#Big Blue Chess Match Series Of Five

But the people at the chessboard were professionals, and only one was paid to play chess. Multiple parallel processors enabled the supercomputer to calculate more than 200 million chess The room where it happened was decked out like a faux study—a place where a couple of friends might engage in a friendly game of chess. When you set up your new game, you can also configure the time control, which means thinking time will also be limited.In 1997, IBM Deep Blue became the first computer to defeat a world chess champion in tournament conditions. To start the game, simply click on the Start button and start playing the chess computer. Start playing chess now against the computer at various levels, from easy level one all the way up to master level.

He was clearly under epic stress. His head hovered over the chessboard as if trying to identify which piece was threatening to betray him. The other was world champion chess player Garry Kasparov, whose concentration was intense enough to start a fire in a rainforest. He sat with an air of detachment mixed with anticipation, like a passenger on public transit not sure where the bus will stop.

It was February 1997, and I was covering the Kasparov-Deep Blue match—the historic contest where IBM’s computer would beat the world champion—for Newsweek. I was in that room, for a few minutes at least, taking a turn at occupying one of its eight seats. The human still won the chess match, but by the narrowest. The 1996 well publicized chessmatch between Big Blue (a mainframe chess software program. Some of them were freeware or shareware, or demo versions of commercial programs, but. Big Blue Disk was a monthly DOS disk magazine that was published by Softdisk Publishing between 19 (also as 'On Disk Monthly' and 'Softdisk PC'.) It carried various games and applications for DOS as well as reviews and various extras.

Development for Deep Blue began in 1985 with the ChipTest project at Carnegie Mellon University Grandmaster Joel Benjamin was part of the development team.The other interesting point was our discussion about the psychological aspects of the game. It was the first computer to win both a chess game and a chess match against a reigning world champion under regular time controls. Even Kasparov, in a TED Talk last month, cited it twice.Deep Blue was a chess-playing computer developed by IBM. And that “Brain’s Last Stand” line would come to be be invoked to this day. So it was that Kasparov’s X-ray eyes and ultra-confident visage graced the newsstands of America, at a time when people actually paused at the newsstands to see what the weeklies put on their covers. What clinched it was the cover line I suggested: “The Brain’s Last Stand.” It also helped that no celebrity died that week.

He felt at a disadvantage because in a contest with any human, he would have a long history of match performance and would be able to tailor a strategy against that person’s tendencies and weaknesses. Going into the match, Kasparov was frustrated that IBM had not shared printouts of Deep Blue’s practice games. It turns out that Tan’s remark about IBM doing everything it could to win included waging psychological warfare against its human opponent.One tool was the element of surprise. IBMs Deep Blue AI beat reigning global Chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov.Today, those aspects seem to loom larger than the technological achievement of Deep Blue.

I asked Tan directly at our lunch if this was so, and the IBM-er replied, “No. But he did suspect that IBM was secretly working with more experienced grandmasters. “I have better things to do in my life” than study Benjamin’s games, Kasparov told me.

When Kasparov made his best move, the machine would play immediately, trying to give Kasparov the impression he had fallen into a trap. When a chess computer stalls like this, it typically signals that the machine is having difficulty, or even has crashed. In a 2009 interview with a chess publication, Illescas revealed that sometimes when Deep Blue instantly knew its next move, it would wait minutes before acting. IBM actually programmed in the equivalent.

It seemed to Kasparov — and frankly, to a lot of observers as well — that Deep Blue had suddenly stopped playing like a computer (by resisting the catnip of the queen attack) and instead adopted a strategy that only the wisest human master might attempt. In a situation where virtually every top-level chess program would have attacked Kasparov’s exposed queen, Deep Blue made a much subtler and ultimately more effective move that shattered Kasparov’s image of what a computer was capable of doing. But on the 36th move, the computer did something that shook Kasparov to his bones. In the second, the match was close and hard fought. Kasparov had won the first game and was feeling pretty good.

He fought to draws in the next three games, but in addition to the added mental pressures of dealing with what he clearly believed was his opponent’s skullduggery, he was physically wearing down. In what he described as “a fatalistic depression,” he played on, and wound up resigning the game.Kasparov was not the same player after Game Two. A few days later, he described it this way: “Suddenly played like a god for one moment.” From that moment Kasparov had no idea what — or who — he was playing against.

In a chaotic post-game press conference, Kasparov alternated between rage and depression.After the match, I pushed very hard for a one-on-one with Kasparov. He played in a desultory fashion for a few moves, and then resigned in obvious disgust. It was almost like he was throwing the game. Afterwards, he claimed that he “wasn’t in the mood of playing at all.” On his seventh move, on what should have been a routine opening-game move, he made a mistake so egregiously awful that there were cries of disbelief in the auditorium where spectators were gathered. From where we journalists were sitting, Kasparov seemed disengaged from the start. Asked in the press conference after Game Five about a comment Illescas made that he was now afraid of Deep Blue, Kasparov said, “I’m not afraid to admit I’m afraid!” Quite a difference from his pre-match confidence.Indeed, Game Six was a debacle.

“There is no information,” he complained. Kasparov immediately repeated a demand he had made in the press conference: that IBM agree to a rematch, under more favorable conditions.And of course, he railed about not seeing those full printouts. We sat knee-to-knee — like chess players, but of course no board separated us. The space was empty except for a few generic dining chairs, the kind used at banquets.

His new book is a departure into a chapter of his life that defines him more than he’d like. He is a political activist squaring off against a more formidable opponent than even IBM : Vladimir Putin. The company never agreed to Kasparov’s demand for a rematch.Today, Kasparov is no longer competing for chess titles. “It was sitting in my mind.” And then he summed it up: “It was a single individual fighting one of the largest corporations in the world.”Indeed, IBM’s stock jumped up after the match. “I never got over Game Two,” he said to me.

Big Blue Chess Match Series Of Five

We view them as inevitabilities.The prime example is last year’s contest, during which DeepMind’s AlphaGo program thumped an 18-time world champion in a series of five games. But in 2017, we view them differently. We hear of amazing machine learning accomplishments on a daily basis. Amazingly, when the Deep Blue match occurred, AI was in its “winter” peri0d. In his recent TED Talk, he didn’t revert to his complaints about IBM in the Deep Blue match.I dwell on these suspicions, even ones that may border on paranoia, for a reason.

Given enough time, money, and machine learning, there’s no cognitive obstacle that machines will not surmount.When I covered Kasparov-Deep Blue match, I thought the drama came from a battle between computer and human. But though the match deservedly received attention, it was nowhere near as mythic as the Deep Blue match was. The human champion, Lee Sedol, ended with respect for his opponent and awe for how far computer science had come. Yet AlphaGo did not need to resort to any of the tactics that IBM used to distract, deceive, and ultimately destroy Kasparov.

Ultimately, using the power of computation for cognition is a great and historic human enterprise. I’m still on board with the scientists who believe that advances in AI will make life better for all of us. That leads me to believe it’s not Skynet that should worry us about AI, but rather the homo sapiens who build, implement, and employ those systems.Don’t get me wrong.