Over the last couple of years, the world has been gripped by a Y2K-esque paranoia of a different kind: wondering if artificial intelligence will become all-conquering. Garry Kasparov, former world champion and one of the greatest chess players in history, was possibly among the earliest humans to mull this question — will AI take over my job? — sometime back in the 90s.
“I am not unsympathetic to those whose lives and livelihoods have been negatively impacted by disruptive new technology. Few people in the world know better than I do what it’s like to have your life’s work threatened by a machine,” Kasparov once wrote in his book Deep Thinking, which chronicles his famous battles with machines.
An early evangelist of man versus machine contests, Kasparov added: “No one was sure what would happen if and when a chess machine beat the world champion. Would there still be professional chess tournaments? Would there be sponsorship and media coverage of my world championship matches if people thought the best chess player in the world was a machine? Would people still play chess at all?”
Ironically, Kasparov was thinking this in an era where his powers were at their peak. He was the undisputed world champion. And having brushed aside the challenge of every man that faced off against him on the chess board, Kasparov started to seek battles against supercomputers, with minds made out of silicon, nerves of wires and bodies held together in large metal cupboards.
A poster of Rematch, featuring featuring Christian Cooke as former world champion Garry Kasparov. (PHOTO: Lionsgate Play)
Among his many duels with electronic foes, the two battles with a supercomputer created by IBM, called Deep Blue, became the most famous. It is this Kasparov vs Deep Blue battle — famously called ‘The Brain’s Last Stand’ by Newsweek magazine on its cover back then — that forms the setting of ‘Rematch’, a six-part miniseries released on Lionsgate Play late last week. Starring Christian Cooke with a pitch-perfect accent and a voice with a gravitas befitting the intimidating Kasparov, ‘Rematch’ uses the first Kasparov vs Deep Blue battle in Philadelphia in 1996 (which Kasparov won easily) to set the backdrop of the actual battle: the second contest in 1997, which Kasparov lost in New York.
As Kasparov once pointed out, the first battle was a science experiment. The second one was war with a machine. ‘Rematch’ captures the drama of both these duels, with a few creative liberties to spice up an already intriguing battle between the greatest general on the battlefield of 64 squares and a large cupboard that could think faster than anyone had thought before. The man behind the machine, Feng-hsiung Hsu, called it a battle between “man as a performer and man as a toolmaker”.
It was a war that made global headlines back in the 90s. “How do you make a computer blink?” ran the catchphrase across giant posters advertising the 1997 chess match.
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Kasparov’s duels with computers started even before he became a world champion. In one particularly enjoyable one for the Russian, in Hamburg in June 1985, he played a simultaneous exhibition game (called simul) against 32 computers created by four chess computer manufacturers.
“One of the organisers warned me that playing against machines was different. Because they would never get tired or resign in dejection the way a human opponent would; they would play to the bitter end,” wrote Kasparov in Deep Thinking.
Kasparov won each of the 32 games. “These were the good ol’ days of human versus machine chess. But this golden age would be brutally short,” he noted.
So short, that in 1997, just 12 years after he had defeated 32 computers in a row in a span of five hours, Kasparov was handed defeat in New York by IBM’s $10 billion supercomputer, Deep Blue. “Chess computers went from being laughably weak to being nearly unbeatable during my 20 years as the world’s top player,” Kasparov wrote.
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For those interested in computer speak on how Deep Blue ended up making Kasparov blink instead of the other way round (Kasparov won one game out of six while the machine won two games), the second machine which took down the Russian used “32 processors to perform a set of coordinated, high-speed computations in parallel. Deep Blue was able to evaluate 200 million chess positions per second, achieving a processing speed of 11.38 billion floating-point operations per second, or flops”, notes the IBM website. “They improved the databases dealing with chess endgames, created a more powerful evaluation function for chess positions, hired additional chess grandmasters to advise the team, and developed methods to disguise the computer’s strategy.”
In ‘Rematch’, before the second man vs machine battle, Kasparov is doing an interview where he is asked by a reporter: “In a factory, when a machine outperforms an employee, the employee will often lose their job.” An introspective Kasparov/Cooke opts not to answer the question.
This question is the elephant in the room of the whole battle. In one of the earliest scenes of ‘Rematch’, the man behind the Deep Blue asks Kasparov/Cooke: “Aren’t you even a little concerned you might lose?” A belligerent Kasparov responds: “Why would I be concerned? It’s a science experiment and computers are the future. I want to see what Deep Blue is capable of more than anyone else. But of course I will win.”
Machines did become much stronger. Much stronger than humans will ever be on the board. But yet, the world does not spend time watching two machines fight each other while being tended to by human handlers. It would rather watch humans test themselves, even with flaws in their game play, against other humans. Why?
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The answer lies in what transpired after Kasparov’s defeat in New York.
Even though the Russian was deeply livid at his defeat — at the press conference afterward, he is said to have “personally guaranteed” that he would “tear Deep Blue into pieces” in games if it started playing competitive chess tournaments — Kasparov lent himself to plenty more ‘science experiments’. One of them, in 1998 in Leon, saw Kasparov team up with a computer running his preferred chess program (German chess program Fritz 5) while taking on Veselin Topalov using ChessBase 7.0. They didn’t just use the computers in the background for their prep as every professional chess player does now. They were allowed to use them during the game.
The result was a 3-3 tie. And therein lies the problem with computer perfection. If two of the world’s best computers played against each other, the result would inevitably be a dead draw.
Who would want to watch that?
