The Baytown Sun (Baytown, Tex.), Vol. 75, No. 177, Ed. 1 Tuesday, May 27, 1997 Page: 4 of 12
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PAT ON THE BACK
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Page 4-A ❖ Tuesday, May 27,1997
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Chess result gives deep Hues]
Cedar
Today in history
SPEAR
PORI
PORI
BONE
TENDE
1
— Henry Kissinger
baytownsun@aol.com
We Honor
FAMII
BONE
Joseph Spear is a nationally syndicate^,
columnistfor the Newspaper Enterprise S.
Association.
a computer’s defeat of a chess master and
the dawn of a new millennium are not
entirely coincidental. This same part of
me wonders whether, in years to come,
they’ll date the epoch with references to
BDB (Before Deep Blue) and ADB
(After Deep Blue). 1 mean, I can’t escape
the dreadful feeling that computing
machines are preparing to take over the
planet.
Oh, I know there are some smart peo-
ple out there who pooh-pooh this notion.
Machines can only crunch numbers, they
say. They cannot think, they cannot feel,
they have no soul. Why does this make
me think of what Charlie Duel l said in
1899? Charlie was the head of the U.S.
Patent Office at the time. “Everything
that can be invented has been invented,”
he said.
I’m saying to myself: A decade ago, we
were looking things up in the encyclope-
dia, and now we turn on a machine and
search the ether for information. If we
can put blips on a disk and give a
machine the capability of calculating 200
million possible chess moves in a single
second, it can’t be long before we are
programming feelings into the thing.
Talk about blows to the ego. First there
national holiday celebrated by everyone in
the United States as Memorial Day.
This is rather disturbing to me. What
message is this sending to our children? I
personally feel very strongly as to the
observation of Memorial Day, as I appre-
ciate my rights that are protected under the
Constitution of the United States of Amer-
ica.
Would we have these rights if our fore-
fathers, family members and friends had
not fought for this country and gave their
lives for our freedom?
I think not. I never knew my uncle as he
died in active duty in 1943 serving on the
USS Pennsylvania. I have had the pleasure
to listen to the tales of the Korean War as
They say there’s a universe of information on the Internet — and it’s true.
But what some folks don’t realize is that some of the information out
there includes your age, your weight, the color of your hair and your
home address.
And that data is available to anyone who has the time, the money or the desire
to access the information.
If you’ve got a driver’s license, all that information is public record — it
always has been. But until the Internet came along, accessing that information
was much more cumbersome and involved than it is now.
Currently, one entrepreneurial web-site operator is offering access to the
state’s driver’s license information files to any interested Internet surfers.
It’s not hard to see how such personal information could be used by unethical
telemarketers, obscene callers or even stalkers.
Currently, the Texas Senate is poised to shut down the site by making the dis-
closure of such state records on the Internet illegal. The Legislature should
move quickly to OK this proposal. We all agree that government records need to
be available on the Internet, but obviously there must be strict limits on the types
of personal data — the government has everything from tax returns to health
records, after all — that can be accessed.
Today’s riddle is: What is the differ-
ence between the Hundred Years War and
the battle between man and machine?
Sorry, you only had five seconds to
respond. The answer is: It took just 50
years for the Chips to defeat the Neurons.
Computers as we know them have been
around since 1946, when researchers
assembled a 30-ton behemoth with
18,000 vacuum tubes which they called
ENIAC. The first direct computer chal-
■ lenge to human intelligence was mounted
in 1967, when a chess program called
Mac Hack was pitted against human
players.
The real people won, and they kept
winning — until May 11,1997, when an
IBM supercomputer named Deep Blue
defeated world chess champion Garry
Kasparov in the final game of a show-
down in a Manhattan skyscraper while
hundreds followed on closed-circuit tele-
vision and millions kept up on the Inter-
net. A Russian prodigy who has been
winning chess matches since he was a
child, Kasparov at first hinted darkly that
the Deep Blue team had cheated. But at
another point he allowed, with an air of
wonderment, that the machine had
“played like a god.”
I don’t know enough about the game to
understand the technical details, but in a
nutshell, Kasparov’s strategy had been to
feel out Deep Blue’s weaknesses and then
fake out the machine. Problem was, Deep
Blue didn’t fall for Kasparov’s feints —
which, if you think about it, is sort of
scary.
Indeed, this whole thing has got me
kind of spooked. Part of me believes that
Basd
Three Rosl
being awl
Johnny wl
and Scholl
ship are, frl
Steven Ko
Lannou, ad
...to Mont Belvieu’s Calyn Copeland, a student at Barbers Hill Middle I
School. She was recently named an All-American Scholar by the United i
States Achievement Academy. Congratulations!
told by another uncle, and to hear the
hardships faced in Vietnam by a brother-
in-law.
These tales have made me appreciate
what each of these people and thousands
of others have done to protect our free-
dom.
I know we teach out school children his-
tory — so what does the message of not
observing a national holiday such as
Memorial Day convey to these children?
Is it not a wonder we have young people
flying our flag upside down and burning it
in the streets?
Is it not a wonder our young people .
don’t know about the fights our Armed
Forces have faced to protect our country?
And is it a wonder that we have disci-
Bible verse:
Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
- John 15:13
was Galileo, telling us the Earth is not th£
center of the universe. Then there was
Darwin, telling humans we are the prod-
uct of trial and error and the descendants
of apes. Now comes Deep Blue to tell us
machines are more intelligent than
humankind and may be capable, eventu-
ally, of running the world without us. ;
Even if computers are not planning a I
putsch, you have to admit that they’ve I
taken the romance out of chess. Before ; ;
Deep Blue, the game had a certain aura ’ 5
about it. It was widely perceived as a
definitive test of human intelligence. ;
Now, a damned gussied-up adding !
machine is the master of it.
So what’s next? Computers already ;
read soup can labels, operate phones, fly
airplanes, print newspapers. They say the;,
line that will never be crossed is art. ; ft
Computers will never be able to write a 1 J
Mozart symphony, they say, or paint a ' = >'
Mona Lisa, or write a “War and Peace,”
or pen a line remotely as heart-rending
and melancholy as the best of William
Butler Yeats.
Not to compare newspaper work with
authentic art, but I have my doubts that a 5
computer will ever be able to write a col-5'
umn, either. I compose these words on an?:
IBM machine twice a week and I can X-
give personal witness to the fact that it is? •
many times, a singularly unproductive ?;
contraption. .,
I can also say with certainty that it
never feels my pain. ‘ .
Honor Memorial Day
It has come to my attention that
Thought for today
“History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pretested recipes. It teaches
by analogy, not by maxims. It can illuminate the consequences of actions in
comparable situations, yet each generation must discover for itself what situa-
tions are in fact comparable.”
| Lee Colle J
Development I
jion with Lee I
Education, wi
trip to Dallas]
^ood Servicl
jhrough July 11
LPeople in til
service, super
COKI
DIET C<
Send us a letter
Please send signed letters to:
The Baytown Sun, PO. Box 90,
Baytown, Tx. 77522. Or, fax
them to: (281)427-6283. Or, e-
mail us at:
The Baytown Sun is published Monday through Friday and Sunday at
1301 Memorial Drive in Baytown.
Gary Dobbs David Eldridge
Editor and Publisher Managing Editor
Legislature takes steps to
clamp down on Internet
======—=F
pline problems both in the classrooms ancE
at home? X
I think not — I also think our represen- X
tatives within bur schooT disfrict should “.
reflect on the battles of the past to prevent =
battles in the future. Maybe next year. “ '
— M. Johnson^.
Baytowig.
Today is Tuesday, May 27, the 147th day of 1997. There are 218 days left
in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
Sixty years ago, on May 27, 1937, the newly completed Golden Gate
Bridge connecting San Francisco and Marin County, Calif, was opened to
the public.
On this date:
In 1647, the first recorded American execution of a “witch” took place in
Massachusetts.
In 1896, 255 people were killed when a tornado struck St. Louis, Mo., and
East St. Louis, Ill.
In 1933, Walt Disney’s Academy Award-winning animated short “The
Three Little Pigs” was released.
In 1935, the Supreme Court struck down the National Industrial Recovery
Act.
In 1936, the Cunard liner Queen Mary left England on its maiden voyage.
In 1964, independent India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, died.
In 1977, New York City fined “human fly” George H. Willig $1.10 — one
penny for each of the 110 stories of the World Trade Center he scaled the day
before.
In 1985, in a brief ceremony in Beijing, representatives of Britain and
China exchanged instruments of ratification on the pact returning Hong
Kong to the Chinese in 1997
Ten years ago: The Rev. Jerry Falwell, responding to comments by Jim
Bakker, denied hoodwinking Bakker into giving up control of the PTL min-
istry.
Today’s Birthdays: Novelist Herman Wouk is 82. Actor Christopher Lee is
75. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is 74. Actress Lee Meriwether
is 62. Musician Ramsey Lewis is 62. Actor Louis Gossett Jr. is 61. Country
singer Don Williams is 58. Actor Bruce Weitz is 54. Sen. Christopher Dodd,
D-Conn., is 53. Singer Bruce Cockburn is 52. Singer Siouxsie Sioux
(Siouxsie and the Banshees) is 40. Rock musician Eddie Harsch (The Black
Crowes) is 40. Actress Cathy Silvers is 36. Actor Todd Bridges is 32. Rock
musician Sean Kinney (Alice In Chains) is 31. Rhythm-and-blues singer Left
Eye (TLC) is 26. Rapper Andre (Outkast) is 23.
< — The Associated Press
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Dobbs, Gary. The Baytown Sun (Baytown, Tex.), Vol. 75, No. 177, Ed. 1 Tuesday, May 27, 1997, newspaper, May 27, 1997; Baytown, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1176318/m1/4/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Sterling Municipal Library.