March Of The Machines

When Gary Kasparov finally surrendered humanity's supremacy over the sixty four squares to Deep Blue, there was an air of finality to the whole affair. After all, Kasparov had reigned supreme among humans for over fifteen years before this encounter and went on to stay on top of the human pyramid till he retired some six years later. And he still has the highest rating ever achieved by a human player - which means that he is still the best we've ever had. On the other hand, in terms of raw computing power, Deep Blue probably had less power than, well perhaps even my netbook, for all I know. And I have no doubt that the algorithms have been refined tremendously in those intervening years. It would be interesting to use Kasparov - or the current world number 1 at chess (Magnus Carlsen, I believe) as one qualitative benchmark to see how much computers have progressed in the past fifteen years. Hold a tournament with the world's top 5 grandmasters and about 10 computers of varying power and chess sofware and see where the humans end up after a round robin tournament. I know there are much better ways of quantifying the progress of computing power than this - but this provides a direct comparison with humans and that too in a competitive, combative way. As a child of the '80s and '90s which were so gripped by the whole 'machines taking over' thingy (Terminator, Matrix) I would like to see this. In a masochistic way, I guess.