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| Man Can’t Beat Machine | |||||||
| Chess master Garry Kasparov can only draw with Deep Junior—and our columnist couldn’t be happier | |||||||
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| Feb. 10 — In what was either the greatest sporting event or the most excruciatingly tedious spectacle in decades, hundreds of people gathered in an ornate ballroom at the New York Athletic Club last week to root — desperately, passionately root — for a human being called Garry Kasparov to beat a computer called Deep Junior at a game called chess. |
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I WAS ROOTING for the machine. I had no idea that I’d be a cheering section of one. In my experience, I have found that lovers of chess — in addition to being aficionados of out-of-style clothing — are also typically fans of science fiction, a genre of literature that often depicts the future as a Utopia where human beings lounge around in skin-tight unitards, nibble grapes and write New Age poetry while computers do all the dirty work. Beyond that, rooting for Kasparov — with whom, I am ashamed to say, I share a species — was impossible. In a match pitting man versus machine, Humanity could have no worse representative than Garry Kasparov. Often referred to as “the Michael Jordan of chess,” Kasparov is more like the Michael Jackson of chess, a former boy genius whose obsession with perfection made him the greatest player in the history of the game, but also turned him into a ranting, swaggering, tin-plated, egotist with delusions of godhood. In 1997, Kasparov lost a series of games to a supercomputer named Deep Blue. In fairness, there was no way for Kasparov to win — Deep Blue could calculate nearly 12,000,000,000 chess moves per minute compared to Kasparov’s ability to calculate somewhere in the area of 3. No one blamed Kasparov for “letting down” mankind. Hey, he’s only human, right? Yeah, all too human: For the next six years, Kasparov told anyone who’d listen that Deep Blue’s programmers had somehow fixed the match. His evidence? Well, clearly it is impossible for Kasparov to lose a chess match, yet he did lose, so by the transitive property of ego, Deep Blue must have cheated. Although Deep Blue was dismantled ( Fools! Think of the merchandising possibilities!), computer nerds all over the world have devised newer, better and, yes, more human-like chess programs. Last year, a German program called Deep Fritz managed to beat World Champion Vladimir Kramnik twice before ultimately settling for an eight-game draw (he won two, and the remaining four games were draws). Yet Deep Junior has beaten Deep Fritz, as well as another bucket of bolts called Deep Shredder. Humanity, it would seem, is in Deep Doo-Doo. No wonder everyone was rooting for the human. “People get nervous about the idea of a machine beating a human being — and they’re right to be nervous,” said David Shenk, author of a forthcoming book, which has not yet been titled, on the cultural history of chess. “It’s not because a chess-playing monster is a bad thing, but it signifies that we’re on the verge of creating machines that will truly think for themselves and make decisions that will affect our lives. We’ll start to rely on them so much that we’ll happily give them that control. And that’s the danger.” Danger? Hey, that sounds to me like that grape-filled Utopia. But chess fans agree. “To most humans, a computer like Deep Junior is like HAL taking over,” chess Grand Master Maurice Ashley told the crowd before the sixth and final game in the Kasparov-Deep Junior match last week. “They think, what’s next? The computer moves into your living room, puts its feet up on the coffee table and takes your wife?” An untidy, adulterous, chess-playing machine. A bitter human yearning to get the silicon-based monkey off his back. This sounded like it was going to be exciting. Well, to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of chess’s exhilarating qualities have been greatly exaggerated. For this sports fan, watching last week’s championship was an out-of-body experience. Sure, the huge, boisterous crowd on the ninth floor of the New York Athletic Club created a great environment for one of the world’s biggest sporting events — except that the competitors were in a private, sound-proof room on the 12th floor. The huge, boisterous crowd was left to watch the event — taking place a mere 3 floors away, mind you — on big screen TVs (I should have watched from home; I have better refreshments). As sports go, watching chess is like listening to golf on the radio. For one thing, there’s nothing to actually watch. Master chess players don’t even sit at the board between moves — and the pause between each move can last up to 20 minutes. Imagine, sitting in a crowded ballroom, wearing Elton John-style glasses and starring at a chess board for 20 minutes with no refreshments. Ashley and fellow grand master Yasser Seirawan filled the eons of downtime by imitating real sports announcers. Granted, chess is not exactly a “Let’s get ready to rummmmbllllle!” sport, but it does have its moments. When Kasparov arrives at the board, for example, he indicates that he’s ready for action by removing his watch. “The watch is off!” Ashley screamed. “The watch is off!” And Kasparov tends to doff his sport jacket at the precise moment when the game begins to heat up. “The jacket is off!” Ashley bellowed. “Now we’ve got a game!” In between, Ashley, Seirawan and dozens of other grandmasters analyzed the moves. For chess fans, this was like watching the Super Bowl with 100 ex-NFL coaches, freezing between each play to consider every possible offensive play and every possible defensive countermove, watching it unfold and starting again. And this was a smart crowd, with a collective IQ as high as a Bush Administration budget deficit. Yet there’s rarely a consensus in chess. In Game 3, Kasparov made a series of bold moves and Seirawan pronounced, “Deep Junior is complete toast!” But the computer’s ability to see millions of moves in the blink of an eye quickly overcame Kasparov’s initial success. “I thought it was going to be murder in the street,” Ashley said just a few moves later, “but it’s turned completely around.” And when Kasparov got tired, he made a move so bad that even two 7-year-olds next to me groaned as they followed along on the portable chess board they carried wherever they went. When Kasparov realized what he’d done — too late, of course — he started ripping at his hair and curling up in a fetal position. Seconds later, he put the watch back on (“The watch is back on!”). The match was over (“The match is over!”). |
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As gracious as ever in defeat, Kasparov came downstairs and claimed that he just got tired. “I made many great moves, of course,” he said. “With a human opponent, the game would have been over. But machines are machines.” Finally, the security guards (security guards? Who is he, Dick Cheney?) ushered Kasparov to his secret lair so that he could spend the next three days in total isolation, replaying the game another hundred times. “That was a terrible way to go down,” Ashley said. By the time Game 5 rolled around, Ashley was still speaking of Kasparov’s need to exorcise the demons of that terrible blunder in Game 3. But Kasparov again lost concentration, and Deep Blue locked him up in a draw. “He’s been defanged!” Ashley screamed! “This computer can draw the best player of all time quite easily.” Again, Kasparov came downstairs to give his spin. “There are huge gaps in the machine’s understanding of chess.” I wondered: Did that huge gap make that stunning Bishop-to-H2 move that turned Kasparov into a mumbling fool and sent the watch back to his wrist? “That move shouldn’t work,” Kasparov grunted. By the final game of the match, Kasparov showed why Humanity doesn’t stand a chance against computers — and why this is a good thing. Sure, Kasparov attacked boldly and looked like he had a big advantage midway through the game, but he offered a draw rather than risk making another blunder and losing the match to Junior. When the time came for courage, Kasparov offered caution. Man vs. Machine had become Chicken vs. Computer. Again, Kasparov came downstairs and proclaimed himself the greatest player in chess history. “The machine never outplayed me,” he said. “It beat me only when I made terrible blunders.” You know, Garry, in addition to the chess program, you might want to study the thesaurus that’s also built into the Deep Junior computer. My guess is that it would spit out the word “loser.” Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post. His website is at www.gersh.tv © 2003 Newsweek, Inc. | ||||||||||||||||||
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