NEW YORK, May 12: The computer's victory over the world's best chess player was a landmark event but it does not solve the argument about its supposed intelligence.

World chess champion Garry Kasparov and the scientists backing up the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue disagreed over whether the system was just a massive calculating machine or a new kind of intelligence.

``Chess is a very simple problem if you compare it with being a medical doctor and the skills that takes, or doing what General Norman Schwartzkopf did in the Gulf War,'' said computing science professor Jonathan Schaeffer of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. ``All this is an historical milestone on the way towards building machines that can do intelligent things.''

Deep Blue, an IBM RS/6000 parallel processor with specialised microchips for chess, defeated the Russian Grandmaster over six games, winning two, drawing three and losing just once. Kasparov is believed to be the best player in the history of an ancient game long considered as the ultimate expression of rational thought.

Chess playing is ideal for computers because the game involves a specific number of physical objects governed by simple, clearly defined rules. The system created history by becoming the first programme to defeat a reigning world champion in a match played under classical chess conditions in which games can last as long as seven hours.

``It is important but it's not going to affect people in their day-to-day life, it's not going to make these images that the science fiction writers portray like Hal in the movie `2001', those days are long way away,'' said Schaeffer, who led a team that created the world champion checkers computer programme called Chinook.

Other scientists and philosophers who observed the contest, held over nine days in a skyscraper Manhattan office complex, said that while the machine's triumph will not change the world, it could change chess.

``We may learn new strategies for playing chess from powerful calculators like Deep Blue,'' said professor Monty Newborn of the Association for Computing and Machinery Chess Project that assisted in the organisation of the $ 1.1 million match. ``It showed in a couple of these games that it can play in ways that people don't even think of.''

Perhaps the most spectacular example of this was in Saturday's fifth game when Deep Blue turned what every human expert believed was a losing position into a coldly calculated, precisely executed draw with the black pieces in a complex endgame.

It calculates at a rate of 200 million moves per second, but it does not have emotions or intuitions about the game it is playing the way that a human does. Kasparov's emotions ultimately let him down because he cracked under the psychological pressure of facing an opponent who was relentless and never tired over several grueling games.

``There is a tradition of deep fear, not restricted to chess players, that human beings may be unable to control their creations, and particularly their `thinking creations','' said philosophy professor Timothy McGrew of Western Michigan University. ``This, I think, is really wide of the mark. It is important to realise that the computer goes about its tasks in a way vastly different from the way a human being does.''

The International Business Machines computer scientists who built the machine by combining massive speed with a database of chess knowledge portrayed Deep Blue as a mere calculator, something Kasparov found difficult to accept in this match and in their first clash in Philadelphia in February 1996.

The question of what defines intelligence is still unsolved by the scientific community and Kasparov falls into the camp of those who believe the net result is what matters.

``You can run an experiment where I'm looking at the position and make a decision based on creativity, intuition, fantasy and a little bit of calculation,'' Kasparov said. ``The machine is looking at the position and making its decision, which is the same, but based purely on calculation.

``If the situation repeats time and time and time again, we're having the same result. It's sort of intelligence because the result is the same.''In the match, the frustrated 34-year-old Grandmaster was so unnerved by the computer that he altered his own attacking style to that of a careful, anti-computer strategy. The mistake cost him the contest and he vowed not to play that way again.

GAME 6 (DEEP BLUE-KASPAROV)

1. e4 c6 2. d4 d5 3.Nc3 dxe4 4.Nxe4 Nd7 5.Ng5 Ngf6 6.Bd3 e6 7.N1f3 h6 8. Ne6 Qe7 9. O-O fe6 10. Bg6 Kd8 11. Bf4 b5 12. a4 Bb7 13. Re1 Nd5 14. Bg3 Kc8 15. ab5 cb5 16. Qd3 Bc6 17. Bf5 ef5 18. Re7 Be7 19. c4 1-0

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.