“It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance.” Hans Moravec, Mind Children (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
Deep Blue matches beyond what was publicly known. A notable exception was the 2003 documentary film about the match, Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine. But while it succeeded in reflecting my perspective it was content to leave much to conjecture. This made for good drama and cinema, but it lacked the rigor and depth I finally felt ready to apply in this book.
According to the Associated Press, “Thousands struggled up stairways.” Associated Press, September 24, 1945. Online via the Tuscaloosa News: https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1817&dat=19450924&id=I-4-AAAAIBAJ&sjid=HE0MAAAAIBAJ&pg=4761,2420304&hl=en. On a related note, the impact of technology on the age-old battle between labor and capital is critical for any discussion on rising economic inequality.
The game is popular on every continent. Chess did not only move westward, it also spread east, where its forms took on distinctive cultural flavors. Many East Asian countries have their own chess variants, likely also descended from an Indian precursor, that are more popular there than modern “European” chess. Japan has shogi, China has xiangqi, and much of the region is also devoted to Go, which is unrelated to chess and is even older.
A character of Goethe’s called chess a “touchstone of the intellect,” The character Adelheid calls chess “a touchstone of the intellect” in Goethe’s 1773 drama, Götz von Berlichingen.
“The willingness to take on new challenges.” The Der Spiegel article titled “Genius and Blackouts” was published in issue 52 in 1987, in German here: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13526693.html.
“a phenomenon in the history of man.” Cited in H. J. R. Murray’s A History of Chess as appearing in an article in the World newspaper on May 28, 1782.
set by a German player of average master strength. Marc Lang is a German FIDE master rated around 2300. He played forty-six boards blindfold in 2011. The old records were often controversial because the conditions were not standardized. For example, some players had access to the scoresheets of the games. More on Lang’s record at https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2011/dec/30/chess-marc.
military exemptions were given to strong chessplayers. I. Z. Romanov, Petr Romanovskii (Moscow: Fizkultura i sport, 1984), 27.
and the Communist system that produced him. Typical of Stalin’s cult of personality, a game was published in which he supposedly defeated Nikolai Yezhov, the future head of the secret police, in elegant fashion.
winning the gold medal in eighteen of the nineteen Chess Olympiads. Hungary relegated the USSR to silver in 1978, considered a huge humiliation. When I was just seventeen I was a part of the “comeback team” that won gold in 1980.
proudly exchange my Soviet flag for a Russian one hastily handmade by my mother, Klara. I insisted on changing flags over the protest of Soviet sports officials and my opponent, Karpov. For the full story, see my 2015 book, Winter Is Coming.
In “Programming a Computer for Playing Chess.” Claude Shannon, “Programming a Computer for Playing Chess,” Philosophical Magazine 41, ser. 7, no. 314, March 1950. It was first presented at the National Institute of Radio Engineers Convention, March 9, 1949, New York.
This insight echoes Norbert Wiener’s note. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in Animal and Machine (New York, Technology Press, 1948), 193.
made an accurately calculated piece sacrifice. Mikhail Tal, The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal (London: RHM, 1976), 64.
enough to beat a very weak human player. This was indeed a very optimistic number, and a chess machine wouldn’t reach the speed of analyzing a million moves per second until the 1990s. But long before that happened, efficient algorithms had made pure Type A programs obsolete.
roughly in accord with Moore’s Law. Moore’s law, popularly understood to say that computing power will double every two years, has been a golden rule of technology for decades. As with so many popular maxims, Gordon Moore’s original statement was more specific and was later updated by him. In 1965, Moore, the cofounder of Intel, referred to how the density of transistors on integrated circuits had doubled every year since they had been invented. In 1975, he updated his prediction to every two years.
better than Deep Blue did in 1997 on its specialized hardware. For additional perspective on the practical implications of Moore’s law and how rapidly computers have gotten faster and smaller, the 1985 Cray-2, again the world’s fastest computer at the time, weighed several thousand pounds and had a peak speed of 1.9 gigaflops while the 2016 iPhone 7 weighs five ounces and reaches 172 gigaflops.
Many things on Earth are faster than Usain Bolt’s top speed. Legendary American gold medalist Jesse Owens, hero of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, actually did run stunt races against horses, dogs, cars, and motorcycles in the 1940s.
The most popular programs were directed toward casual consumers. The slogan for a PC game called Battle Chess, which appeared in 1988: “It took 2,000 years for someone to make chess better!” I think not.
Bronstein proposed many innovative ideas for promoting chess. Bronstein suggested shuffling the pieces for each game long before Bobby Fischer proposed a version of doing this that is now fairly popular. Also in advance of Fischer, Bronstein proposed a time delay for each move to ensure that the players would always have at least a few seconds to move. Time delay or increment is now standard in professional events.
In 1963, Bronstein was still one of the strongest players in the world. There have always been allegations that Bronstein was not “allowed” to beat Botvinnik, a loyal Soviet man, an echo of my confrontations with Karpov decades later.
The basic set of values was established two centuries ago. Different players, like different computer programs, have proposed slight modifications in the piece values. The most radical was probably Bobby Fischer, who suggested bishops were worth 3.25 pawns.
“the AGAT wouldn’t stand a chance in today’s international market,” Leo D. Bores, “AGAT: A Soviet Apple II Computer,” BYTE 9, no. 12 (November 1984).
I conceded defeat to avoid having to sit watching through dinnertime. A version of this anecdote appears in How Life Imitates Chess. In the ten years since I wrote that book, it has become even clearer to me that technology is like language, best learned through early immersion.
It was a much-coveted type of hard drive. If I recall correctly, the shouting was being done by Stepan Pachikov, a computer scientist who shared the direction of the computer club with me. His contributions to handwriting recognition software at the Soviet company ParaGraph were used in the Apple Newton. He later moved to Silicon Valley and founded Evernote, the ubiquitous note-taking app.
I once made a television commercial for the search engine company AltaVista. If you want to know what happened to AltaVista, you can google it!
This fits the axiom of Bill Gates. Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (New York: Viking Penguin, 1995).
“I checked it very thoroughly,” said the computer. Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (New York: Del Rey, 1995), Kindle edition, locations 2606–14.
In my lectures on the human-machine relationship, I’m fond of citing Pablo Picasso. Different versions of this are cited in William Fifield’s original interview with Picasso, “Pablo Picasso: A Composite Interview,” published in the Paris Review 32, Summer–Fall 1964, and in Fifield’s 1982 book, In Search of Genius (New York: William Morrow).
They believed it was worthwhile to fund Ferrucci’s attempts. Steve Lohr, “David Ferrucci: Life After Watson,” New York Times, May 6, 2013.
In a 1989 article, two of the leading figures in computer chess wrote an essay. Mikhail Donskoy and Jonathan Schaeffer, “Perspectives on Falling from Grace,” Journal of the International Computer Chess Association 12, no. 3, 155–63.
“But one is born an excellent player.” Binet’s conclusions about chess players are from several of his papers from 1893 and are usefully summarized in the book A Century of Contributions to Gifted Education: Illuminating Lives by Ann Robinson and Jennifer Jolly (New York and London: Routledge, 2013).
John McCarthy, the American computer scientist who coined the term “artificial intelligence” in 1956. McCarthy later credited the Drosophila phrase to his Soviet peer Alexander Kronrod.
I am not going to argue with the International Olympic Committee. I don’t doubt that if a mind sport proved lucrative enough, the International Olympic Committee would quickly change its tune about the definition of physical exertion. But here bridge has an advantage over chess and video games (e-sports) have an advantage over both.
“natural ability requires a huge investment of time in order to be made manifest.” Malcolm Gladwell post on Reddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2740ct/hi_im_malcolm_gladwell_author_of_the_tipping/chx6dpv/.
Might I have become a Shogi champion had I been born in Japan. In my visit to Tokyo in 2014 to promote a human-machine shogi competition we joked that in Japan I was the “Habu of Western chess.” High praise!
I would hate to provide anyone with a genetic excuse for taking it easy. Several recent studies have indicated that practice is indeed substantially heritable. This isn’t exactly what I meant when I first wrote “hard work is a talent” in 2007, but it’s always nice to see scientific research confirm your assumptions. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24957535 and http://pss.sagepub.com/content/25/9/1795 for research using thousands of pairs of twins to measure the heritability of work ethic.
What has this to do with the skill. Donald Michie, “Brute Force in Chess and Science,” collected in Computers, Chess, and Cognition (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1990).
Fischer answered, “How would you know?” I was told this story in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and have no way to know if it’s true. But it definitely sounds like something Fischer might say. It is also bitingly insightful, as few fans would have any idea of the quality of a world champion’s game without expert commentary. Today it’s quite different, when everyone has a super-strong engine at his disposal and feels empowered to scoff at the champion’s mistakes as if they’d found them themselves.
within five to ten years that some of these tough problems would be solved.” Remarks by Bill Gates, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Seattle, Washington, August 7, 2001, https://web.archive.org/web/20070515093349/http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/billg/speeches/2001/08-07aiconference.aspx.
DARPA has proposed tournament competitions. Including a proposal to develop “Deep Capture the Flag.” See https://cgc.darpa.mil/Competitor_Day_CGC_Presentation_distar_21978.pdf.
“Data trumps everything.” Josh Estelle, quoted in the Atlantic, November 2013, “The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think,” by James Somers.
educated on a diet of GM games, giving up its queen was clearly the key. Recounted by Kathleen Spracklen, the creator of the famous microcomputer program Sargon, along with her husband, Dan. “Oral History of Kathleen and Dan Spracklen,” interview by Gardner Hendrie, March 2, 2005, http://archive.computerhistory.org/projects/chess/related_materials/oral-history/spacklen.oral_history.2005.102630821/spracklen.oral_history_transcript.2005.102630821.pdf.
Watson then answered simply “leg.” It was Watson’s first night on the show. You can watch the “leg” clip online, and it’s also amusing to see the many YouTube comments from humans (one assumes) who were delighted by the machine’s failures. Don’t make them angry! Jeopardy, aired February 14, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJFtNp2FzdQ.
A “lounge for the weak” at an airport, a “plate of little stupids” at a restaurant. Weak instead of tired, so a rest area. The second one makes perfect sense if you know that (1) a burrito is Mexican food; (2) burro is also Mexican slang for stupid; (3) the -ito suffix is a diminutive in Spanish. Burritos = little burros = little stupids.
I don’t know why more people aren’t that way.” James Somers, “The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think,” Atlantic, November 2013.
the reason the project was started in the first place.” F-h. Hsu, T. S. Anantharaman, M. S. Campbell, and A. Nowatzyk, “Deep Thought,” in Computers, Chess, and Cognition, Schaeffer and Marsland, eds. (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1990).
as a competitive sport (performance driven) rather than as a science (problem driven). Danny Kopec, “Advances in Man-Machine Play,” in Computers, Chess, and Cognition, Schaeffer and Marsland, eds. (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1990).
There just weren’t any women on the horizon who showed the potential. I won’t hide from the fact that I did make regrettably sexist remarks about women in chess around this time. In that 1989 Playboy interview I said men were better at chess because “women are weaker fighters” and that “probably the answer is in the genes.” The possibility of gender brain differences aside, I find it almost hard to believe I said this considering that my mother is the toughest fighter I know.
I’m a little chagrined now to see that I did not play the best moves throughout. If you are interested—43.Qb1—a clever move I don’t see mentioned in any of the many books and articles that covered the match. Black is still much better but it will take a lot of work to break through. I could have kept my crushing advantage with 40..f5. The free chess engine on my laptop finds 43.Qb1 in half a second, to indicate how far things have come.
an advantage similar to that of serving in tennis. I don’t mean this strictly statistically, since serving in tennis confers a far greater advantage than having the white pieces in chess. But it’s similar in how both confer the initiative, the ability to better control the development of the game.
wrote the New York Post, with an anachronistic Cold War jab. Andrea Privitere, “Red Chess King Quick Fries Deep Thought’s Chips,” New York Post, October 23, 1989.
“Beating Gary Kasparov at chess is considerably more difficult than climbing Mount Everest.” Raymond Keene, How to Beat Gary Kasparov at Chess (New York: Macmillan, 1990). Publications deciding on the English spelling of my first name used to fluctuate between Gary, Garry, and even Garri, but I prefer Garry.
Privacy is dying, so transparency must increase. For a look at how society might cope in a post-privacy world, I recommend David Brin’s 1997 book, The Transparent Society, and the updates and conversations about it on his website.
“the best commercial chess programs appear to have measurably better evaluation than the research.” Hsu et al., “Deep Thought,” in Computers, Chess, and Cognition.
I had to agree to a draw. I was out. In the next round, Genius beat GM Predrag Nikolic and was then beaten in the semifinal by Viswanathan Anand.
“It won about nine out of ten games against Fritz.” Feng-hsiung Hsu, Behind Deep Blue (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
Deep Blue committed suicide. The “reboot induced” mistake was 13.0-0, instead of the stronger 13.g3, which is what one observer said Deep Blue was planning on playing before the disconnection. Then it blundered with 14.Kh1 only to get a reprieve when Fritz missed 14..Bg4, winning immediately. Two moves later, 16.c4 was the losing blunder, punished immediately by 16..Qh4, and there was never a chance after that for white to save the game. Curiously, Hsu highlighted the 16.c4 blunder a few days after the match in a post on an online chess discussion group but omitted it in his book.
they wouldn’t expect me to repeat that game. I know that technically the machine I faced in 1989 was Deep Thought not Deep Blue and that it was practically a different machine altogether, but if only for convenience I will always consider the 1989, 1996, and 1997 matches to be against different iterations of the same opponent.
less accurate than when they were playing. I give a specific historical example of this in How Life Imitates Chess, a world championship game between Lasker and Steinitz from 1894 that had been misrepresented mightily for over a century.
“not allowing your opponent to show you what he can do.” Brad Leithauser, “Kasparov Beats Deep Thought,” New York Times, January 14, 1990.
I might have saved the game. By playing 27..f4 immediately instead of the error 27..d4. 27..Rd8 was also okay for black.
no human can be sure to have seen everything. Deep Blue can. Charles Krauthammer, “Deep Blue Funk,” TIME, June 24, 2001.
I could sense “a new kind of intelligence across the table.” Garry Kasparov, “The Day I Sensed a New Kind of Intelligence,” TIME, March 25, 1996.
the rest of the Dow Jones went down significantly. Of course there is no way to prove the match was responsible for this, but, as Newborn points out, even if only 10 percent of the rise was due to the match, that’s over $300 million in value. Not bad for six games of machine chess.
Imagine what winning a match might do. Or, as Hsu puts it in his book Behind Deep Blue, “The event could only get bigger. There was no way in hell that IBM would not want a rematch.”
Botvinnik dominated the rematch. Tal’s health, never good, was quite poor during parts of the rematch, but it was also apparent that Botvinnik had come very well prepared.
“Conceit does not put one in the right frame of mind for work.” Mikhail Botvinnik, Achieving the Aim (Oxford, UK: Pergamon Press, 1981), 149. The quote is from the English translation of his book, first published in Russian in 1978.
“he stumbled on something that he was able to exploit.” Monty Newborn, Deep Blue: An Artificial Intelligence Milestone (New York: Springer-Verlag, 2003), 103.
As was later revealed in Michael Khodarkovsky’s book. Michael Khodarkovsky and Leonid Shamkovich, A New Era (New York: Ballantine, 1997).
“This time, we’re just going to play chess.” Bruce Weber, “Chess Computer Seeking Revenge Against Kasparov,” New York Times, August 20, 1996.
C. J. Tan and others still occasionally referred to future cooperation with me. The Club Kasparov website did launch in beta form right before the match, but the plug was pulled on it almost as quickly as it was on Deep Blue itself. I personally supported it in Russia and, in 1999, it was relaunched as Kasparov Chess Online with new venture capital.
“‘Here I was blind, I didn’t see this!’” Dirk Jan ten Geuzendam, “I Like to Play with the Hands,” New In Chess, July 1988, 36–42.
each story containing more errors about chess. The Wired’s “Did a Computer Bug Help Deep Blue Beat Kasparov?” story from September 28, 2012, by Klint Finley, deserves to be singled out because it mixes everything up so spectacularly it could have been written by a computer. It confuses the rook move blunder from game one with Deep Blue’s bishop move in game two, and by so doing gives the credit for Deep Blue’s most remarkable maneuver to a random bug.
C. J. Tan’s pre-rematch statement that “the science experiment is over.” Robert Byrne, “In Late Flourish, a Human Outcalculates a Calculator,” New York Times, May 4, 1997.
his work on Deep Blue and other events. Dirk Jan ten Geuzendam, “Interview with Miguel Illescas,” New In Chess, May 2009.
“a little with the hand of God.” Later in the game Maradona would help everyone but the English forget la mano de Dios goal by scoring the sensational “goal of the century” after running past half the English team.
202 “because IBM had insisted he sign a secrecy agreement.” Bruce Weber, “Deep Blue Escapes with Draw to Force Decisive Last Game,” New York Times, May 11, 1997.
I missed one good attacking chance. My last best chance to win the game was likely 35..Rff2. Incredibly, after my 35..Rxg4 there appears to be no clear win for black.
they had specially requisitioned from an expert. Murray Campbell, A. Joseph Hoane Jr., and Feng-hsiung Hsu, “Deep Blue,” Artificial Intelligence 134, 2002, 57–83.
I did miss a win in the game five endgame. In game five 44.Rd7 is winning, instead of my 44.Nf4. Deep Blue blundered with 43..Nd2 when 43..Rg2 draws.
As Pynchon’s “Proverbs for Paranoids, 3” says. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1973), 251. Here are all five of the Proverbs for Paranoids, several of which seem disturbingly applicable here, although I won’t say which ones. “1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures. 2. The innocence of the creature is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master. 3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers. 4. You hide, They seek. 5. Paranoids are not paranoids because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.”
but on our creation and use of tools. The works of cognitive scientist Steven Pinker and his colleagues has convinced me that the origins of the development of human language are unknown and possibly unknowable, as befits “the hardest problem in science,” as Pinker’s essay on the subject is titled. It was probably fortuitous that I did not have the chance to discuss language evolution with him during our brief encounters at the Oslo Freedom Forum, or this book might have ended up being even longer. And so, I will stay with tools and other things that can be verified by archeologists. And the ability to speak beyond rudimentary sounds wasn’t going to save cave dwellers from freezing or starving. Furs, fire, and spears would. See Morten H. Christiansen and Simon Kirby, eds. Language Evolution: The Hardest Problem in Science? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Cory Doctorow coined the term “outboard brain.” Cory Doctorow, “My Blog, My Outboard Brain,” May 31, 2002, http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/01/01/cory.html.
“we’ve outsourced important peripheral brain functions to the silicon.” Clive Thompson, “Your Outboard Brain Knows All,” Wired, September 25, 2007.
“It’s merely my autonomy that I’m losing.” David Brooks, “The Outsourced Brain,” New York Times, October 26, 2007. His tone is derisive here, or at least resigned, although Brooks has in the past been an accurate chronicler of American cultural foibles. His book Bobos in Paradise describes the search for fake authenticity by the entitled, and a similar attitude decries the new technology we need for supplanting an obsolete analog past.
“Does an overreliance on machine memory shut down other important ways.” Thompson, “Your Outboard Brain Knows All.”
more wins and losses than draws. Since Kramnik’s use of the Berlin Defense in our 2000 world championship match brought it to prominence, 63 percent of the elite games in which it appears have been drawn. Compare this to my old favorite, the Sicilian Defense, which was drawn 49 percent of the time over the same period.
to monitor and control one’s mood is of great importance. Patrick Wolff, Kasparov versus Anand (Cambridge: H3 Publications, 1996).
decision making that is slower, more conservative, and inferior. This 2011 study is a good overview: “Decision-Making and Depressive Symptomatology” by Yan Leykin, Carolyn Sewell Roberts, and Robert J. DeRubeis, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3132433/.
“potential disappointment in the expected outcome.” Wolff, Kasparov versus Anand.
Depression short-circuits intuition. There are many studies on this topic as well. An interesting and recent one is discussed on the website of the British Psychological Society: “When we get depressed, we lose our ability to go with our gut instincts,” https://digest.bps.org.uk/2014/11/07/when-we-get-depressed-we-lose-our-ability-to-go-with-our-gut-instincts/.
enhance human decisions instead of replacing them. Murray Campbell of the Deep Blue team is one of the leaders on the IA project at IBM. Does that mean he’s come over to my side?!
“A man is much more dispensable than a computer.” Isaac Asimov, “The Feeling of Power” in If, February 1958.
what was right in front of them in their labs and studies. Ian Goldin wrote an important book, Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance, and left Oxford Martin in mid-2016. The new director is Achim Steiner.
“the world will pass far beyond our understanding.” Vernor Vinge in an op-ed in Omni magazine, January 1983.
“we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.” Vernor Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era,” originally in Vision-21: Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in the Era of Cyberspace, G. A. Landis, ed., NASA Publication CP-10129, 11–22, 1993.
in real life things are far more complex. Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics: “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.” Isaac Asimov, I, Robot (New York: Gnome Press, 1950).