Excerpts from two Sports Illustrated articles about Garry Kasparov tangling with Deep Blue: Th first is a jokey piece supposedly written by the IBM chess computer itself after losing a five-game series to the Russian in 1996, and the second is a matter-of-fact declaration of the rise of the machines in 1997, when the laughter stopped for good.

________________________

From “I Was a Just a Pawn!” February 26, 1996:

“When I was just a chip, my motherboard used to tell me, ‘D.B., if you can’t process something nice, don’t process it at all.’ But Mom never went through what I went through last week, when world chess champion Garry Kasparov humiliated me, an IBM supercomputer, four games to two.

All week I kept hearing these grandmasters and chess nerds saying, ‘Deep Blue’s advantage is that he doesn’t feel pressure, emotion or anxiety.’ Yeah, right. I’d like them to spend a week in my outlet. You want pressure? It took six years to build me, man! They had a five-person team doing nothing but programming me for this one match. I can consider 200 million moves in one second! Kasparov can do, what, one, maybe two? IBM does not put five guys on a project for six years and expect to lose. That’s how you end up at the employee Montessori, with kids sticking jelly doughnuts in your serial ports.

I can hear all the snickering around the office now. I hear the other mainframes calling me Deep Blue It and whispering about how, any day now, the guys in the white coats are going to come and give me the big drag-and-drop. I’ll tell you what: If I had coasters, I’d get over there and teach them all about megahurts.

Sure, I lost, but how come nobody ever mentions that no computer had ever won one single regulation game from a world chess champion before I did? I won the first game from Kasparov. Stick that in your hi-memory! And how about the fact that I wasn’t even in the room with Kasparov the whole match. I wasn’t! They made me stay in this crummy room in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., while some little guy in Philadelphia typed Kasparov’s moves into a desktop and fed them to me through a phone line. Let me ask you this: How good would Troy Aikman be if he had to read defenses from some Marriott 800 miles away? You talk about mo-dumbs.”

________________________

From “Tangled Up in Blue,” May 19, 1997:

“In his 12-year reign as world chess champion, Garry Kasparov has earned a reputation for both brilliance and aggressiveness. He is widely considered the greatest player in history. But on Sunday afternoon, after resigning the sixth and deciding game of his match with the IBM supercomputer known as Deep Blue, Kasparov sat slumped and glassy-eyed as he awaited questions in a midtown Manhattan ballroom. ‘He looks like a DMV photo,’ cracked international master Mike Valvo.

Kasparov’s capitulation shocked everyone, coming just one hour into a game that he needed to draw in order to tie the match. Things had gone much differently 15 months ago, when Kasparov defeated an earlier version of Deep Blue 4-2 in Philadelphia. But since then IBM’s computer scientists had enlisted the help of four grandmasters, and this latest teaming of technology and human intelligence threw Kasparov some curves. In Game 5, for example, no one anticipated that with one of Kasparov’s pawns poised to reach the last file and become a queen, Deep Blue would simply ignore it and launch an attack with its own king. That stunning shift of focus set up a perpetual check and forced Kasparov to offer a draw.

‘The computer will be unbeatable in five or 10 years,’ says Frederick Friedel, an expert on artificial intelligence and computer chess who served as one of Kasparov’s seconds. ‘Garry will understand much more about chess, but he will still lose because he will make mistakes.'”

See also:

• New York Times reportage of the 1997 contest.

After seeing how bungled the instant replay and home plate collision rule changes have been in Major League Baseball, I prefer we wait for any more alterations to the game until Bud Selig has actually and finally retired. I’ve said before I’m in favor of balls and strikes being called robotically because of the high fail rate of umpires. The best of the men in masks are wrong on 9% of those calls and the worst 14% of the time. If the latter figure is acceptable, then maybe an umpire could be wrong 20% of the time here and there and not have it seem unusual. That could lead to games being fixed.

Which isn’t to say that any of the current MLB umpires would ever do such a thing, but subconsciously they’re swayed by something other than money: the reputation of the players. From Eric Chemi at Businessweek:

“The adage ‘your reputation precedes you’ neatly summarizes what we all suspect: People with better reputations often get the benefit of the doubt when they need it. Just how much reputation matters is open for debate, but two business school professors have taken a good shot. Using two years of data from Major League Baseball, Jerry Kim of Columbia University and Brayden King at Northwestern University found that behind-the-plate umpires are reliably more generous in their calls with highly regarded pitchers than they are with average hurlers (pdf).

The systematic bias persists, the researchers say, in spite of strong disincentive. Behind-the-plate umpires are quantitatively graded on their accuracy, and these grades help determine lucrative playoff assignments. Even so, for pitches hitting the exact same location, umpires are more likely to call a strike if the pitcher has a better reputation. More All-Star appearances means fewer called balls”