IBM, in recounting its history of arranging high-profile contests between humans and computers, describes the tension surrounding the final chess game between Deep Blue and Gary Kasparov. One of the machine’s designers “vividly remembers the final game of the six-game match in 1997. Deep Blue was so dominant that the game ended in less than two hours. His wife, Gina, had planned on arriving at the venue in the Equitable Center in New York City to watch the second half, but it was over before she arrived. ” To my mind, the machine’s raw chess prowess is less remarkable than its ability to multitask between chess and marriage.
O brave new quantum world!
In further news, the Theoretical Physics StackExchange has closed down. On a planet of 7×10^9 people, the single-citizen interval between visits to the site was 96 thousand years, and the mean interval between questions was 27 million years.
Summary: The inhabitants of this planet show no substantial interest in theoretical physics.