The ability to think for itself separates HAL from any known computer, and certainly the kind of computer that addresses problems with brute force. In that sense, Deep Blue was not analogous to HAL, who would ultimately decide of his own accord that the human astronauts would jeopardize his mission. Augmented with human learning gathered over centuries of playing the game-for example, best practice, or “theory,” in certain openings, as well as knowledge of specific endgames-the computer’s physical advantage just isn’t fair, in the same way that it isn’t fair for a human to enter into a footrace against a car. Deep Blue was able to look at 200 million positions per second it’s been estimated that Kasparov could look at. While chess has yet to be “solved,” the nature of the game, which takes place within a bounded setting and offers a limited number of moves per position, makes it susceptible to what’s called a “brute force” approach, in which a computer uses its raw processing power to analyze a number of possible positions far beyond the capabilities of human beings.
Like so many other technological advances previously thought to be in the realm of science fiction, the superiority of chess AI has become banal. We can now carry chess computers better than Deep Blue in our pockets, on the same machines we use to send texts, check Facebook, and play games considerably less culturally and intellectually significant than chess. When I see something that is well beyond my understanding, I’m afraid.’” Newsweek put the match on its cover under the headline, “The Brain’s Last Stand,” but grandmasters continued to insist that the match was a one-off fluke, a result of Kasparov’s exasperation and shady tactics by IBM put Deep Blue into regular competition against the best chess players, they said, and surely it would be put in its place. From The New York Times’ coverage of the match: “‘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. When Kasparov then lost, and lost in dispiriting fashion-in Game 2, he described the computer as playing “like a god for one moment”-he seemed to have been not only intellectually but spiritually defeated. Garry Kasparov makes a move during his fourth game against the IBM Deep Blue chess computer. “I don’t think it’s an appropriate thing to discuss the situation if I lose,” Kasparov said leading up to the match. The Deep Blue victory has since entered into the cultural lexicon as a major milestone in the advancement of AI, but the distance of time and the benefit of hindsight makes it easy to overlook the fact that, when Kasparov sat down to play, he firmly expected to win. Kubrick’s vision had come true: While Poole wasn’t the greatest chess player in the world, a computer had beaten a human being on one of the species’ greatest intellectual playing fields.
#PLAY AGAINST DEEP BLUE CHESS SERIES#
In 1997, chess computer Deep Blue, created by IBM, beat the reigning world champion, Garry Kasparov, in a series of six games. “To defeat another human being at chess,” Steiner wrote, “is to humble him at the very roots of his intelligence to defeat him easily is to leave him strangely stripped.” Chess also seems to offer some strange key to the riddle of what makes us human to begin with. As he points out, these three disciplines are the only ones in which prepubescents have made major accomplishments, from Mozart and Rossini to Gauss and Pascal to Morphy. For Steiner, chess is as human as music and mathematics.
The same year that 2001 premiered, literary critic and polymath George Steiner published an essay in The New Yorker called “A Death of Kings.” “The origins of chess are shrouded in mists of controversy, but unquestionably this very ancient, trivial pastime has seemed to many exceptionally intelligent human beings of all races and centuries to constitute a reality, a focus for the emotions, as substantial as, often more substantial than, reality itself,” he wrote. (Kubrick based the game on a real one played in Hamburg in 1910.) Frank Poole plays chess against supercomputer HAL 9000, which is, it claims, “foolproof and incapable of error.” While that statement will be called into question later in the film, it holds true in their game: HAL beats Poole handily. On the spaceship Discovery One, which is bound for Jupiter, Dr. Looking back on the film, countless scenes and moments stand out for their prescience and beauty, but one in particular seems to most eerily encapsulate the oracular foresight of Kubrick and his cowriter, the sci-fi novelist Arthur C. Half a century ago, Stanley Kubrick’s transcendent 2001: A Space Odyssey debuted in theaters.
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