When Deep Blue, IBM’s chess-playing supercomputer, beat Garry Kasparov in 1997, computers were still just computers. Deep Blue weighed more than a ton, had 32 central processing units and could evaluate 200 million board positions in a second, but everyone knew what it was doing: The computer determined the best next move by simulating, and assigning values to, board positions up to 12 moves ahead (amounting to billions of positions). This ability was programmed into Deep Blue directly by its makers, just as the first modern computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC, was programmed in 1945 to add numbers. These were “white box” systems. There was no mystery around what was going on inside them, even though they were, in a way, intelligent: What else would you call something that was good at chess?

Full explainer : A primer on “interpretability” and how AI researchers are figuring out how to open and understand the “black box” that holds the formulas within most AI models.