Oh, absolutely. Deep Blue had a huge opening book of lines thoroughly worked out in grandmaster-level analysis, and the machine was co-operated by American Grandmaster Joel Benjamin. It took a coordinated team effort to beat Kasparov. If Deep Blue had had to work out its opening play on its own, it is likely Kasparov would have won every game handily.
"Methinks the programs were and are semi-empirical, based on human knowledge of principles (weighting various configurations as more advantageous), rather than from ab initio.
Oh, absolutely. Deep Blue had a huge opening book of lines thoroughly worked out in grandmaster-level analysis, and the machine was co-operated by American Grandmaster Joel Benjamin. It took a coordinated team effort to beat Kasparov. If Deep Blue had had to work out its opening play on its own, it is likely Kasparov would have won every game handily."
This is where AI starts. In itself it is still a major accomplishment. Once the game started, the machine won without outside assistance.
But math proofs and other mathematical stuff has been discovered by computers---things no person knew. The boundary people imagine does not exist.