Marina Krol provides a famous example of Chess-playing automaton in her article, "Chess playing.... Krol writes that people's belief that machines could be as intelligent as humans became stronger after Alan Turing, a British mathematician, wrote the first computer program for chess in 1947, and declared that machines would compete with humans in all purely intellectual fields including chess (36). ... In 1997, the Deep Blue computer defeated the world champion, Garry Kasparov, in a classic chess match against computer for the first time (Krol 36). Krol states, "Now computers ...

• Word Count: 2656
• Approx Pages: 11
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

On the Conflict Between Determinism and Moral Responsibility The thesis of determinism seems to have dealt a crushing blow to the idea of free will and therefor to our notions of moral responsibility. If it can be shown that our actions are physically determined and therefor predictable (assuming one can be aware of all of the relevant causes and the laws determining them), then presumably our actions lack a kind of freedom necessary for our notions of moral responsibility to hold true. But in the course of this essay I want to show that the consequences of physical determinism have bee...

• Word Count: 4380
• Approx Pages: 18
• Grade Level: Undergraduate