The chair of the Alan Turing centenary celebrations, Professor S. Barry Cooper of Leeds University, continues his guest blog for the Guardian Northerner with a look at a legendary chess match

What is the link between Garry Kasparov, greatest chess player of all time, and World War II decoding genius Alan Turing, dead in Wilmslow of cyanide poisoning nine years before Kasparov was even born?

Back in 1944, at secret MI6 establishment Hanslope Park near Bletchley Park, Turing (the world's first computer scientist) talked of "building a brain". This was four years before the first 'stored program' computer, the 'Manchester Baby', was born. The first computing revolution had hardly begun.

Scroll forward 50 years - after 22-year old Kasparov had already become the youngest chess world champion ever - and we see IBM chess playing computer Deep Blue beat the best human player in the world. On the 15th anniversary of this victory in May 1997, here we are celebrating 100 years since Turing was born, with Kasparov himself (usual speaking fee $60,000) addressing the Turing Centenary Conference at Manchester Town Hall (June 22 to 26) and the Olympic flame passing by outside on Turing's actual birthday. It is a Turing-Kasparov link formed of computers, artificial intelligence, and Manchester.

Gary Kasparov, left, plays Anatoliy Karpov. Then came Deep Blue Photograph: Miroslav Zajic/Corbis

We are of course a long way from building that brain that Turing dreamt of, and Kasparov talks interestingly about the difference between human and machine thinking. One of Turing's first discoveries when he was just 23 was that computers can't do everything. It was a short step from his 1936 dream of a computing future to a mathematical proof that most problems cannot be solved by any computer! And computers certainly have a hard time predicting all sorts of worldly events, from earthquakes, to weather, to economic crises.

Is there anything we can do that a computer can't? Could a computer write like Shakespeare - "to compute or not to compute, that is the Halting Problem"? Can we build an intelligent machine - and when?

Alan Turing is often dubbed 'the Father of Computer Science'. In 1950 he certainly took a paternalistic view of his 'late developer' computers. Not only did he considerthe measure of intelligence to be doing as well as a human: he only allowed humans to judge the competition. This is how he described his famous Test:

A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.



And the Turing Test is still with us, and is the basis for the famous Loebner Prize, with a reward of $100,000 for:

the first computer whose responses are indistinguishable from a human's.



This year, the Turing Centenary Loebner Prize competition is on May 15 at Turing's wartime haunt of Bletchley Park. Watch for news of the winning machine. But it's a safe bet Hugh Loebner's $100,000 is safe.

Underlying these 'X Factor for computers' competitions is a serious controversy. On one side we have Marvin Minsky, grand theorist of Artificial Intelligence, claiming:



AI has been brain-dead since the 1970s.



On the other, Rodney Brooks with his more experimental robot-centered approach admits:

Marvin may have been leveling his criticism at me.



Many computer scientists think that what the brain does does not depend on the stuff it's made of. People like Brooks belioeve that 'embodiment' is important. And he is a big fan of Turing, saying in my forthcoming book Alan Turing - His Work and Impact (due from Elsevier in July):

It is humbling to read Alan Turing's papers. He thought of it all. First.



Brooks is another of the giants of computer science converging on Manchester for the Turing Centenary Conference, speaking just after Kasparov on June 25.

Professor Rodney Brooks with 'Cog', his artificially intelligent computer. Photograph: Ted Thai/Rex Features

So how close are we to making a brain? It depends who you ask. Computers certainly do wonderful things nowadays. A nice Turing quote, seen on T-shirts, posters and coffee mugs these days, is this:

Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.



It featured in Google chair Eric Schmidt's address to the huge Turing Celebration at Princeton University on 10 May. However, today's consensus is that the brain is just that bit more surprising than any of today's computers.

But do we really want machines to think like humans? Turing thought that making mistakes was necessary for intelligent thought. What makes human intelligence work with all its fallibility is its interaction with others and with the wider world.

We rely on the fact that human brains are not manufactured on a production line, but evolve to represent a huge variety of very individual ways of 'computing', creatively yet fallibly. Can we learn to be as clever in building thinking machines as is the complex and beautiful world around us? And how will we deal with criminal computers? Future computer surprises can bring risks.

Here's a YouTube clip about the mighty match between Kasparov and Deep Blue. Follow the Alan Turing Year on Twitter at: @AlanTuringYear and for all the events happening in 2012, check out the Alan Turing Year website here.

Professor S. Barry Cooper is a mathematician at the University of Leeds. He is Chair of the Turing Centenary Advisory Committee (TCAC), which is co-ordinating the Alan Turing Year, and President of the association Computability in Europe.