"That sounds like the way a man would play a game," Sandra observed. "Look ahead a little way and try to make a plan. You know, like getting out trumps in bridge or setting up a finesse."
"Exactly!" Doc beamed at her approvingly. "The Machine is like a man. A rather peculiar and not exactly pleasant man. A man who always abides by sound principles, who is utterly incapable of flights of genius, but who never makes a mistake. You see, you are finding human interest already, even in the Machine."
Sandra nodded. "Does a human chess player—a grandmaster, I mean—ever look eight moves ahead in a game?"
"Most assuredly he does! In crucial situations, say where there's a chance of winning at once by trapping the enemy king, he examines many more moves ahead than that—thirty or forty even. The Machine is probably programmed to recognize such situations and do something of the same sort, though we can't be sure from the information World Business Machines has released. But in most chess positions the possibilities are so very nearly unlimited that even a grandmaster can only look a very few moves ahead and must rely on his judgment and experience and artistry. The equivalent of those in the Machine is the directions fed into it before it plays a game."
"You mean the programming?"
"Indeed yes! The programming is the crux of the problem of the chess-playing computer. The first practical model, reported by Bernstein and Roberts of IBM in 1958 and which looked four moves ahead, was programmed so that it had a greedy worried tendency to grab at enemy pieces and to retreat its own whenever they were attacked. It had a personality like that of a certain kind of chess-playing dub—a dull-brained woodpusher afraid to take the slightest risk of losing material—but a dub who could almost always beat an utter novice. The WBM machine here in the hall operates about a million times as fast. Don't ask me how, I'm no physicist, but it depends on the new transistors and something they call hypervelocity, which in turn depends on keeping parts of the Machine at a temperature near absolute zero. However, the result is that the Machine can see eight moves ahead and is capable of being programmed much more craftily."
"A million times as fast as the first machine, you say, Doc? And yet it only sees twice as many moves ahead?" Sandra objected.
"There is a geometrical progression involved there," he told her with a smile. "Believe me, eight moves ahead is a lot of moves when you remember that the Machine is errorlessly examining every one of thousands of variations. Flesh-and-blood chess masters have lost games by blunders they could have avoided by looking only one or two moves ahead. The Machine will make no such oversights. Once again, you see, you have the human factor, in this case working for the Machine."
"Savilly, I have been looking allplace for you!"
A stocky, bull-faced man with a great bristling shock of black, gray-flecked hair had halted abruptly by their table. He bent over Doc and began to whisper explosively in a guttural foreign tongue.