth time that Mr.
Kasparov has matched wits against a computer and the
first time since he lost a similar match in 1997 to
Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer developed by
I.B.M. Recently, Vladimir Kramnik, Mr. Kasparov's
former protégé and the current world champion, tied an
eight-game match against another chess playing program
called Deep Fritz. 

Whether Mr. Kasparov wins or loses, clearly chess
computers have reached a point where they can compete
against, and sometimes beat, the world's best players.
Even Mr. Kasparov, always reluctant to acknowledge
that anyone or anything might be superior to him over
a chess board, admits that the point at which
computers consistently play better than humans is
probably not that far off.

But if computers become better than humans at chess,
does that mean that computers are being artistic or
that chess is essentially a complicated puzzle? 

The question arises partly because of the very
different ways that humans and computers play chess.
People rely on pattern recognition, stored knowledge,
some calculation and that great unquantifiable —
intuition. Computers, on the other hand, have a
database of chess knowledge but mostly rely on brute
force calculation, meaning they sift through millions
of positions each second, placing a value on each
result. In other words, they play chess the way they
attack a large math problem.

Chess is not the only field where computers have
achieved success formerly thought to be achievable
only through human creativity. In 1997, six months
after the victory by Deep Blue, a competition was held
at Stanford University between a human and a computer
to see which could compose music in the style of Bach.
The computer won.... 

[...]

Others do not see the implications for computer
supremacy in chess in black-and-white terms. Murray
Campbell, a developer of Deep Blue who still works at
I.B.M., said that Deep Blue's designers had adopted a
scientific and an engineering approach when building
the computer, but that the results could be viewed as
artistic, regardless of what produced them. 

"The question reminds me of the question that often
gets asked in artificial intelligence," he said. "Is
the system intelligent? It is because it produces
intelligent behavior. If it does something artistic,
then it is artistic. It does not matter how it did
it."

[...]

For his part, Mr. Kasparov thinks that chess is art
and sport as well as math and science. If there were a
clear answer about what chess is, he says, "then the
game of chess is over."

Mr. Campbell of I.B.M. worries that chess could be
relegated to the realm of a complex math problem if
computers ever "solve" the game — figure out all the
possibilities and know the result regardless of what
moves are played.... 

But, Mr. Campbell said, if computers do ever solve
chess it would ruin it artistically. Already, he said,
those endgames that computers have solved sometimes
take so many moves that the ideas behind them are at
times hard to follow. "That is not beautiful," he
said. "It is just incomprehensible."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/25/arts/25TANK.html

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