Have We Witnessed a Real-Life Turing Test?

Did Deep Blue ace the Turing Test? Did it do much more? It seems that the IBM creation not only beat the reigning chess World Champion Gary Kasparov, but also took a large step, in some people's eyes, toward true artificial intelligence. For AI professionals, a computer defeating a human in chess is probably neither surprising nor really significant. After all, they contend, chess can be described in terms of a nondeterministic alternating Turing machine. Despite the enormous number of possible positions and available moves, the task does not present a challenging theoretical AI problem of NP completeness. There are many well-developed AI strategies that limit the search for the best move to an analysis of the most promising positions. Therefore, the progress in logical and numerical methods of AI and a computer's computational speed and available memory made the computer's victory inevitable. Deep Blue's victory, then, was attributable to its ability to analyze 200 million positions per second and a refined algorithm that accounted for positional-in addition to material-advantage. In summary, most AI professionals conclude that the computer won by brute force, rather than a sophisticated or original strategy. What most AI experts have overlooked, though, is another aspect of the match, which may signify a milestone in the history of computer science: for the first time, a computer seems to have passed the Turing Test.