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What is intelligence?
What is the point of reasoning and thinking
when it is possible to access a resource that gives all the answers?
I got married in December of 1999 (...just in case the world ended in 2000...) They gave me many days off, more than I expected. My wife went back to work before I did, so I had long hours of leisure, free from worries...
I felt at peace. There was no problem I couldn't solve. The revelation came down clear as water, diaphanous as crystal.
I was reminded of a problem that had been bothering me months before. It was a chess problem for which I found no evidence that it had been solved at that time. Expert programs solved many problems, but they didn't solve this one. It is almost impossible for the human to improvise a real-time solution to this problem without knowing the theory. A final and conclusive pronouncement on the subject could not be found on the Internet.
...But I saw the solution, so...
I sat down to write an algorithm.
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
and the earth was without form and void,
and darkness was over the face of the deep,
and the Spirit of God moved over the face of the waters.
and God said: Let there be light; and it was light.
and God saw that the light was good;
and God separated the light from the darkness.
and God called the light Day,
and the darkness he called Night.
and there was evening and morning one day» [The bible]
I translated the algorithm into a programming language
and I told to him: "RUN..."
Like a standing beast he got up and began to walk,
leaning more to one side than the other.
It took six days for him to calculate sixteen million answers = Six days to resolve sixteen million positions. It was no longer necessary to reason, just look for the answers where they were stored. I added my wife's voice saying "CHECK", "CHECK MATE", "IMPOSSIBLE TO FORCE MATE", and I had fun watching what I had never seen before: a chess program that, with instant moves, corners and gives death to the opposing king in a bishop and knight endgame.
To this date, there are no programs in the world that play perfect chess, despite what the movies show. It is, in fact, a more difficult problem to solve than the map of the human genome.
I will write about this later.
