Author: Mike Byrne
Date: 15:24:02 04/26/05
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On April 26, 2005 at 10:33:01, José Antônio Fabiano Mendes wrote: > Harvard Business Review, April 2005 > >Speaking of analytic prowess, what was the significance of your famous matches >with IBM’s chess-playing supercomputer, Deep Blue? > >For a start, they were a huge promotion for the game. Nothing made chess more >popular than the match I won against Deep Blue in 1996 and the match I lost in >1997. The official Web site got 72 million hits during the six games of the >second match in New York, which was a higher daily rate than the Atlanta Olympic >Games Web site got in 1996. That is a lot of hits and I think the interest in the matches was great. I think if somebody came up with a Name Your Program/32 CPUs - that would create a lot of excitement. I favor Crafty , but obviously there are other programs out there as well. Maybe this something AMD can capitalize on with their new dual core opterons. > >But the matches meant a lot more than that to me. Competing with a computer was >first and foremost a scientific experiment for me. I thought it was very >important for society to start communicating with computers, and I knew that >chess was the only field where man and machine could meet. You can’t do it with >mathematics or with literature. Chess, however, lies somewhere in between. I >believed that it would be an ideal playing field for comparing human intuition >with the brute force of a machine’s calculation. Kasparov echoed similar comments in 1996 when he spoke after the 6th game of tthe first match. It sounds good, but the reality is that the chess programs today are still number crunching calculators. It is about nodes evaluated and which ones are evaluated and how decisions are made on those evaluations. I'm not really surprised that a machine can now calculate xxx millions nps and play at a GM chess level. It still amazes me that any human ( like a Kasparov, Fischer, Karpov etc) can outplay a such a machine. > >The yardstick of victory, I think, should be this: If the best human player—on >his best day, at his peak—can still beat the best machine, then we can say that >the chess master is superior to the machine. And for now, I believe that chess >masters like me still have the upper hand. I can beat the machine unless I make >a fatal unforced error. But when the chess master can no longer defeat the >machine on his best day, then we will have to take a cold, hard look at issues >such as artificial intelligence and the relationship between man and machine. I would agree that Kasparov play subpar for the second match and that is the main reason why he lost. That is why all of us were a little disappointed there was no rematch - and not beat a dead horse - but Kasparov's knee jerk reaction after the second match sealed the decision about the third match. If he was a little more diplomatic, perhaps there could have been a third match. > >Unfortunately, I don’t think everyone shared the same spirit of experiment. The >day after the New York match against Deep Blue, the one I lost in 1997, IBM >stock immediately jumped 2.5% to a ten-year high. It continued to rise >dramatically for weeks. For some reason, Lou Gerstner did not invite me to the >next IBM shareholders’ meeting to take a bow! Maybe Gerstner would have invited Kasparov if Kasparov did not bite the hand that was feeding him and accused the IBM team (anmd indirectly IBM) of cheating -- HELLO -- anybody home. For somebody who see so far ahead in a chess game, it amazes me that Kasparov simply cannot connect the dots on this issue. >But seriously, I wish that IBM had >accepted my offer for a tiebreaker. To my mind, IBM actually committed a crime >against science. By claiming victory so quickly in the man-versus-machine >contest, the company dissuaded other companies from funding such a complicated >and valuable project again, and that’s the real tragedy. The only crime committed was Kasparov's false and misleading accusation. He is total state of denial. IBM did not dissuade anybody from funding another match. Kasparov's own outlandish behavior after the match was sufficient to scare any company from sponsoring another match. Think about it, what company would like to spend millions of dollars for science and good PR - when at the end of the day, if Kasparov loses, the odds are that he will probably accuse your company cheating. Not a very hard decision to make in light of what happened. > > Did it hurt your pride to be beaten by a computer? > >No, not at all. Let me explain this by telling you a little anecdote. In 1769, >the Hungarian engineer Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen constructed a chess-playing >machine for the amusement of the Austrian empress Maria Theresa. It looked like >a purely mechanical device, shaped like a person. And it played chess very well. >But the machine was a fake. There was a chess master cleverly hidden inside the >device who decided all the moves. This about the worst analogy that Kasparov could make - except if he wanted to keep up the accusation of cheating alive. He is essentially saying the DB team cheated here. > >In some ways, Deep Blue was also a fake. The machine I played with in 1996 and >1997 had no history. Records of its past games were better guarded than >top-secret documents at the Pentagon. And since IBM refused to release printouts >of earlier games, it was impossible to prepare for the match. I couldn’t feel >badly about losing because I wasn’t playing on a level playing field. Get the violins out, here is Kasparov sympathy song. Excuse me, while I dabble my tears for him. IBM was so mean - they held a gun to his head to play the match under these conditions or else he would be freed. If he didn't feel bad, why was he so upset. Why he is so upset to this day? He had sufficient leverage in 1996 to demand that Deep Blue play match against the #2 man in the world first if that was major concern. If he was that concern before the match about how level the playing field was, why did he sign on the dotted line? The answer is obvious; he wanted the money. Either way, it again points out the same question raised earlier, for somebody who can so far ahead in a chess game, why can't he see 2 or 3 moves ahead in the game of life? > > What, if anything, did we learn from your contests with Deep Blue? > >We learned, of course, that we are very slow compared with the machine, like >ants compared with a jet. But it’s not just speed. Playing against a chess >computer means facing something that doesn’t have any nerves; it’s like sitting >across the table from an IRS agent during a tax audit. Steve B - we can related to this analogy! Excellent - there is nothing worse than the IRS in the US. The IRS in the US is the only agency that sieze your property BEFORE you are found guilty. (Well now, I guess the DEA can also do that if you are involved a drug deal.) It seems like Kapparov is writing from first hand experience here. >Chess between humans and >computers is very different from chess between only humans. For one thing, human >players have to cope with a lot of external pressures and distractions: you have >a family, you write books, you give lectures, you get headaches, you have to >earn money. HELLO! Welcome to the club Kasparov - they call this the real world and we all have those issues everyday when we go to work. >There’s a lot of stuff filling up your brain while you’re playing. A >machine, on the other hand, is completely without distractions. This shows the >weakness, the shortcomings of the mortal mind, which is a daunting lesson for >human beings. We just can’t play with the same consistency as a computer. So >it’s all the more fortunate that we have our intuition to help us play better. Bottom line - Kaspy is whinning just as much in 2005 as he did in 1997. Nothing has really changed for him at all regarding the match. Just my $.02 (okay maybe a nickel's worth) -- feel free to disagree. Best, Michael
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