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Picture: chess with a machine. Kenneth Rogoff is putting his money on AI to be the new source of economic growth, and he seems to think the Turing Test is pretty much there for the taking.

His case is mainly based on an analogy with chess, where he observes that since the landmark victory of “Deep Blue” over Kasparov, things have continued to move on, so that computers now move in a sphere far above their human creators, making moves whose deep strategy is impenetrable to merely human brains. They can even imitate the typical play of particular Grandmasters in a way which reminds Rogoff of the Turing Test. If computers can play chess in a way indistinguishable from that of a human being, it seems they have already passed the ‘Chess Turing Test’. In fact he says that nowadays it takes a computer to spot another computer.

I wonder if that’s literally the case: I don’t know much about chess computing, but I’d be slightly surprised to hear that computer-detecting algorithms as such had been created. I think it’s more likely that where a chess player is accused of using illicit computer advice, his accusers are likely to point to a chess program which advises exactly the moves he made in the particular circumstances of the game. Aha, they presumably say, those moves of yours which turned out so well make no sense to us human beings, but look at what the well-known top-notch program Deep Gambule 5000 recommends…

There’s a kind of melancholy pleasure for old gits like me in the inversion which has occurred over chess; when we were young, chess used to singled out as a prime example of what computers couldn’t do, and the reason was usually given as being the combinatorial explosion which arises when you try to trace out every possible future move in a game of chess.  For a while people thought that more subtle programming would get round this, but the truth is that in the end the problem was mainly solved by sheer brute force; chess may be huge, but the computing power of contemporary computers has become even huger.

On the one hand, that suggests that Rogoff is wrong. We didn’t solve the chess problem by endowing computers with human-style chess reasoning; we did it by throwing ever bigger chunks of data around at ever greater speeds.  A computer playing grandmaster chess may be an awesome spectacle, but not even the most ardent computationalist thinks there’s someone in there. The Turing Test, on the other hand, is meant to test whether computers could think in broadly the human way; the task of holding a conversation is supposed to be something that couldn’t be done without human-style thought. So if it turns out we can crack the test by brute force (and mustn’t that be theoretically possible at some level?) it doesn’t mean we’ve achieved what passing the test was supposed to mean.

In another way, though, the success with chess suggests that Rogoff is right. Some of the major obstacles to human-style thought in computers belong to the family of issues related to the frame problem, in its broadest versions, and the handling of real-world relevance. These could plausibly be described as problems with combinatorial explosion, just like the original chess issue but on a grander scale. Perhaps, as with chess, it will finally turn out to be just a matter of capacity?

All of this is really a bit beside Rogoff’s main interest; he is primarily interested in new technology of a kind which might lead to an economic breakthrough; although he talks about Turing, the probable developments he has in mind don’t actually require us to solve the riddle of consciousness. His examples; from managing the electronics and lighting in our homes to populating “smart grids” for water and electricity, helping monitor these and other systems to reduce waste” actually seem like fairly mild developments of existing techniques, hardly the sort of thing that requires deep AI innovation at all. The funny thing is, I’m not sure we really have all that many really big, really new ideas for what we might do with the awesome new computing power we are steadily acquiring. This must certainly be true of chess – where do we go from here, keep building even better programs to play games against each other, games of a depth and subtlety which we will never be able to appreciate?

There’s always the Blue Brain project, of course, and perhaps CYC and similar mega-projects; they can still absorb more capacity than we can yet provide. Perhaps in the end consciousness is the only worthy target for all that computing power after all.