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Subject: Resurrection of Deep Blue; Uninformed observations and a question

Author: Rob Fatland

Date: 00:57:55 01/11/98


Apologies in advance if my perceptions or facts are wrong.  The
following is a statement of my perspective on public perception of
chess, particularly with regard to Deep Blue and what seems to me to be
a great opportunity going to waste.  Here goes:

After the Kasparov match I was hugely disappointed in IBM when I
understood that the Deep Blue project was being mothballed.  I felt this
was largely due to all the stereotypical bad things one hears about
large companies and IBM in particular.  However, a recent interview with
Joel Benjamin (maybe Chess Life? or somewhere on the net) cast a
different light on the issue for me.  Here IBM was acknowledged by
Benjamin as having its own financially-motivated agenda, but Kasparov's
behavior after the match was also cited as a strong influence in the
decision to mothball the computer.  This picture seems to me to be
reasonable, at least on the surface; that is, that the Deep Blue team
felt that they had taken much more abuse than they deserved and with
hurt feelings along with other reasons they packed up their toys and
went home.  While I applauded the computer victory over Kasparov at the
time I believe that the current state of affairs is bad for chess.

Now speaking of agendas, here in brief is mine:  My main soap-box issue
is education, and I believe chess is a powerful educational tool in many
ways.  I would like to see chess become increasingly popular for
school-age kids and I think that this can happen in a number of ways.
For example, we can take it on ourselves to promote chess on a
grass-roots level by walking into the local elementary school and seeing
if they need a volunteer.  And USCF seems to be doing what it can
promoting youth chess.  Another way that chess can become interesting is
to have the mainstream media take an interest, covering developments in
the chess world thus bringing chess into popular culture.  This is where
chess is in Russian popular culture.  Unfortunately it seems to me that
right now the top levels of chess competition are in a shambles, and
this means that worse than appearing merely muddled and disorganized,
top-level chess is just boring.  A brief litany (or perhaps eulogy):

  - We have a FIDE human world champion determined by grossly unfair
      conditions and to make it more ridiculous, blitz chess.  Truly
      a format which should have included Fritz, Hiarcs, and CM5500.
  - We have the second-highest rated human player not even bothering
      to show up for the FIDE championship.
  - We have the generally acknowledged best human player in the
      world also not participating in the FIDE tournament, a guy
      who has been playing well but *lost* to a computer, who
      furthermore has such enormous behavioral problems that he has
      turned himself into something of a pariah.
  - We have a computer that is ostensibly the best chess-playing
      entity on the planet now hidden away doing a Bobby Fischer
      impersonation.

I think this situation is not good for the public perception of chess.
Even though it doesn't particularly dent my enthusiasm for the game, it
does smell pretty bad.  On the other hand, we are experiencing a boom in
personal computers so computer chess is more ubiquitous.  (Pardon my
US-centric perspective.)  And finally our current pair of human
champions are starting to be overtaken by a younger set of players,
Lausanne notwithstanding.  So eventually perhaps top level chess will
recover from the current squalor it seems to be in.  But finally, having
made my rather uninformed and rambling observations, I will get to my
question:

            How do we get IBM to plug Deep Blue back in?

Having said this much, I suppose the least I can do is write them a
letter.  Thanks for your time.



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