Rooting for Silicon

“The surest sign that intelligent life exists
 elsewhere in the universe is that
 it has never tried to contact us”
 – Bill Watterson


            For home archeology, it was quite a find. 
            An unusual shard from the dim digital past. 
            At the bottom of a carton I found a stack of punch cards from an old college course called Introduction To Computing, back in 1967.  Like the ossuary of Jesus, the discovery struck me as either a mysterious fount of information or else a musty tomb, I was not sure which.
            Punch cards were rectangular pieces of cardboard with square holes punched in them in rows.  They were the means by which instructions were put into the computer back in the days when computers did not know what to do until you programmed them to do it.  I recalled working out a sequence of commands for the computer to follow in a language called Fortran and then typing each line of instruction on a keypunch machine. The stack of cards was then placed into a reader that translated them into data that the computer could use. 
            All very quaint to be sure yet the idea of using holes to transmit information has a long history.  Rolls of paper or fabric with poked holes were used to run automata and organs in the 1700s.  By the 18th century Joseph Marie Jacquard used the idea to control the threads of a loom to create the intricate textile patterns that still bear his name.  Cards were an improvement over rolls because they could be shuffled for new designs.  The idea resurfaced again and again to control calliopes, riveting machines, census tallies.  And eventually the computer in my college course.
            But cards were cumbersome; hand-written lines of code had to be typed on a clunky keyboard and a printout had to be proofed against the original.  Mistakes were rampant and errors meant that the cards had to be repunched.  Plus, of course, the computer was the size of a Volkswagen, painfully slow, very hot, and had a lower IQ than an air conditioner. 
            Still, it was with warm nostalgia that I beheld those cards.  They were yellowing with age and wrapped in sprocketed paper from a lost era of hands-on computing.  The moment was especially touching because I happened to find those cards on the day of an important moment in computation…the announcement of yet another chess match between the current Grand Master and a computer.
            Call me a traitor but I was rooting for the machine.
            Perhaps the punch cards pushed me to the dark side.

            As a term project for the course, I had decided to program the computer to play a perfect game of blackjack with up to six players.  I picked blackjack because I was neither a mathematician nor a gambler.  It was simply the one game that I could understand well enough to outline the rules of play in a series of steps.
            To my shock, the program worked, which is why I kept the cards all those years.  There was something amazing about the way they held the understanding of a game inside them.  Just some dumb cards; placed into two equal piles side by side they are roughly the same size as my laptop, itself a thousand times more powerful than the computer that guided Apollo 11.
            Meanwhile back in the real world, the chess match was being touted as the ultimate contest between brain and chip, neuron and silicon.  The math of possible outcomes versus the human intuition of deep structure.  The whispers of the mind against the commanding oscillations of nanotech.
            Lurking in the shadows was also a very human sense of payback.
            Grand Master Garry Kasparov had already lost a match with IBM's Deep Blue, a customized RS/6000 SP computer that had 32 microprocessors and could scan 200 million positions per second.  Kasparov could merely intuit the pattern, have an insight, be creative in his strategy.  “I could feel – I could smell – a new kind of intelligence across the table, “ he said at the time.
            Kasparov always claimed that the match was unfair because he was not able to study Deep Blue’s past games because there weren’t any and yet the computer knew all of his.  Plus, the computer team made unannounced adjustments to the computer’s strategic thinking between matches.
            But of course all that is posturing.  Then or now, sooner or later, a computer will master chess better than the best master.  It will have to.  And the usual folks will raise the usual lament about the inevitable downfall of our species.  But I feel the opposite. 
            For one thing, playing chess is only the best test of chessplaying and even masterful computing is still not knowing.  The chips may topple a king but they still could not invent a game like chess.  So until we develop machines with brilliant audacity or spunky wit, we are still pretty safe in our domain.

            Holding those punch cards again, I recalled the odd mix of defeat and triumph that I felt when the computer I programmed whomped me and took my last virtual penny.  Confidence in my blackjackability suffered of course.  But that was overcome by pride in my own creation.  Helped along when the machine and I went on to win a few bucks from other students in the class.
            Don’t get me wrong, I admire anyone with any kind of mastery.  But this is only pride in the human genome, the evolution game.  To root for the chips, on the other hand, is to cheer for human ingenuity itself.   What we are capable of, what we can transcend through our creativity.
            So when the computer says its final checkmate, I will toss my punch cards in the air like so much confetti and cheer.
            Not for its triumph, but for ours.

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