Garry Kasparov

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“That Makes Us Easy Prey For Machines, In A Closed System”

October 26, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Since I was never a chess player, one of the things that surprised me when reading the long centerpiece of Garry Kasparov’s Deep Thinking, in which he recounted at length for the first time his two titanic battles in the 1990s with IBM’s Big Blue, was just how many seemingly obvious mistakes great human players make. I always assumed the best of the best went long flawless stretches before finally tripping up, but that’s not so. A game in which the two best players square off can see countless mistaken maneuvers—and that’s the case even if one of the competitors is a supercomputer. 

In a smart New Standard interview conducted by Will Dunn, Kasparov compares his own humblings at the feet of technology to the lot of us potentially encountering an AI enhanced enough to remake society over the next several decades. He’s more sanguine than most when confronted by the specter of machine dominance, believing as industries fall before computers, others will rise to provide new employment, and that humans will succeed in what he terms “open systems.” 

I think he’s making assumptions that may not prove true. Well-trained human telephone operators are to this point far better at handling caller queries than automated systems are, but that hasn’t stopped corporations from opting for the cheaper alternative. That doesn’t mean all jobs will disappear—though I bet lots of them in the medical field, including doctor, will be diminished—but it does mean that machines don’t necessarily have to be better to win, even outside of a closed system. Facebook and Google have all but proven that with their lackluster response to cyber espionage. And the more AI that slides into our lives, the more surveillance capitalism will become ubiquitous. 

An excerpt:

By the mid-90s, Moore’s Law had held true for three decades. As in so many areas, the machines appeared to be little more than a novelty until, following the curve of exponential growth, their power became suddenly apparent. “The whole idea that if we had enough time, we would avoid making mistakes,” says Kasparov, “was ignorant. Humans are poised to make mistakes, even the best humans. And the whole story of human-machine competition is that the machines – first it’s impossible [that they could play], then the machines are laughably weak, then they are competing, for a brief time, and then, forever after, they are superior.”

But the inevitability of the machines’ success, says Kasparov, is not a matter of brute force, but of reliability. “Machines have a steady hand. It’s not that machines can solve the game” – the number of possible moves is so high that, even calculating at 200 million moves per second, it would have taken Deep Blue longer than the life of its opponent, or the solar system or quite possibly the universe itself, to calculate them all – “it’s about making moves that are of a higher average quality than humans.” The machine, says Kasparov, need never fear losing its concentration because it can never feel fear and it has no concentration to lose. “It doesn’t bother about making a mistake in the previous move. Humans are by definition emotional. Even the top experts, whether it be in chess, or video games, or science – we are prisoners of our emotions. That makes us easy prey for machines, in a closed system.”   

In 1997, Kasparov played his second match (he had won the first) against the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue and lost in the deciding game. He had been the World Champion since 1985, and would remain the world’s highest-rated human player until his retirement in 2005. He found losing to a machine to be “a shocking experience,” although this was partly, of course, because “I haven’t lost many games… Now, two decades later, I realise it was a natural process.”

But Kasparov does not think humans are about to be replaced entirely by machines. Even in cyber security, where automation and machine learning are necessary, “It’s not a closed system, because there are no written rules. Actually, it’s one of the areas where human-machine collaboration will have a decisive effect. I think it’s naïve to assume that machines could be totally dominant, because the angle of attack can change. There are so many things that can change. It’s an unlimited combination of patterns that can be manipulated.”•

__________________________

“It was very easy, all the machines are only cables and bulbs.”

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“Machines Remain Machines”

June 29, 2017 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Loved the long centerpiece of Garry Kasparov’s Deep Thinking, in which perhaps the greatest chess champion of all recreates his epic 1996 and 1997 matches with Deep Blue, the IBM program that ultimately toppled him–and by extension, us. The barrage of machinations employed by the computer company are fascinating and worthy of Cold War spooks, which makes this section read like an espionage thriller married to insightful sportswriting.

The rest of the book is an interesting meditation on the intelligent machines that increasingly surround us, consume us, though Kasparov’s argument that we should stop worrying and learn to love the “bomb” doesn’t completely convince because he gives short shrift to the many potential pitfalls.

A few random thoughts.

· · ·

While Steven Levy’s cover line, “The Brain’s Last Stand,” was a great way to sell his Newsweek article that previewed the second match, it also was a simplification of a complex point. There’s no one instant when intelligent machines absolutely surpass us, no Turing Test or ego-deflating checkmate, Watson win or Singularity moment can do the trick. It’s a gradual process. Apollo 11’s success, IBM’s victory and Deep Learning’s mysterious prowess are all part of an eerie landscape in which there is no Main Street. The landmarks are scattered and continually being built.

Kasparov makes this point himself in depicting the titanic contests as great theater and personally taxing but almost completely beside the point. He knew that even if he triumphed in ’97, the machines would soon far surpass their carbon-based competitors. Kasparov might have staved off IBM long enough to avoid being the one to “earn” the John Henry tag, but soon enough the number one player in the world, whoever that may have been, was going down.

· · ·

Early in the volume, on page 47, Kasparov tries to relate to people whose livelihoods, and sometimes communities, have been devastated by technological innovation (in tandem with globalization), arguing that “few people in the world know better than I do what it’s like to have your life’s work threatened by a machine.” Hmm, it would seem that a brilliant, world-famous, fairly well-off guy in his thirties would be fine even if he was shoved aside by AI, but maybe he was truly terrified like those who hope the plant in Ohio doesn’t kick them to the curb.

Later that very same page, however, Kasparov writes: “Nor did I believe the apocalyptic predictions about what might happen if I lost a match to a machine. I was always optimistic about the future of chess in a digital age.” Whew, crisis averted! 

The author sees a progression in which for a period of indeterminate length humans and machines collaborate on many forms of work until our silicon sisters take full control of these processes and we move on to other more important matters. That’s probably correct, but it’s not so likely to unfold as neatly off the page, especially since industries can rise and fall far more quickly during a technological boom.

Think how rapidly CDs went from the most successful format in music-business history to being almost worthless when the sounds disappeared into the 0s and 1s. Consider that Blockbuster and Polaroid and Fotomat went under during just the first wave of the Internet. Even if the aggregate job numbers don’t end up diminished, discomfiting displacement may become a permanent feature of life, as we’re all engaged in a never-ending game of musical chairs. That can’t be healthy for a society. From an economic standpoint, you wouldn’t want to be a nation that misses out on the Digital Age, but things could, and probably will, get messy. Some will be seated comfortably and many will fall to the floor.

· · ·

I’m working from memory, but I think Kasparov dedicates about three pages to the thorny problems of surveillance, privacy, hacking, etc. That’s not nearly adequate. As physical objects from cars to refrigerators to personal assistants are computerized and seamlessly integrated into our lives, these issues will become enormous. Actually, they already are. The author believes these complications to be fixable bugs.

The main problem with his reasoning is it assumes there must be reasonable answers to vexing Digital Era questions. That’s not necessarily so. Perhaps there’s no taming the anarchy of a “smart” world that’s super-connected. Certainly Kasparov’s arch-nemesis Vladimir Putin wouldn’t have been able to influence the Brexit and U.S. Presidential votes without linked computers, those chaos agents. Mayhem may be baked so deeply into the new tools that the havoc is inseparable–and insuperable. It could even be that a highly technological society, a deeply connected and heavily sensored one, ultimately destroys itself. I don’t believe that scenario plausible, but it’s irresponsible to not consider it possible.

Those challenges are just the ones we’re aware of. Nobody knew a century ago that the internal combustion engine would soon create an existential threat. Tomorrow’s tools will be far more powerful and so probably will be their unintended consequences.

· · ·

In one passage, Kasparov asserts that his quote from 1989 in which he predicted AI would become world champion before a woman did wasn’t sexist. Well, perhaps that’s so, but the suspicion seems more understandable if you know the context the author has omitted. If anyone in 1989 suspected Kasparov was deeply sexist that’s because in 1989 Kasparov was deeply sexist.

From a Playboy Interview that year:

Playboy:

How about women chess players?

Garry Kasparov:

Well, in the past, I have said that there is real chess and women’s chess. Some people don’t like to hear this, but chess does not fit women properly. It’s a fight, you know? A big fight. It’s not for women. Sorry. She’s helpless if she has men’s opposition. I think this is very simple logic. It’s the logic of a fighter, a professional fighter. Women are weaker fighters.

There is also the aspect of creativity in chess. You have to create new ideas. That’s quite difficult, too. Chess is the combination of sport, art and science. In all these fields, you can see men’s superiority. Just compare the sexes in literature, in music or in art. The result is, you know, obvious. Probably the answer is in the genes.

Playboy:

Do you realize that you’re expressing a sexist point of view, and that Western women will be enraged by it?

Garry Kasparov:

Yes, but I’m not concerned. I’m sure that women can do many things better than men in many fields. I think it’s wrong to want to be compared all the time, to want to be equal in everything. Men and women are different.•

Two daughters and two decades later, Kasparov was far more enlightened when questioned by the same magazine:

Playboy:

Why are there relatively few women chess players?

Garry Kasparov:

Tradition. How many women composers are there? Architects? Things are changing in this. We have Judit Polgar, who proved a woman can make the top 10, though she didn’t come even close to number one.•

Okay, sexism would have been a more apt word choice than tradition, but I don’t blame Kasparov from wanting to recoil from his earlier misogyny, seeing how he’s apparently grown past it. But disappearing this failing removes an important lesson: Humans, like intelligent machines, can learn and grow in surprising ways.

· · ·

In “A Brutal Intelligence: AI, Chess, and the Human Mind,” Nicholas Carr reviews Kasparov’s title for the Los Angeles Review of Books, making interesting observations about the limits of blunt-force computing and the very nature of chess. Carr notes that our type of thinking will likely be beyond the reach of computers into the long-term future but worries that “brutally efficient calculations” will become more valued than the inexpressible nuances of human thought. An excerpt:

The history of computer chess is the history of artificial intelligence. After their disappointments in trying to reverse-engineer the brain, computer scientists narrowed their sights. Abandoning their pursuit of human-like intelligence, they began to concentrate on accomplishing sophisticated, but limited, analytical tasks by capitalizing on the inhuman speed of the modern computer’s calculations. This less ambitious but more pragmatic approach has paid off in areas ranging from medical diagnosis to self-driving cars. Computers are replicating the results of human thought without replicating thought itself. If in the 1950s and 1960s the emphasis in the phrase “artificial intelligence” fell heavily on the word “intelligence,” today it falls with even greater weight on the word “artificial.”

Particularly fruitful has been the deployment of search algorithms similar to those that powered Deep Blue. If a machine can search billions of options in a matter of milliseconds, ranking each according to how well it fulfills some specified goal, then it can outperform experts in a lot of problem-solving tasks without having to match their experience or insight. More recently, AI programmers have added another brute-force technique to their repertoire: machine learning. In simple terms, machine learning is a statistical method for discovering correlations in past events that can then be used to make predictions about future events. Rather than giving a computer a set of instructions to follow, a programmer feeds the computer many examples of a phenomenon and from those examples the machine deciphers relationships among variables. Whereas most software programs apply rules to data, machine-learning algorithms do the reverse: they distill rules from data, and then apply those rules to make judgments about new situations.

In modern translation software, for example, a computer scans many millions of translated texts to learn associations between phrases in different languages. Using these correspondences, it can then piece together translations of new strings of text. The computer doesn’t require any understanding of grammar or meaning; it just regurgitates words in whatever combination it calculates has the highest odds of being accurate. The result lacks the style and nuance of a skilled translator’s work but has considerable utility nonetheless. Although machine-learning algorithms have been around a long time, they require a vast number of examples to work reliably, which only became possible with the explosion of online data. Kasparov quotes an engineer from Google’s popular translation program: “When you go from 10,000 training examples to 10 billion training examples, it all starts to work. Data trumps everything.”

The pragmatic turn in AI research is producing many such breakthroughs, but this shift also highlights the limitations of artificial intelligence. Through brute-force data processing, computers can churn out answers to well-defined questions and forecast how complex events may play out, but they lack the understanding, imagination, and common sense to do what human minds do naturally: turn information into knowledge, think conceptually and metaphorically, and negotiate the world’s flux and uncertainty without a script. Machines remain machines.

That fact hasn’t blunted the public’s enthusiasm for AI fantasies.•

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“AI Won’t Be Kept In A Box”

June 6, 2017 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Still haven’t written my thoughts on Garry Kasparov’s Deep Thinking. Will do so soon, I promise. For whatever philosophical differences I have with the author on technology, the long centerpiece about his pair of matches with Deep Blue in ’96 and ’97 is riveting. It’s also revealing in surprising ways, about both humans and machines.

In a New Scientist Q&A conducted by Sean O’Neill, the chessman is asked about surveillance, a topic which receives a scant few pages in his book, but I believe the question posed is the wrong one. The reporter wonders about new technologies being hoarded by the “ruling class,” which is silly, because these tools, ever cheaper and more powerful, will snake their way through every inch of society. Artificial Intelligence will be useful in countless ways, but it will just as surely enable the anarchy of the Internet to be visited upon the physical world. The problem we face isn’t that it may be controlled but that it absolutely cannot be. There’s no going back (nor should there be), but this progress will be attended by regress. Constantly trying to separate those realities will be our task–our burden.

An excerpt:

Question:

What happens if AI, high-tech surveillance, military tech, and communications are sewn up by the ruling class?

Garry Kasparov:

Ruling class? Sounds like Soviet propaganda! New tech is always expensive and employed by the wealthy and powerful even as it provides benefits and trickles down into every part of society. But it seems fanciful – or dystopian – to think there will be a harmful monopoly. AI isn’t a nuclear weapon that can or should be under lock and key; it’s a million different things that will be an important part of both new and existing technology. Like the internet, created by the US military, AI won’t be kept in a box. It’s already out.

Question:

Will handing off ever more decisions to AI result in intellectual stagnation?

Garry Kasparov:

Technology doesn’t cause intellectual stagnation, but it enables new forms of it if we are complacent. Technology empowers intellectual enrichment and our ability to indulge and act on our curiosity. With a smartphone, for example, you have the sum total of human knowledge in your pocket and can reach practically any person on the planet. What will you do with that incredible power? Entertain yourself or change the world?•

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“Today, Those Aspects Seem To Loom Larger Than The Technological Achievement Of Deep Blue”

May 24, 2017 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Overall I enjoyed Garry Kasaprov’s Deep Thinking. Have philosophical disagreements with it, for sure, and there is some revisionism in regards to his personal history, but the author’s take on his career developing parallel to the rise of the machines and his waterloo versus IBM is fascinating. It’s clear that if there had been a different World Chess Champion during Kasparov’s reign, one who lacked his significant understanding of the meaning of computers and maverick mindset, the game would have been impoverished for it. I’ll try to make time this weekend to write a long review.

The 20-year retrospective on Deep Blue’s 1997 victory would be incomplete without reflection by Steven Levy, who penned the famous Newsweek cover story “The Brain’s Last Stand” as a preface to the titanic match in which humanity sunk. (It turns out Levy himself composed that perfectly provocative cover line that no EIC could refuse.)

The writer focuses in part on the psychological games that Deep Blue was programmed to play, an essential point to remember as computers are integrated into every aspect of life–when nearly every object becomes “smart.” Levy points out that no such manipulations were required for DeepMind to conquer Go, but those machinations might be revisited when states and corporations desire to nudge our behaviors.

An excerpt:

The turning point of the match came in Game Two. Kasparov had won the first game and was feeling pretty good. In the second, the match was close and hard fought. But on the 36th move, the computer did something that shook Kasparov to his bones. In a situation where virtually every top-level chess program would have attacked Kasparov’s exposed queen, Deep Blue made a much subtler and ultimately more effective move that shattered Kasparov’s image of what a computer was capable of doing. It seemed to Kasparov — and frankly, to a lot of observers as well — that Deep Blue had suddenly stopped playing like a computer (by resisting the catnip of the queen attack) and instead adopted a strategy that only the wisest human master might attempt. By underplaying Deep Blue’s capabilities to Kasparov, IBM had tricked the human into underestimating it. A few days later, he described it this way: “Suddenly [Deep Blue] played like a god for one moment.” From that moment Kasparov had no idea what — or who — he was playing against. In what he described as “a fatalistic depression,” he played on, and wound up resigning the game.

After Game Two, Kasparov was not only agitated by his loss but also suspicious at how the computer had made a move that was so…un-computer like. “It made me question everything,” he now writes. Getting the printouts that explained what the computer did — and proving that there was no human intervention — became an obsession for him. Before Game Five, in fact, he implied that he would not show up to play unless IBM submitted printouts, at least to a neutral party who could check that everything was kosher. IBM gave a small piece to a third party, but never shared the complete file.

Kasparov was not the same player after Game Two.•

“It was very easy, all the machines are only cables and bulbs.”

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“I’m Telling You That It’s Inevitable”

May 11, 2017 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Intelligent doesn’t necessarily mean good, in humans or machines.

I doubt I’ve come across any public figure who’s read more books than Tyler Cowen, yet in the country’s darkest hour, he’s pulled his punches with his fellow Libertarian Peter Thiel, who’s behaved abysmally, dangerously, in his ardent Trump support. The Administration, a gutter-level racist group, has apparently allowed Russian espionage to snake its way into the U.S. and is working in earnest to undo American democracy, to put itself beyond the reach of the law. Those who’ve gone easy on its enablers are complicit.

Maybe the machines will behave more morally than us when they’ve turned away from our lessons to teach themselves? Maybe less so?

· · · 

The pro-seasteading economist just interviewed Garry Kasparov, whose new book, Deep Thinking, I’m currently reading. Likely history’s greatest chess player, the Russian was turned deep blue by IBM during the interval between Cold Wars, when he could conjure no defense for the brute force of his algorithmically advantaged opponent.

Initially, Kasparov was too skeptical, too weighed down by human ego, to fully appreciate the powers of computers, but sometimes those who’ve most fiercely resisted religion become the most ardent believers, redirecting their fervent denial into a passionate embrace. That’s where Kasparov seems to be now in his unbridled appreciation for what machines will soon do for us, though I can comment more once I’ve completed his book.

He’s certainly right that much of what will happen with AI over the course of this century is inevitable given the way technologies evolve and the nature of human psychology. With those developments, we’ll enjoy many benefits, but with all progress comes regress, a situation heightened as the tools become more powerful. It’s clear to me that we’re not merely building machines to aid us but permanently placing ourselves inside of one with no OFF switch.

An excerpt:

Tyler Cowen:

A lot of humans don’t play chess, but we’re looking at a future where AI will make decisions about who gets a monetary loan, who is diagnosed as being schizophrenic or bipolar. How cars drive on the road increasingly is controlled by software.

The fact that the decisions of the software are not so transparent — and you see this also in computer chess — how will ordinary human beings respond to the fact that more and more of their lives will be “controlled” by these nontransparent processes that are too smart for them to understand? Because in your book, you have emotional conflict with Deep Blue, right?

Garry Kasparov:

Exactly. I’m telling you that it’s inevitable. There are certain things that are happening, and it’s called progress. This is the history of human civilization. The whole history is a steady process of replacing all forms of labor by machines. It started with machines replacing farm animals and then manual laborers, and it kept growing and growing and growing.

There was a time I mentioned in the book, people didn’t trust elevators without operators. They thought it would be too dangerous. It took a major strike in the city of New York that was equal a major disaster. You had to climb the Empire State Building with paralyzed elevators.

I understand that today, people are concerned about self-driving cars, absolutely. But now let us imagine that there was a time, I’m sure, people were really concerned, they were scared stiff of autopilots. Now, I think if you tell them that autopilot’s not working in the plane, they will not fly because they understand that, in the big numbers, these decisions are still more qualitative.

While I understand also the fear of people who might be losing jobs, and they could see that machines are threatening their traditional livelihood, but at the same time, even these people whose jobs are on chopping block of automation, they also depend on the new wave of technology to generate economic growth and to create sustainable new jobs.

This is a cycle. The only difference with what we have been seeing throughout human history is that now, machines are coming after people with college degrees, political influence, and Twitter accounts.•

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“AI Will Not Replace Humans But Will Enlighten And Enrich Us”

April 27, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Can’t say I’m unduly focused on superintelligence posing an existential threat to our species in the immediate future, especially since so-called Weak AI is already here and enabling its own alarming possibilities: ubiquitous surveillance, attenuated democracy and a social fabric strained by disappearing jobs. We may very well require these remarkably powerful tools to survive tomorrow’s challenges, but we’d be walking blind to not accept that they’re attended by serious downsides.

Deep Learning will be particularly tricky, expressly because it’s a mysterious method that doesn’t allow us to know how it makes its leaps and gains. Demis Hassabis, the brilliant DeepMind founder and the field’s most famous practitioner, has acknowledged being “pretty shocked,” for instance, by AlphaGo’s unpredictable gambits during last year’s demolition of Lee Sedol. Hassibis, who has sometimes compared his company to the Manhattan Project (in scope and ambition if not in impact), has touted AI’s potentially ginormous near-term benefits, but tomorrow isn’t all that’s in play. The day after also matters.

The neuroscientist is fairly certain we’ll have Artificial General Intelligence inside a century and is resolutely optimistic about carbon and silicon achieving harmonic convergence. Similarly sanguine on the topic these days is Garry Kasparov, the Digital Age John Henry who was too dour about computer intelligence at first and now might be too hopeful. The human-machine tandem he foresees may just be a passing fancy before a conscious uncoupling. By then, we’ll have probably built a reality we won’t be able to survive without the constant support of our smart machines.

Hassibis, once a child prodigy in chess, wrote a Nature review of Kasparov’s new book, Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins. (I’m picking up the title tomorrow, so I’ll write more on it later.) An excerpt:

Chess engines have also given rise to exciting variants of play. In 1998, Kasparov introduced ‘Advanced Chess’, in which human–computer teams merge the calculation abilities of machines with a person’s pattern-matching insights. Kasparov’s embrace of the technology that defeated him shows how computers can inspire, rather than obviate, human creativity.

In Deep Thinking, Kasparov also delves into the renaissance of machine learning, an AI subdomain focusing on general-purpose algorithms that learn from data. He highlights the radical differences between Deep Blue and AlphaGo, a learning algorithm created by my company DeepMind to play the massively complex game of Go. Last year, AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol, widely hailed as the greatest player of the past decade. Whereas Deep Blue followed instructions carefully honed by a crack team of engineers and chess professionals, AlphaGo played against itself repeatedly, learning from its mistakes and developing novel strategies. Several of its moves against Lee had never been seen in human games — most notably move 37 in game 2, which upended centuries of traditional Go wisdom by playing on the fifth line early in the game.

Most excitingly, because its learning algorithms can be generalized, AlphaGo holds promise far beyond the game for which it was created. Kasparov relishes this potential, discussing applications from machine translation to automated medical diagnoses. AI will not replace humans, he argues, but will enlighten and enrich us, much as chess engines did 20 years ago. His position is especially notable coming from someone who would have every reason to be bitter about AI’s advances.•

Two quainter examples of technology crossing wires with chess.

In 1989, Kasparov, in London, played a remote match via telephone with David Letterman.

In 1965, Bobby Fischer, in NYC, played via Teletype in a chess tournament in Havana.

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“They Are Not A Threat To Humankind But A Great Boon”

April 14, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

I was critical of Bill Gates’ recent suggestion that America utilize taxation to slow down progress in robotics. First of all, defining “robot” isn’t so simple. Are they only machines that move across warehouse floors? Are they algorithms? Will they be something else entirely tomorrow?  

Also there’s no central switch that can be pointed at OFF until everything makes sense. The race in machine intelligence among states will see the actions of some players influence priorities and ethics across borders. No wall will keep out the future.

In “Learning to Love Intelligent Machines,” a WSJ essay taken from his book Deep Thinking: Where Artificial Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins, Garry Kasparov, the Digital Age John Henry, argues that AI will bring a bounty, not a threat. I agree with the former contention but not the latter.

John Henry’s postscript: He won, but he died. In the aftermath, steam and gas and electricity made us richer as they transformed society, but they also imperiled us with their deleterious impact on the environment. Long after we learned the damage the carbon was doing, it’s proven difficult politically and financially to alter the course and unplug the machine.

Garry Kasparov’s postscript: He lost, but he survived, and perhaps he, and the rest of us, will thrive because of increasingly intelligent machines. Aspects of life will improve, some markedly, as machines progress, but these stronger tools will also make for greater potential dangers: nonstop surveillance, disruption to democracy, complete loss of privacy, cascading disaster, etc. There will be no turning off this machine once we’re fully lowered into it, and that will be soon.

We may not be able to avoid extinction as a species in the long run without super-algorithms, but they will also be their own existential risk.

Kasparov is right, however, in saying: “There is no going back, only forward.” 

The opening:

It was my blessing and my curse to be the world chess champion when computers finally reached a world championship level of play. When I resigned the final match game against the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue on May 11, 1997, I became the first world champion to be defeated in a classical match by a machine.

It is no secret that I hate losing, and I did not take it well. But losing to a computer wasn’t as harsh a blow to me as many at the time thought it was for humanity as a whole. The cover of Newsweek called the match “The Brain’s Last Stand.” Those six games in 1997 gave a dark cast to the narrative of “man versus machine” in the digital age, much as the legend of John Henry did for the era of steam and steel.

But it’s possible to draw a very different lesson from my encounter with Deep Blue. Twenty years later, after learning much more about the subject, I am convinced that we must stop seeing intelligent machines as our rivals. Disruptive as they may be, they are not a threat to humankind but a great boon, providing us with endless opportunities to extend our capabilities and improve our lives.•

In his WSJ article, Kasparov writes that by the 1980s, people knew machines would soon be kings of chess. He was most certainly not among that enlightened set.

He defeated Deep Thought in 1989 and believed a computer could never best him. But by 1997 Deep Blue turned him–and humanity–into an also-ran in some key ways. The chess master couldn’t believe it at first–he assumed his opponent was manipulated by humans behind the scene, like the Mechanical Turk, the faux chess-playing machine from the 18th century. But no sleight of hand was needed.

Below are the openings of three Bruce Weber New York Times articles written during the Kasparov-Deep Blue matchup which chart the rise of the machines.

Responding to defeat with the pride and tenacity of a champion, the I.B.M. computer Deep Blue drew even yesterday in its match against Garry Kasparov, the world’s best human chess player, winning the second of their six games and stunning many chess experts with its strategy.

Joel Benjamin, the grandmaster who works with the Deep Blue team, declared breathlessly: “This was not a computer-style game. This was real chess!”

He was seconded by others.

“Nice style!” said Susan Polgar, the women’s world champion. “Really impressive. The computer played a champion’s style, like Karpov,” she continued, referring to Anatoly Karpov, a former world champion who is widely regarded as second in strength only to Mr. Kasparov. “Deep Blue made many moves that were based on understanding chess, on feeling the position. We all thought computers couldn’t do that.”•

Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, opened the third game of his six-game match against the I.B.M. computer Deep Blue yesterday in peculiar fashion, by moving his queen’s pawn forward a single square. Huh?

“I think we have a new opening move,” said Yasser Seirawan, a grandmaster providing live commentary on the match. “What should we call it?”

Mike Valvo, an international master who is a commentator, said, “The computer has caused Garry to act in strange ways.”

Indeed it has. Mr. Kasparov, who swiftly became more conventional and subtle in his play, went on to a draw with Deep Blue, leaving the score of Man vs. Machine at 1 1/2 apiece. (A draw is worth half a point to each player.) But it is clear that after his loss in Game 2 on Sunday, in which he resigned after 45 moves, Mr. Kasparov does not yet have a handle on Deep Blue’s predilections, and that he is still struggling to elicit them.•

In brisk and brutal fashion, the I.B.M. computer Deep Blue unseated humanity, at least temporarily, as the finest chess playing entity on the planet yesterday, when Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, resigned the sixth and final game of the match after just 19 moves, saying, “I lost my fighting spirit.”

The unexpectedly swift denouement to the bitterly fought contest came as a surprise, because until yesterday Mr. Kasparov had been able to summon the wherewithal to match Deep Blue gambit for gambit.

The manner of the conclusion overshadowed the debate over the meaning of the computer’s success. Grandmasters and computer experts alike went from praising the match as a great experiment, invaluable to both science and chess (if a temporary blow to the collective ego of the human race) to smacking their foreheads in amazement at the champion’s abrupt crumpling.

“It had the impact of a Greek tragedy,” said Monty Newborn, chairman of the chess committee for the Association for Computing, which was responsible for officiating the match.

It was the second victory of the match for the computer — there were three draws — making the final score 3 1/2 to 2 1/2, the first time any chess champion has been beaten by a machine in a traditional match. Mr. Kasparov, 34, retains his title, which he has held since 1985, but the loss was nonetheless unprecedented in his career; he has never before lost a multigame match against an individual opponent.

Afterward, he was both bitter at what he perceived to be unfair advantages enjoyed by the computer and, in his word, ashamed of his poor performance yesterday.

“I was not in the mood of playing at all,” he said, adding that after Game 5 on Saturday, he had become so dispirited that he felt the match was already over. Asked why, he said: “I’m a human being. When I see something that is well beyond my understanding, I’m afraid.”•

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“Stick To The Facts, Repeat Them Boldly And Frequently”

February 12, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Trump Adviser Stephen Miller is one of the true ideologues of the Administration, a dweeb eager to encourage a demagogue’s worst impulses.

In a 2016 Politico profile by Julie Ioffe, Miller said of his liberal high school that “a number of students lacked basic English skills,” and commented about his alma mater Duke that “many professors had radical beliefs and engaged in outrageous behavior.”

Now he’s the willing marionette of an Administration in which most seem to lack basic English skills, have radical beliefs and engage in outrageous behavior–a Pinocchio to Gestapo-ish Geppettos.

What’s worst about the bald-faced lies he offers on TV news shows as he did over the weekend is they’re meant to confer upon the occupant of the Oval Office an unimpeachable authoritarian status. “The President’s powers here are beyond question,” he commented in immigration on ABC’s This Week, trying to cut a path for the Simon Cowell-ish strongman to do what he pleases with no dissent brooked.

In a smart Vox interview conducted by Alexander Bisley, Garry Kasparov reminds that the “U.S. President shouldn’t need to speak like a tyrant.” He also offers tips on how to stop the birth of dictatorship in America based on Russia’s descent under Putin. An excerpt:

Alexander Bisley:

What can Trump opponents do?

Garry Kasparov:

You have to reinforce the institutions, steadily and legally, and work through them. If you go too far, and react violently, it will only play into the hands of the Trump administration, which is already portraying all opposition as paid agitators and other ridiculousness straight from Putin’s playbook. When I talk about these things on Twitter or Facebook, I immediately receive a bunch of “Here too!” responses from people living in other authoritarian regimes, from Venezuela to Vietnam.

Riots will only frighten the “moderate middle” you will need as allies sooner or later. If Trump convinces them with lies that the opposition is controlled by dangerous thugs, you’re going to have eight years of Trump and another of his kind to follow. Stick to the facts, repeat them boldly and frequently, so his supporters see the would-be emperor has no bathrobe!

The courts are important, but things won’t really change unless enough Republicans start to see Trump as a liability to their fundraising and reelection chances. That could be quite soon if he can’t fulfill his many campaign promises. Making him look like a loser is crucial. Either the GOP will turn on him or he will be chastened and more likely to compromise. If a demagogue succeeds in claiming credit for wins and scapegoating his enemies for losses, he’s very hard to stop.

Trump will continue to push the limits, to find the cracks in the system that constrains him. America is finding out the hard way that much of its government is based on tradition and the honor system, and not explicit laws. There will be a crisis every day.

Everyone must do what they can themselves and not wait for others to act. If you want change, you have to initiate action, even at a personal level that might seem insignificant. As the motto of Soviet dissidents went: “Do what you must, and so be it.”•

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“The Free World Acted As Though The Fight Had Been Won Once And For All”

December 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Videos | Permalink

“Anything felt possible,” writes Garry Kasparov in the WSJ of the ebullient time a quarter century ago when it became apparent Soviet autocracy had failed and democracy seemed, at long last, to have triumphed. The walls came down, history supposedly ended, and it was only a matter of time until all nations succumbed to the new reality.

In 2016, with liberal governance in retreat, anything again feels possible, but in a different and chilling way.  

In a reversal of fortunes, in an unforced error, America would appear to have retroactively lost the Cold War, perhaps even World War II. The blissfully unaware, the political opportunists and the truly evil have conspired to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Hope has never needed to be more audacious because this is no joke, it is not a test, we’re really on fire. 

From Kasparov on how the failure to address history left the demons breathing, if barely, waiting to revitalize and pounce once more:

It is difficult to describe what life in the U.S.S.R. was like to people in the free world today. This is not because repressive dictatorships are an anachronism people can’t imagine, like trying to tell your incredulous children that there was once a world without cellphones and the internet. The U.S.S.R. ceased to exist in 1991, but there are plenty of repressive, authoritarian regimes thriving in 2016. The difference, and I am sad to say it, is that the citizens of the free world don’t much care about dictatorships anymore, or about the 2.7 billion people who still live in them.

The words of John F. Kennedy in 1963 Berlin sound naive to most Americans today: “Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free,” he said. That for decades the U.S. government based effective foreign policy on such lofty ideals seems as distant as a world without iPhones.

Ronald Reagan’s warning that “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction” was never meant to be put to the test, but it is being tested now. If anything, Reagan’s time frame of a generation was far too generous. The dramatic expansion of freedom that occurred 25 years ago may be coming undone in 25 months.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the U.S.S.R. was the end of watch for the anti-Communist coalition formed by Harry Truman after World War II. A year later, baby boomer Bill Clinton was making jokes with Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin and it was time to party, not press the advantage. The U.S. had unrivaled global power and influence, more than at any other time in history. Yet instead of using it to shape a new global framework to protect and project the values of democracy and human rights—as Truman had done immediately to put Stalin in check—the free world acted as though the fight had been won once and for all.

Even worse, we made the same mistake in Russia and in many other newly independent states. We were so eager to embrace the bright future that we failed to address our dark past.•

A remote match via telephone versus David Letterman in 1989.

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“Attacking The American Political System Was The Highest Prize Of All”

December 7, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

It was a galling affront, even unfathomable, to Garry Kasparov when it was said that machines would one day conquer humans in chess. As World Champion, he considered it his responsibility to protect the species from this indignity. He was shocked when he failed.

I wonder if the retired Russian grandmaster is even more stunned about the recent global turn of events, as numerous countries have tried to retreat from globalization, reviving the natavistic, xenophobic and isolationist tendencies associated with the dark forces of World War II and the Cold War, though this time the reliably noble are also in retreat, as is liberal democracy itself. Russia has returned to autocracy and the U.S. may not be too far behind. And the Kremlin, with hacks and leaks, had a hand in that latter outcome.

In an excellent Playboy interview conducted by Alexander Bisley, Kasparov speaks about the ghosts of yesterday’s politics now haunting the twenty-first century, saying, “The past always returns in one form or another. There are periods in which the past even becomes the dominating factor in the present. Right now we are going through a moment like that because we don’t have a vision for the future.” He also discusses what he believes will happen to Russia at the time of Putin’s inevitable fall from power.

The opening:

Playboy:

After Trump’s election, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a state-run news agency that “there were contacts” with the Trump team, saying “Obviously, we know most of the people from his entourage.” Do you believe Russia is responsible for Trump’s election?

Garry Kasparov:

The whole story of the rise of Donald Trump is extraordinary. Putin believes that if you’re strong enough and if your opponent is not responding, you can go as far as you want. For Putin, who’s always looking for an opportunity to show his strength and militancy, attacking the American political system was the highest prize of all. Now, President Barack Obama is very much reaping the harvest of his weak foreign policy because Russia tried to demonstrate its political might by attacking the very foundation of American democracy. It’s a fact that Russia definitely helped Donald Trump to be elected by revealing all these emails that were hacked, stolen from John Podesta and the DNC. Maybe Russia went even beyond that.

Playboy:

Extraordinarily, the NSA Director Michael Rogers said that there was “a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect.”

Garry Kasparov:

I agree that’s extraordinary. You have one of the top security chiefs of the United States pointing at Russia. Clearly it’s Russia. If this is correct, that means it comes as close as one can imagine to a declaration of war. The very mechanism of American democracy—the foundation of power—was in danger by interference of a hostile foreign power. And what did Obama do? Nothing.

Playboy:

Shouldn’t this be a bipartisan national security issue?

Garry Kasparov:

I’m surprised Chuck Schumer isn’t demanding a full-scale congressional investigation. Where are the Democrats?•

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“Russia Is A Mafia State Today”

November 10, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Comrade-Vladimir-Putin-1024x706

Retired chess champion Garry Kasparov, a real-life John Henry, is still fighting machines, chiefly Vladimir Putin’s. The Russian autocrat has led his nation to re-embrace the failed aggressions of the twentieth century rather than create a modern state based on the German model, doing so in the manner of an underworld mob boss, a capo with nuclear capabilities. His most outspoken Russian-born critic sat for an interview with Erich Follath of Spiegel, expressly accusing President Obama and the West of appeasement, which seems more than a little hyperbolic. The opening:

Spiegel:

Mr. Kasparov, you call Vladimir Putin the greatest threat to world peace. Don’t we need the Russian president’s help now more than ever to end wars and contain terrorism?

Garry Kasparov:

Russia is a mafia state today, and Putin is its top godfather. The regime is in trouble economically and can no longer offer anything to its citizens. That’s why Putin has to pursue an aggressive foreign policy, so he can serve his people the fairy tale of Russian pride and regaining its strength as a major power. But he uses fascist propaganda to do so. From Ukraine to Syria, he is behaving like the world’s new general and celebrating victories, while the American president sits on the sidelines and Europe sleeps. The West’s behavior toward Putin is political and moral capitulation.

Spiegel:

Now you’re really exaggerating.

Garry Kasparov:

No, I’m not. People would have been shaking their heads in disbelief if someone had predicted, 15 months ago, that Putin would annex Crimea and grossly violate European postwar borders. Then came the expansion into eastern Ukraine, and now the direct military intervention in the Syrian war, on the side of mass murderer Bashar Assad. Putin needs wars to legitimize his position. It’s the only move he has left. And his appearance before the United Nations General Assembly in late September is typical for action and counter reaction.

Spiegel:

What do you mean?

Garry Kasparov:

Putin spoke unabashedly about the importance of national sovereignty in Syria, a concept apparently near and dear to his heart, unless it comes to the sovereignty of Georgia, Ukraine or any other country in which he intervenes. Then he offered his cooperation, but without making any concrete concessions at all. And he didn’t have to, either. He knows what he can rely on. He has assets that are more valuable than words: He has tanks in Ukraine, fighter jets in Syria — and Barack Obama in the White House. His speech before the UN only an hour earlier was completely toothless. The West can’t come up with anything to deal with Moscow, except appeasement.•

 

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“Saying That Deep Blue Doesn’t Really Think Is Like Saying An Airplane Doesn’t Really Fly Because It Doesn’t Flap Its Wings”

May 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Following up the earlier post about computers and consciousness, here’s an excerpt from “Yes, Computers Can Think,” a 1997 New York Times article by Drew McDermott written in the wake of the machines conquering Kasparov:

“When people say that human grandmasters do not examine 200 million move sequences per second, as the computer does, I ask them, ‘How do you know?’ The answer is usually that human grandmasters are not aware of considering so many options. But humans are unaware of almost everything that goes on in our minds.

I tend to agree that grandmasters search in a different way than Deep Blue does, but whatever method they use, if done by a computer, would seem equally ‘blind.’

For example, some scientists believe that the masters’ skill comes from an ability to compare their current position against, say, 10,000 positions they’ve studied. We call their behavior insightful because they are unaware of the details; the right position among the 10,000 ‘just occurs to them.’ If a computer did the same thing, the trick would be revealed; we could examine its data to see how laboriously it checks the 10,000 positions. Still, if the unconscious version yields intelligent results, and the explicit algorithmic version yields essentially the same results, are not both methods intelligent?

So what shall we say about Deep Blue? How about: It’s a ‘little bit’ intelligent. Yes, its computations differ in detail from a human grandmaster’s. But then, human grandmasters differ from one another in many ways.

A log of the machine’s computations is perfectly intelligible to chess masters; they speak the same language, as it were. That’s why the I.B.M. team refused to give the game logs to Mr. Kasparov during the match: It would have been the same as bugging the hotel room where the computer ‘discussed’ strategy with his seconds.

Saying that Deep Blue doesn’t really think is like saying an airplane doesn’t really fly because it doesn’t flap its wings.

Of course, this advance in artificial intelligence does not indicate that any Grand Unified Theory of Thought is on the horizon. As the field has matured, it has focused more and more on incremental progress, while worrying less and less about some magic solution to all the problems of intelligence. There are fascinating questions about why we are unaware of so much that goes on in our brains, and why our awareness is the way it is. But we can answer a lot of questions about thinking before we need to answer questions about awareness.

It is entirely possible that computers will come to seem alive before they come to seem intelligent. The kind of computing power that fuels Deep Blue will also lead to improved sensors, wheels and grippers that will allow machines to react in a more sophisticated way to things in their environment, including us. They won’t seem intelligent, but we may think of them as a weird kind of animal — one that can play a very good game of chess.”

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“The Computer Has Caused Garry To Act In Strange Ways”

March 2, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Garry Kasparov held off machines but only for so long. He defeated Deep Thought in 1989, and believed a computer could never best him. But by 1997 Deep Blue turned him–and humanity–into an also-ran in some key ways. The chess master couldn’t believe it at first–he assumed his opponent was manipulated by humans behind the scene, like the Mechanical Turk, the faux chess-playing machine from the 18th century. But no sleight of hand was needed.

Below are the openings of three Bruce Weber New York Times articles written during the Kasparov-Deep Blue matchup which chart the rise of the machines.

_________________________

From “Computer Defeats Kasparov, Stunning the Chess Experts” on May 5:

“Responding to defeat with the pride and tenacity of a champion, the I.B.M. computer Deep Blue drew even yesterday in its match against Garry Kasparov, the world’s best human chess player, winning the second of their six games and stunning many chess experts with its strategy.

Joel Benjamin, the grandmaster who works with the Deep Blue team, declared breathlessly: ‘This was not a computer-style game. This was real chess!’

He was seconded by others.

‘Nice style!’ said Susan Polgar, the women’s world champion. ‘Really impressive. The computer played a champion’s style, like Karpov,’ she continued, referring to Anatoly Karpov, a former world champion who is widely regarded as second in strength only to Mr. Kasparov. ‘Deep Blue made many moves that were based on understanding chess, on feeling the position. We all thought computers couldn’t do that.'”

_________________________

From “Wary Kasparov and Deep Blue Draw Game 3” on May 7: 

“Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, opened the third game of his six-game match against the I.B.M. computer Deep Blue yesterday in peculiar fashion, by moving his queen’s pawn forward a single square. Huh?

‘I think we have a new opening move,’ said Yasser Seirawan, a grandmaster providing live commentary on the match. ‘What should we call it?’

Mike Valvo, an international master who is a commentator, said, ‘The computer has caused Garry to act in strange ways.’

Indeed it has. Mr. Kasparov, who swiftly became more conventional and subtle in his play, went on to a draw with Deep Blue, leaving the score of Man vs. Machine at 1 1/2 apiece. (A draw is worth half a point to each player.) But it is clear that after his loss in Game 2 on Sunday, in which he resigned after 45 moves, Mr. Kasparov does not yet have a handle on Deep Blue’s predilections, and that he is still struggling to elicit them.”

_________________________

From “Swift and Slashing, Computer Topples Kasparov” on May 12:

“In brisk and brutal fashion, the I.B.M. computer Deep Blue unseated humanity, at least temporarily, as the finest chess playing entity on the planet yesterday, when Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, resigned the sixth and final game of the match after just 19 moves, saying, ‘I lost my fighting spirit.’

The unexpectedly swift denouement to the bitterly fought contest came as a surprise, because until yesterday Mr. Kasparov had been able to summon the wherewithal to match Deep Blue gambit for gambit.

The manner of the conclusion overshadowed the debate over the meaning of the computer’s success. Grandmasters and computer experts alike went from praising the match as a great experiment, invaluable to both science and chess (if a temporary blow to the collective ego of the human race) to smacking their foreheads in amazement at the champion’s abrupt crumpling.

‘It had the impact of a Greek tragedy,’ said Monty Newborn, chairman of the chess committee for the Association for Computing, which was responsible for officiating the match.

It was the second victory of the match for the computer — there were three draws — making the final score 3 1/2 to 2 1/2, the first time any chess champion has been beaten by a machine in a traditional match. Mr. Kasparov, 34, retains his title, which he has held since 1985, but the loss was nonetheless unprecedented in his career; he has never before lost a multigame match against an individual opponent.

Afterward, he was both bitter at what he perceived to be unfair advantages enjoyed by the computer and, in his word, ashamed of his poor performance yesterday.

‘I was not in the mood of playing at all,’ he said, adding that after Game 5 on Saturday, he had become so dispirited that he felt the match was already over. Asked why, he said: ‘I’m a human being. When I see something that is well beyond my understanding, I’m afraid.'”

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“There’s No One Alive I Can’t Beat”

February 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Garry Kasparov is the John Henry of the Computer Age, “dying” on behalf of us all in a race against a machine despite his utter confidence in the efficacy of humankind. But even before computers were in the room, Bobby Fischer was likewise defeated by a machine, and it was him, the string of code he possessed off by just a little, just enough. He could make plans, but he didn’t plan on a ghost in the machine. There was only one person Fischer couldn’t beat, and it was himself. The opening of Ralph Ginzburg’s 1962 Harper’s article, “Portrait of a Genius As a Young Chess Master“:

“RUSSIA’S traditional hold on World Championships in chess is about to be challenged by the United States in the person of an eighteen-year-old boy from Brooklyn named Bobby Fischer. Bobby has been United States Chess Champion for four years. He won the title at the age of fourteen, the youngest player ever to do so. He has since successfully defended his title three times and has won virtually every major chess title in the country.

In an international tournament at Bled, Yugoslavia, last summer, he astonished the chess world by defeating Russia’s Mikhail Tal in his only game against this former World Champion. The present World Champion, Mikhail Botvinnik, did not participate in the tournament. Fischer is aching to play Botvinnik. ‘I know that I deserve to be World Champion and I know I can beat Botvinnik,’ he has said. ‘There’s no one alive I can’t beat.’

Fischer may have his chance early in 1963 when the triennial chess World Championship will be played. He will first have to win two preliminary international tournaments, the Inter-Zonal and the Candidates, in 1962. Many of America’s leading chess authorities agree with Lisa Lane, the twenty-four-year-old Women’s Chess Champion of the United States. ‘I’m sure that Bobby can beat Botvinnik,’ she has said. ‘There’s never before been a chess player with such a thorough knowledge of the intricacies of the game and such an absolutely indomitable will to win. I think Bobby is the greatest player that ever lived.’

John W. Collins columnist for Chess Life and Chess Review and one of the country’s most highly respected chess annotators, has written: ‘Bobby is the finest chess player this Country ever produced. His memory for the moves, his brilliance in dreaming up combinations, and his fierce determination to win are uncanny. Not only will I predict his triumph over Botvinnik but I’ll go further and say that he’ll probably be the greatest chess player that ever lived.'”

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“I Can’t Visualize Living With The Knowledge That A Computer Is Stronger Than The Human Mind”

February 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Usain Bolt runs really fast, for a human. Slow for a sheep.

Similarly, humans play chess really well for humans, but we’re inferior when competing on a wider playing field, when AI is introduced. That means we must redefine the way we view our role in the world.

Before the shift was complete and computers became our partners–our betters, in some unnerving ways–Garry Kasparov still had a fighting chance and so did you and I. At the end of the 1980s, the chess champion was able to stave off the onslaught, if only for a little while longer, when challenged by Deep Thought. From an article by Harold C. Schonberg in the October 23, 1989 New York Times:

“Yesterday Gary Kasparov, the world chess champion, played Deep Thought, the world computer chess champion, in a two-game match. He won both games handily, to nobody’s surprise, including his own.

Two hours before the start of the first game, held at the New York Academy of Art at 419 Lafayette Street in Manhattan, he held a conference for some 75 journalists representing news organizations all over the world. They were attracted to the event because of the possibility of an upset and the philosophical problems an upset would cause. Deep Thought, after all, has recently been beating grandmasters. Does this mean that the era of human chess supremacy is drawing to a close?

Yes, in the opinion of computer and chess experts.

The time is rapidly coming, all believe, when chess computers will be operating with a precision, rapidity and completeness of information that will far eclipse anything the human mind can do. In three to five years, Deep Thought will be succeeded by a computer with a thousand times its strength and rapidity. And computers scanning a million million positions a second are less than 10 years away. As for the creativity, intuition and brilliance of the great players, chess computers have already demonstrated that they can dream up moves that make even professionals gasp with admiration. It may be necessary to hold championship chess matches for computers and separate ones for humans. …

Mr. Kasparov, unlike many of the experts, was even doubtful that a computer could ever play with the imagination and creativity of a human, though he did look ahead to the next generation of computers and shuddered at what might be coming. Deep Thought can scan 720,000 positions a second. The creators of Deep Thought have developed plans for a machine that can scan a billion positions a second, and it may be ready in five years.

‘That means,’ grinned Mr. Kasparov, ‘that I can be champion for five more years.’ More seriously, he continued: ‘But I can’t visualize living with the knowledge that a computer is stronger than the human mind. I had to challenge Deep Thought for this match, to protect the human race.'”

_______________________________

“What you have here is the phenomenon of how we define ourselves in relationship to the machine”:

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“Some Observers Saw That Battle As A Historic Test For Human Intelligence”

November 24, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Garry Kasparov’s defeat at the hands–well, not exactly hands–of Deep Blue was supposed to have delivered a message to humans that we needed to dedicate ourselves to other things–but the coup de grace was ignored. In fact, computers have only enhanced our chess acumen, making it clear that thus far a hybrid is better than either carbon or silicon alone. In the wake of Computer Age child Magnus Carlsen becoming the greatest human player on Earth, Christopher Chabris and David Goodman of the Wall Street Journal look at the surprising resilience of chess in these digital times. The opening:

“In the world chess championship match that ended Friday in India, Norway’s Magnus Carlsen, the cool, charismatic 22-year-old challenger and the highest-rated player in chess history, defeated local hero Viswanathan Anand, the 43-year-old champion. Mr. Carlsen’s winning score of three wins and seven draws will cement his place among the game’s all-time greats. But his success also illustrates a paradoxical development: Chess-playing computers, far from revealing the limits of human ability, have actually pushed it to new heights.

The last chess match to get as much publicity as Mr. Carlsen’s triumph was the 1997 contest between then-champion Garry Kasparov and International Business Machines Corp.’s Deep Blue computer in New York City. Some observers saw that battle as a historic test for human intelligence. The outcome could be seen as an ‘early indication of how well our species might maintain its identity, let alone its superiority, in the years and centuries to come,’ wrote Steven Levy in a Newsweek cover story titled ‘The Brain’s Last Stand.’ 

But after Mr. Kasparov lost to Deep Blue in dramatic fashion, a funny thing happened: nothing.”•

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“In Norway, you’ve got two big sports–chess and sadness”:

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“From Super Brains To Supercomputers, He’s Taken Them All On”

September 25, 2013 in Politics, Science/Tech, Sports, Videos | Permalink

Garry Kasparov is a real-life John Henry, having been felled by the steam-powered hammer of IBM’s Deep Blue. He was the chess king as we were being dethroned by automation, as computers came to rule games–and other things. Kasparov now dabbles in Putin-punching and writing. I’m glad he does the former and wish he would do more of the latter. He’s a very gifted writer.

Below is a recent interview about chess and politics the just-departed David Frost did with the chess champ.

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“In Reality The Move Was Caused By A Bug”

December 10, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Blake Masters’ blog has ideas about and notes from Peter Thiel’s recent Stanford address, “The Future of Legal Technology.” From an exchange during the audience Q&A, which points out, among other things, that we can sometimes mistake error for genius:

“Question: 

What is your take on building machines that work just like the human brain?

Peter Thiel: 

If you could model the human brain perfectly, you can probably build a machine version of it. There are all sorts of questions about whether this is possible.

The alternative path, especially in the short term, is smart but not AI-smart computers, like chess computers. We didn’t model the human brain to create these systems. They crunch moves. They play differently and better than humans. But they use the same processes. So most AI that we’ll see, at least first, is likely to be soft AI that’s decidedly non-human.

Question: 

But chess computers aren’t even soft AI, right? They are all programmed. If we could just have enough time to crunch the moves and look at the code, we’d know what/s going on, right? So their moves are perfectly predictable. 

Peter Thiel: 

Theoretically, chess computers are predictable. In practice, they aren’t. Arguably it’s the same with humans. We’re all made of atoms. Per quantum mechanics and physics, all our behavior is theoretically predictable. That doesn’t mean you could ever really do it. 

Question: 

There’s the anecdote of Kasparov resigning when Deep Blue made a bizarre move that he fatalistically interpreted as a sign that the computer had worked dozens of moves ahead. In reality the move was caused by a bug. 

Peter Thiel: 

Well… I know Kasparov pretty well. There are a lot of things that he’d say happened there…” (Thanks Browser.)

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“Chess Programs Regularly Play At Good Amateur Level”

September 11, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

An excerpt from “Today’s Computers, Intelligent Machines and Our Future,” an essay by roboticist Hans Moravec from 1978, before Deep Blue was beating Kasparov in chess and Watson was wowing Trebek on Jeopardy!: 

“In the thirty years since then computers have become vastly more capable, but the goal of human performance in most areas seems as elusive as ever, in spite of a great deal of effort. The last ten years, in particular, has seen thousands of people years devoted directly to the problem, referred to as Artificial Intelligence or AI. Attempts have been made to develop computer programs which do mathematics, computer programming and common sense reasoning, are able to understand natural languages and interpret scenes seen through cameras and spoken language heard through microphones and to play games humans find challenging.

 There has been some progress. Samuel’s checker program can occasionally beat checker champions. Chess programs regularly play at good amateur level, and in March 1977 a chess program from Northwestern University, running on a CDC Cyber-176 (which is about 20 times as fast as previous computers used to play chess) won the Minnesota Open Championship, against a slate of class A and expert players. A ten year effort at MIT has produced a system, Mathlab, capable of doing symbolic algebra, trigonometry and calculus operations better in many ways than most humans experienced in those fields. Programs exist which can understand English sentences with restricted grammar and vocabulary, given the letter sequence, or interpret spoken commands from hundred word vocabularies. Some can do very simple visual inspection tasks, such as deciding whether or not a screw is at the end of a shaft. The most difficult tasks to automate, for which computer performance to date has been most disappointing, are those that humans do most naturally, such as seeing, hearing and common sense reasoning. 

A major reason for the difficulty has become very clear to me in the course of my work on computer vision. It is simply that the machines with which we are working are still a hundred thousand to a million times too slow to match the performance of human nervous systems in those functions for which humans are specially wired. This enormous discrepancy is distorting our work, creating problems where there are none, making others impossibly difficult, and generally causing effort to be misdirected.”

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“Even In His Prime There Were Concerns About Fischer’s Stability, During A Lifetime Of Outbursts And Provocations”

February 15, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Bobby Fischer as the smiling, chess-playing child.

Before he became an unstable, ranting anti-Semitic hermit, Bobby Fischer was one of the most revered people on the planet. His legendary chess matches with Russian champion Boris Spassky during the height of the Cold War were televised to a rapt audience of millions. Victory meant the world was at Fischer’s feet, but he punted and disappeared from the game for two decades. He emerged for a big-money rematch against Spassky in 1992 which had none of the gravitas of the original contest–it was merely a cash grab by two players past their prime who were trading on nostalgia. In a new article in the New York Review of Books, Garry Kasparov, an excellent writer as well as a former world chess champion, opines on Fischer’s sad tale of being moved from king to pawn by mental illness. An excerpt about Fischer’s uneasy return to the spotlight in the ’90s:

“It was therefore quite a shock to see the real live Bobby Fischer reappear in 1992, followed by the first Fischer chess game in twenty years, followed by twenty-nine more. Lured out of self-imposed isolation by a chance to face his old rival Spassky on the twentieth anniversary of their world championship match—and by a $5 million prize fund—a heavy and bearded Fischer appeared before the world in a resort in Yugoslavia, a nation in the process of being bloodily torn apart.

The circumstances were bizarre. The sudden return, the backdrop of war, a shady banker and arms dealer as a sponsor. But it was Fischer! One could not believe it. The chess displayed by Fischer and Spassky in Svefi Stefan and Belgrade was predictably sloppy, although there were a few flashes of the old Bobby brilliance. But was this really a return, or would he disappear just as quickly as he had appeared? And what to make of the strange things Fischer was doing at the press conferences? America’s great champion spitting on a cable from the US government? Saying he hadn’t played in twenty years because he had been ‘blacklisted…by world Jewry’? Accusing Karpov and me of prearranging all our games? You had to look away, but you could not.

Even in his prime there were concerns about Fischer’s stability, during a lifetime of outbursts and provocations. Then there were the tales from his two decades away from the board, rumors that made their way around the chess world. That he was impoverished, that he had become a religious fanatic, that he was handing out anti-Semitic literature in the streets of Los Angeles. It all seemed too fantastic, too much in line with all the stories of chess driving people mad—or mad people playing chess—that have found such a good home in literature.”

Dick Cavett interviews Fischer in 1971, before the shocking decline:

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Science/Tech: Garry Kasparov Tackles Computers Once Again

February 5, 2010 in Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

In 1997, Garry Kasparov didn't believe Deep Blue had defeated him fairly. See the documentary "Game Over" to learn more.

I can’t claim to be the world’s biggest chess fan, but I’m fascinated by Garry Kasparov’s article “The Chess Master and His Computer” in the New York Review of Books. The legendary champion, who famously lost a match to IBM’s Deep Blue in 1997, looks at the intersection of chess and AI from just about every angle possible–and does so brilliantly. An excerpt about the ramifications of the availability of top-flight chess software:

“There have been many unintended consequences, both positive and negative, of the rapid proliferation of powerful chess software. Kids love computers and take to them naturally, so it’s no surprise that the same is true of the combination of chess and computers. With the introduction of super-powerful software it became possible for a youngster to have a top-level opponent at home instead of need ing a professional trainer from an early age. Countries with little by way of chess tradition and few available coaches can now produce prodigies. I am in fact coaching one of them this year, nineteen-year-old Magnus Carlsen, from Norway, where relatively little chess is played.

The heavy use of computer analysis has pushed the game itself in new directions. The machine doesn’t care about style or patterns or hundreds of years of established theory. It counts up the values of the chess pieces, analyzes a few billion moves, and counts them up again. (A computer translates each piece and each positional factor into a value in order to reduce the game to numbers it can crunch.) It is entirely free of prejudice and doctrine and this has contributed to the development of players who are almost as free of dogma as the machines with which they train. Increasingly, a move isn’t good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn’t been done that way before. It’s simply good if it works and bad if it doesn’t. Although we still require a strong measure of intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more like computers.”

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