If machines become conscious, would they remain machines?

WHEN IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer played a fascinating match with the then reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, and defeated him in one of the games, the latter acquired the dubious distinction of becoming the first grandmaster to have been defeated by a computer. Later the grandmaster admitted that he had learnt a lot from Deep Blue as it "thought" differently from humans.

Back in their office, the designers of Deep Blue must have been amused by the statement, for they knew that Deep Blue often makes some silly chess moves, and actually it does not "understand" chess at all! This is a perplexing thought, if Deep Blue did not understand chess, how did it defeat one of the great players of all time?

Category: Chess , Computers in Chess