[Deep Blue] cannot answer elementary questions about chess such as “If a bishop is now on a black square, will it ever be on a white square?” ... All that it can do is to generate a next move of extraordinary quality.
But in a deeper sense, the match between Deep Blue and Kasparov proves that Hofstadter was profoundly right. ... It is precisely this power of abstracting, of stepping outside the game to a higher-level view, that enabled Kasparov to find where Deep Blue was weak and to exploit this to win his match.
Also, I strongly agree that the music/Bach connection in the book makes little sense.
The only aspect of the book that really does not work for me is the attempt to integrate music.
And there are some very interesting insights with benefit of 20 years of hindsight.
Today, open-source chess programs are better than the best humans. (they have been "trained" via a form of adversarial learning.)
And:
Part of this, of course, is nostalgia for the halcyon years of AI when the funding agencies had more money to throw around than there were researchers to take it, and the universities had more tenure-track slots than there were Ph.D’s to fill them;
Biden just announced a desire to DOUBLE American investment in R&D. Such an optimistic time we are at right now.