The way our board challenged artificial intelligence recalls the marvelous 1951 copyrighted short story “God and the Machine” by Nigel Balchin. Regrettably, I can find no on-line copy, and so quote here the key passages (please pardon the length), where the Uncle Charles recalls opposing a chess-playing machine.
“It was mainly through boredom that I eventually decided to try an experiment.
“I had noticed that while the machine played quite perfectly, and pounced at once on any mistake of mine, its perfection lay purely in response. It never lad traps for me or did anything unexpected, and after a while I began to suspect that it did not really understand the game very well, and might be disconcerted by unorthodoxy.
“I therefore began to make moves which were not so much wrong as irrelevant, and though sometimes they turned out to be fatal, and were immediately pounced on, at others there was a distinctly long interval before the machine’s next move, and that sometimes seemed irrelevant too.
“Scouler noticed this, and launched into a long technical explanation, the gist of which was that this was not the fault of the machine but because the ‘program’ it had been given was one for simple demonstration against a reasonable opponent and made little provision for what he called ‘fooling about.’ He was rather sniffy about it, with a marked implication that I was not behaving in a sporting way. But by now I was interested, and after a while I succeeded in playing a game so peculiar that the machine seemed to become completely post and threw away its men right and left, so that I obviously had won a game. Scouler had stopped explaining now and was sitting quite silent, staring at the illuminated board. There was real pain and loss in his face, and for a moment I heartily wished I had not made the experiment. But there was nothing to be done new but to go on, so I made the move which should win me the game.”
My Uncle Charles paused and stared reflectively at his fingers. “There was an interval of some seconds,” he said carefully, “which was much longer than ant interval before one of the machine’s moves. And then it cheated. Absolutely clearly, without apparent shame, it simply moved a man backwards – the sort of pathetically transparent cheating that a small boy might have tried in the same circumstances. I think I laughed … and then I saw Scouler’s face. He had gone a queer whitish-gray color and was staring at the machine with a sort of startled horror, live a man who has just seen murder done.
[Charles and Scouler discuss. Charles concludes:]
“The moralists have encountered a similar difficulty. Frankly, Scouler, I thought that touch of original sin was the thing’s most endearing gesture.”
