IH – 014-283
PAU Practice Examination
Computer Impact!
In 1996, Gary Kasparov, the world’s number one chess player, played six chess games against
the computer Deep Blue. Kasparov won 4-2, but today, a computer would easily beat any
human at a game of chess.
Computers can do this because they are able to process so much information so quickly. The
software finds the best move by calculating every possible continuation in a way that no human
brain could ever hope to do. As a result, the computer sometimes comes up with an astonishing
move which even a chess grand master would never have considered. As well as unexpected, the
move is also extremely good, and human players can ultimately learn from it. So the computer’s
different perspective has given human players a new idea, an insight that they might never have
obtained without the computer’s help.
Something similar is happening in the music industry. To identify new talent, music companies
have traditionally relied on people with “golden ears”, who use their intuition and experience to
find tomorrow’s stars. But increasingly, music companies are starting to use computerised
analysis to do this job.
Using home computers, almost anybody can now make high-quality recordings without the
expense of recording studios and highly paid producers, and this home-made music can be
uploaded to sites like YouTube. Now it’s possible to find out how many people have been
listening to this new music, to analyse all this Internet data and to discover which of these
unknown singers is suddenly becoming “hot”.
Sometimes, the data points to an unknown artist that the human experts would never have
considered. “The other day we were listening to this rap artist and, you know, she seemed
pretty awful really,” comments one music business executive. “But at the same time, the
numbers she was getting were fantastic. And because of those statistics, we had to start taking
her seriously … . And then as we went on listening, we started to think, ‘Hey, actually this lady
has got something – maybe it’s not what we thought we were looking for, but actually she’s
really good’… .”
The reality is that nobody knew what humans were missing before we had computers – and that
applies to music as much as chess.
Part I Reading Comprehension
1. Answer the following questions using your own words but taking into
account the information in the text. (2 points: 1 point each)
a. What advantage does a computer have over a human chess player?
b. How is the computer’s different perspective an advantage to chess players?
PAU Valencia – Computer Impact! 1/2
