Revisiting Deep Junior

Reading David Fogel's Blondie24:Playing at the edge of AI has prompted me to think again about Kasparov's draw with the supercomputer Deep Junior earlier in February. While it has been bemoaned by many as the end of the superiority of humankind over machines, I see it as just the opposite. As far as intelligence goes, Deep Junior is as intelligent as the gecko in your garden, albeit one that is powered by an array of microprocessors that can crunch numbers faster than you can say 'gazillion'. So we have a computer which can process a billion chessboards in a second and go through it's database of previous games and a board evaluation function that's probably tailored to kasparov's style, and it barely manages a draw with a human who probably analyzes three chessboards in a second! Machines still have a long way to go. (And we can happily thumb our noses at the soothsayers of the slavery of mankind to the bots).