I know many of you are already looking ahead to May 21 next week, our last day of school.  Let’s be honest, some of you have been looking ahead to it since, well, the first day of school back in August.  Fair enough.

But before we turn our attention to all the tomorrows of summer break, I thought we’d take a quick look back at few yesterdays in history.  Why?  Because history is interesting and can make us think.

Exactly 29 years ago today, on May 11, 1997, Gary Kasparov—the undisputed world champion in chess—lost his chess match to Deep Blue, a chess computer developed by scientists at IBM.  As it turns out, Kasparov had actually beaten Deep Blue a year earlier, but this time the computer got the best of him.  Before Deep Blue, since the 1950’s, scientists had been unable to build chess computers that could beat the best the best players in world.

But Deep Blue was different, more powerful.  It could calculate as many as 100 billion to 200 billion different chess positions in the three minutes usually given to a player to make a move.  

Since Deep Blue, chess computers have only gotten better, calculating millions of moves with perfect accuracy in mere seconds—a feat no person can come close to matching.  In fact, no human being has beaten a top chess computer in over 20 years.  It likely will never happen again.

And yet, people still play chess…and mostly with one another—largely for the fun of it, I would guess.  But I wonder, when computers can do just about everything better than humans—and we’re not terribly far off from that—how will you decide whether it’s still worth your doing a thing yourself or just letting the computer handle it?  Just the fun of it?  Or is there more to it than that?

Give it some thought…

And have a wonderful day.