When he learned that Garry Kasperov lost to Deep Blue, back in ‘97, George Plimpton wasn’t nervous. He was certainly not about to cede his manly manliness to a computer, simply because it won a stupid game of chess. As he told PBSThat doesn’t mean the machine is going to walk out of the hotel there and start doing extraordinary things. It’s a very particularized type of machine. Over the years, it may be that the machine is likely to be able to do other things. I’m not sure what, at the moment. It can’t manage a baseball team. They can’t tell you what to do with a bad marriage. They can’t do any of these things. It’s like people always say, “Well, does sport teach you anything in life?” It teaches you certain things, but it doesn’t teach you other things. It doesn’t teach, as I say, very much about marriage, very much about how to make a living, any of those things. Machines can only do certain things, and I think to call it, you know, even if Kasparov, himself, has said it, the end of mankind, is pushing it.Nor, he might have added (or a computer algorithim that can simulate Plimpton might have added) could Deep Blue go sailing, or hunting, or whittling.But it can win at Jeopardy. It can also outlive aging authors. Not that it did: Plimpton died in 2003; when Kasperov asked for a rematch in 1998, IBM dismantled Deep Blue instead.PHOTO: Neville Elder/Corbis
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