Anticipating five moves ahead in chess is the sign of a good player. For every chess position there are more than 30 moves. Each player has 3 minutes to move in a game. To anticipate five moves ahead by a player a computer must anticipate a quadrillion positions (i.e., 10^15). Garry Kasparov in a video at Google said that there are 10^120 chess positions, which is more than the number of atoms in the universe.

The supercomputer Deep Blue—which was specifically designed to play chess and which defeated Garry Kasparov—could search 200 million positions per second (Wikipedia/Computer Chess/Aug. 15, 2017) or ~ 28 bits per second [bits = 3.3219 x Log10 (2 x 10^8)]. Thus, our ability to communicate at 40 bits per second or more (Reed and Durlach 1998) is a major accomplishment, but this cannot be done without a formal education, which thankfully since the 1950’s has been made available to much of the world (the days of invading a colony of idiots is over). Similarly, a commitment to a serious training regime lasting over one decade is necessary to become a Grandmaster chess player, and that only happens if you have the talent and the drive to be the best.

It took over one decade of development by a team from Carnegie Mellon University to prepare Deep Blue for the 1997 chess tournament with Garry Kasparov (Higgins 2017). Grandmaster Joel Benjamin was also part of the development team. Hence, supercomputers, much like humans, require an extended period of training by teachers and programmers to become the best in the world.