May 6, 1997 Contact Ross West (541) 346-2060 Editor's Note: Matt Ginsberg can be reached at (541) 485-4271 or 346-0471 until 8 a.m. on Friday, May 9. Following that, he will be unavailable. His e-mail address is ginsberg@cirl.uoregon.edu. EUGENE--Garry Kasparov may be the last grand champion chess player able to give a computer challenger an even match, according to the University of Oregon's Matthew Ginsberg, an expert in artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is the basis of Kasparov's challenger, Deep Blue, and other computer gaming programs. "Five years ago the computer didn't stand a chance against a grand master and five years from now even the best human player will rarely, if ever, be able to win," says Ginsberg, the founder of the university's Computational Intelligence Research Laboratory. Due to the ever-greater computational muscle available to programmers, he explains, computer programs in chess and other games have shown steady improvement and are likely to continue to do so. "Right now," he notes, "we are at a curious and fleeting place in history where the best players in many games--chess, poker, backgammon, Scrabble, checkers--are almost evenly matched with their computer counterparts." Making the current parity of human and computer skill all the more interesting and unusual, Ginsberg explains, is that computers and humans achieve their great level of technical skill using very different kinds of intelligence. It is a case of the machine's brute force versus the human's raw wit and animal cunning, he says. "Our brains are massively parallel machines--a trillion neurons--working at millisecond time scales; computers are basically serial machines--one processor--working at pico-second time scales (a million times faster). We are good at pattern matching, which appears to be a parallel process; machines are good at sifting through vast numbers of possibilities, a serial process whether it is involved in game playing or elsewhere." For example, a computer would have a difficult time with some seemingly straightforward human mental activities, such as deciding what breakfast to make given the ingredients available in a kitchen. On the other hand, this same computer can make certain kinds of calculations that are far beyond the powers of human intelligence. Designing the most efficient process for assembling an aircraft is an example. "The curious thing is that their performance levels and ours seem so close, in spite of the fact that we're built so differently," the UO expert says. "This bodes well for artificial intelligence at large, since it suggests that machine intelligence will complement ours, as opposed to competing with it." Ginsberg will capture this unique moment of equality of human and machine capability in an exhibit he is coordinating at this year's gathering of the nation's top artificial intelligence scientists, the Fourteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-97), on July 27-31 in Providence, R.I. Ginsberg's exhibit, called the Hall of Champions, whose website address is http://www.cirl.uoregon.edu/ginsberg/champ, will feature some of the world's top players in such games as backgammon, bridge, checkers, chess, go, poker and Scrabble going head-to-head against computer opponents. Among the electronic contestants will be Ginsberg's own bridge player, "Goren in a Box" or GIB. Information about GIB can be found at the website address, http://www.cirl.uoregon.edu/ginsberg/bridge. -30- #F-7247/Local,PDX,OrSci,NB,NN,NW