I was 15 years old when Garry Kasparov played IBM’s Deep Blue in 1997. The idea of man versus machine sounded outlandish at the time: we didn’t have a personal computer at home and my exposure to computers was limited to the neat row of five computers in the new computer lab at school. How would a machine survive the onslaught from a chess grandmaster?
Kasparov had established his dominance in the chess world by then. His nemesis, Anatoly Karpov, was humbled five times over, and the Indian challenger, Viswanathan Anand, was defeated in the 1995 world championship. After Bobby Fischer, Kasparov was reckoned the bad boy of chess. Unlike the quiet demeanour of Karpov and Anand, Kasparov was feisty, almost arrogant. That didn’t make him popular. Yet, in the fight between man and machine, the audience supported the human contender.
Machine outplays Man
And then, the machine won. The 1997 match was the first defeat of a reigning world chess champion to a computer under tournament conditions. What I remember from the video of that time was Kasparov holding his head in his hands, staring shell-shocked at defeat. Angry allegations flew between Team IBM and Team Kasparov and the whole event came to a bitter end. Kasparov never discussed his loss in public.
Deep Thinking is Kasparov’s book on the fateful event 20 years on.
Some would say time is a great healer. Perhaps it’s true in Kasparov’s case as well, for he seems to have made peace with the loss and has now become a proponent of man and machine working together to achieve significant productivity gains. A large part of the book deals with the promise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), how it foundered, and hopes from the future to come. So those expecting to read this book only as a suspenseful account of Kasparov’s battles with the computer may find themselves drowned in information about the rise of AI.
Artificial intelligence
If one is able to look beyond seeking the thrills, the book is an absorbing read about machine intelligence. Kasparov’s interest in history and politics gives him an all-round perspective to comment on the role of machine intelligence. We see him pondering the same fundamental question 20 years back that confronts us today: will automation replace jobs? Kasparov was lucky to have not lost his job to computers. Still, the tectonic maturing of machine intelligence would certainly take jobs away, and the best humans could do is to embrace this future. “Romanticising the loss of jobs to technology is little better than complaining that antibiotics put too many gravediggers out of work,” he writes. Chinese assembly line workers and Indian call centre operatives will be next in line to lose jobs to automation and chatbots, Kasparov conceives. Kasparov builds up the battle with Deep Blue by elaborating the history of computer chess. The match with Deep Blue wasn’t Kasparov’s first. Not many are aware that the ’97 battle was a rematch of the ’96 six-game match that Kasparov had won comfortably 4-2. Before that, Kasparov had countless other battles with parallel computing systems, such as Fritz, a German chess programme that defeated an older version of Deep Blue before the ’97 Kasparov clash.
In each new battle, Kasparov would see the computer improving, mostly as a result of exponential growth in processing power defined by Moore’s law. While these increments gave insurmountable calculation advantage to the machine—Deep Blue could process 200 million moves per second—these gains were limited to tactical play and man could still think strategically and leverage inherent pattern recognition to outthink the machine.
The other side of the story is IBM’s that we don’t get to hear about for obvious reasons. The Deep Blue-Kasparov clash was organised by IBM, which went into the game with a lot at stake. Financially, it had not been doing well, and desperately sought an opportunity to demonstrate itself as an innovative company working with cutting edge technologies. IBM acquired Deep Thought from Carnegie Mellon University and rechristened it Deep Blue. The ’97 game was a make-or-break game for the big company which had poured in millions of dollars despite its fragile financial condition. Kasparov argues that the man-machine battle was less between a man and machine, but more between a man and a super-giant corporation.
Rematch refused
Kasparov considers himself as the most prepared chess player in history. So when IBM team does not allow him to see previous games by Deep Blue, Kasparov feels victimised. Moreover, IBM employs a battery of Grandmasters to tune the supercomputer. The bonhomie from previous encounters is all gone (Kasparov was also seeking IBM as a sponsor for his breakaway league), and the ’97 playoff becomes a knives-out, cut-throat combat.
Kasparov wins the first match easily, but then snatches defeat in the second when he could have forced a draw. On an emotional roller-coaster, Kasparov accuses the IBM team of cheating. The next games are drawn before the final pivotal one in which the remorseless machine crushes Kasparov. Of close to 2,500 games Kasparov played in his lifetime, he lost just 170, but the most hurtful must have been this loss in the last game to Deep Blue. Kasparov demands a rematch, but IBM has got what it wanted. Deep Blue is dismantled, and Kasparov is left with a bitter taste in his mouth. This part of the book reads like a psychological thriller and old memories of watching Kasparov with his head in his hands come rushing in.
Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins ; Garry Kasparov, Hachette India, ₹599.
