By Elizabeth Ridgeway
 A visitor to the Computer History Museum sits at the learning station. The museum’s latest exhibit, “Mastering the Game,” will open Sept. 10. |
Imagine a museum where ancient history starts in the 1940s and a relic from 1982 seems as timeworn as a medieval abacus.
That place is the Computer History Museum at 1401 N. Shoreline Boulevard, Mountain View, which preserves the personalities and stories of the information age as well as its physical artifacts.
The museum’s newest exhibit, “Mastering the Game: A History of Computer Chess,” which opens Sept. 10, tracks the 60-year history of computer chess from an 18th century fraud to IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue. At a panel presentation on Sept. 8 speakers from IBM, Stanford and the International Computer Games Association will discuss some of the exhibit themes.
Ed Feigenbaum, a Stanford professor of artificial intelligence and a museum collaborator, said the exhibit presents “a history of ideas, not boxes.”
Curators have highlighted themes such as the nature of intelligence and the messy, human aspect of scientific invention. The self-guided exhibit uses pictures, text, artifacts and video to illustrate the evolution of computerized chess and artificial intelligence and to raise questions about human understanding and discovery along the way.
A Hungarian nobleman invented the first “automated” chess game in 1769 when he positioned a mechanical man attached to a network of gears and machinery beside a chessboard. For more than 50 years, famous personalities, such as Benjamin Franklin, played against the machine before its secret was revealed: An expert chess player was hidden behind the machinery.
More than 200 years later, chess Grand Master Gary Kasparov wondered if supercomputer Deep Blue also hid an expert player when it made moves too human to be believed in the defeat of a champion for the first time.
“Chess has been considered the ultimate test of intellectual activity,” says Leonard Shustek, chairman of the museum’s board of trustees. “This exhibit provides a way to layer both concrete and abstract ideas. Are these computers intelligent devices? Do we even know yet?”
Feigenbaum said that in intelligent problem solving, knowledge generally proves more important than reasoning abilities.
But in the last decade, advances in hardware and software have produced machines capable of high-speed computation that can conquer the best human knowledge of chess.
How far beyond chess such aptitude can be expanded is the next big question.
In addition to tracing the advance of computerized chess, the exhibit documents the human side of computer progress. Oral histories taken from the pioneers of computer chess and artificial intelligence are available at audiovisual kiosks. Full-length recordings are available online.
An upcoming monthly speaker series brings industry figures, scientists and inventors to lecture, and the annual Fellow Awards honor computing pioneers.
The museum features “visible storage” where visitors can view a sample of artifacts representing the history of computing. From punch-card looms of the 1600s to the newest graphing calculator, there are docent-led tours through a timeline of invention.
The museum is open 1-4 p.m. Wednesdays and Fridays and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays. Docent-led tours are held at 1 p.m. and 2:30 p.m. Wednesdays and Fridays and 11:30 a.m., 1 p.m. and 2:30 p.m. on Saturdays. For more information, visit www.computerhistory.org.
