Garry Kasparov's Blog, page 48

“Starr Forum: The Trump-Putin Phenomenon” | Sept 19th, 2017

A session of the Focus on Russia Lecture Series

Co-chairs, Carol Saivetz and Elizabeth Wood Speakers Julia Ioffe, Moscow born American journalist who covers national security and foreign policy topics for The Atlantic

Garry Kasparov, Chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, Russian chess grandmaster, former World Chess Champion, writer, and political activist.

Kasparov’s books Winter is coming and Deep Thinking will be signed and sold at the event Co-sponsors: MIT Center for International Studies, MIT Security Studies Program, MIT-Russia Program

Conversation with Demis Hassabis at Google | June 14, 2017

Garry Kasparov and DeepMind’s CEO Demis Hassabis discuss Garry’s new book “Deep Thinking”, his match with Deep Blue and his thoughts on the future of AI in the world of chess.

Get the book here: https://goo.gl/OwuOcW

Event moderated by Demis Hassabis, CEO, DeepMind.

** About the book, Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins **

In May 1997, the world watched as Garry Kasparov, the greatest chess player in the world, was defeated for the first time by the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue. It was a watershed moment in the history of technology: machine intelligence had arrived at the point where it could best human intellect.

It wasn’t a coincidence that Kasparov became the symbol of man’s fight against the machines. Chess has long been the fulcrum in development of machine intelligence; the hoax automaton ‘The Turk’ in the 18th century and Alan Turing’s first chess program in 1952 were two early examples of the quest for machines to think like humans — a talent we measured by their ability to beat their creators at chess. As the pre-eminent chessmaster of the 80s and 90s, it was Kasparov’s blessing and his curse to play against each generation’s strongest computer champions, contributing to their development and advancing the field.

Like all passionate competitors, Kasparov has taken his defeat and learned from it. He has devoted much energy to devising ways in which humans can partner with machines in order to produce results better than either can achieve alone. During the twenty years since playing Deep Blue, he’s played both with and against machines, learning a great deal about our vital relationship with our most remarkable creations. Ultimately, he’s become convinced that by embracing the competition between human and machine intelligence, we can spend less time worrying about being replaced and more thinking of new challenges to conquer.

In this breakthrough book, Kasparov tells his side of the story of Deep Blue for the first time — what it was like to strategize against an implacable, untiring opponent — the mistakes he made and the reasons the odds were against him. But more than that, he tells his story of AI more generally, and how he’s evolved to embrace it, taking part in an urgent debate with philosophers worried about human values, programmers creating self-learning neural networks, and engineers of cutting edge robotics.

“The Brain’s Last Stand” | Key-note address at DefCon 2017

Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov has a unique place in history as the proverbial “man” in “man vs. machine” thanks to his iconic matches against the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue. Kasparov walked away from that watershed moment in artificial intelligence history with a passion for finding ways humans and intelligent machines could work together. In the spirit of “if you can’t beat’em, join’em,” Kasparov has explored that potential for the 20 years since his loss to Deep Blue. Navigating a practical and hopeful approach between the utopian and dystopian camps, Kasparov focuses on how we can rise to the challenge of the AI revolution despite job losses to automation and refuting those who say our technology is making us less human. He includes concrete examples and forward-looking strategies on AI.

Can Trump and Putin keep their bromance alive? |Op-ed at Washington Post | August 9th, 2017

by Garry Kasparov

READ ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT THE WASHINGTON POST

Last week, the Senate and the House approved tough new sanctions targeting Russia for its aggression in Ukraine and its cyber-meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Lawmakers included provisions to prevent President Trump from overriding the legislation. Trump signed the bill on Aug. 2, while making his displeasure clear. In this he was immediately joined by Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who took to Trump’s favorite medium to bait the easily baited Trump by tweeting that Congress had “humiliated” him. It was a perfect way to flatter the would-be autocrat Trump: “If only you had total control in America like Vladimir Putin does in Russia!”

Medvedev’s remarks echoed those of Trump and the president’s cheerleaders on Fox News. This chorus likes to portray Trump as a hostage of Congress and various “domestic enemies” holding him back from making America (and Russia) great again. The underlying message is distinctly authoritarian: If only the leader had total control, everything would be better for the country and the people.

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I interpret Medvedev’s tweets, which were in English as well as Russian, as a mafia-style warning from Putin’s consigliere, a 140-character horse’s head in the president’s bed to remind Trump of his obligations, whatever they may be. Trump certainly seemed to respond that way. Twenty-four hours later, he was repeating his “Russia hoax” talking points at a rally in West Virginia.

What Trump did not mention, and has yet to acknowledge, is how Putin has responded to the sanctions – by ejecting 755 personnel from American diplomatic service in Russia. This is a huge number, one that includes many local Russian personnel, not just American diplomats and staff. (Remember: President Barack Obama expelled only 35 Russian diplomats when he moved to retaliate against Moscow’s mischief in December 2016.) The first notable result will be severe limitations in the ability of Russians to obtain visas for the United States. As usual, Putin’s idea of sanctions is to punish Russians.When the 2012 Magnitsky Act legislation put pressure on state human rights abusers in Russia, Putin responded by banning the adoption of Russian orphans by U.S. families. When Obama finally levied sanctions on Russia over Putin’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, Putin responded by banning many imported foodstuffs. His officials even made a show of destroying piles of food in a country where millions struggle to put adequate food on the table. As the Russian joke goes, “If America bombs Syria, Putin will retaliate and bomb Voronezh!”

It seems bizarre for a leader to inflict hardship on his own people, especially when Russia is already collapsing after 17½ years of Putin’s kleptocracy and oil prices that have stayed low for nearly three years. But Putin doesn’t care about the welfare of the Russian people and never has. Even so, he has to find excuses for why everything is so bad despite so many years of his unchallenged rule. The method he has chosen is to create enemies, the stronger the better, in order to create a narrative of Russia being on a wartime footing that necessitates sacrifice and, of course, total devotion to the great leader who is fighting so hard to defend the motherland.

Some proponents of engagement with Moscow argue that sanctioning Putin merely plays into his hands. Yet this is a myth. No amount of appeasement is going to turn Putin into an ally of the free world, at least not if the free world is going to live up to that name. Putin will not stop until he is stopped, and that won’t happen until his gang sees him as an obstacle to maintaining its wealth and power instead of as an asset. Sanctions that strike at the gang’s investments abroad are an excellent way to do that.

It’s important to understand that Putin doesn’t care if Trump wins his fights with Congress and the courts. Putin wants Trump to go right on sowing chaos and division in the only nation on Earth that could single-handedly cripple his hold on power in Russia. This explains why the Kremlin’s trolls are currently working hard to support the alt-right campaign against the most capable person in the White House, national security adviser H.R. McMaster. McMaster has no illusions about the threat Putin represents, and Putin knows it is much easier to manipulate people who are looking out for themselves, not the greater good of the country.

It’s not yet time for Putin and Trump to end their romance. Trump is still the Kremlin’s best hope for creating havoc in Washington and damaging American credibility abroad. Trump is still unable to criticize Putin, partly because his ego prohibits him from acknowledging that hacking by a hostile foreign power helped him get elected. Trump and Putin may not have the same agenda, but they do share at least one goal: to put as much power as possible into Trump’s hands.

Garry Kasparov, a Russian pro-democracy activist, and former world chess champion, is the chairman of the Human Rights Foundation based in New York City. He is the author of “Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped.” Follow @Kasparov63

Fighting Hate and Saving Speech | Avast Blog Post | Aug 1st, 2017

by Garry Kasparov

READ ORIGINAL POST AT AVAST BLOG 

Garry Kasparov on how the internet magnifies what is already a delicate balance between regulating defamatory language and allowing for free expression.

 A new law passed in Germany in June requires social media companies to delete content that qualifies as hate speech within 24 hours, or face fines starting at $5 million and reaching $57 million. The law and the controversy in which it quickly became embroiled has raised many important questions regarding the nature of hate speech, the tradeoff between free expression and regulation, and the roles of private companies and government authorities in overseeing, to name just a few.

The problem of monitoring digital content came up prominently in last year’s presidential election in the United States, so many of these issues are already at the forefront of public debate. But Germany’s history places it in a unique position in terms of free speech, raising the stakes for any hateful commentary. With strict laws outlawing hate speech already on the books—carrying a punishment of up to 5 years’ imprisonment—you might consider these new laws simply an extension of existing policies. But, as I have been consistently aiming to do through my monthly blog posts here, we have to ask two crucial questions: how does the internet transform this issue, and how should we respond?

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A good starting point for our discussion is gaining greater clarity on what counts as hate speech in the first place. If we can’t agree on the types of statements that cross the line, then how can we expect to find a common regulatory solution? The legislation recently passed in Germany simply transfers the definition used in the offline sphere there to the world of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. What is already illegal as a public statement, such as a denial of the Holocaust published in a print magazine or spoken on a television news program, would be equally unacceptable as a post or comment on the internet.

This raises an obvious problem, namely that the national borders within which Germany can regulate its public discourse don’t exist online. A post generated in a country without stringent hate speech laws would have to be removed from the internet in another nation, setting aside whether its true origins can even be determined. And what does “origin” even mean online? The citizenship or residence of the individual who made the post? The location of the server on which the post resides? The home nation of the corporation who owns that server? You begin to see why the internet has been such a boon for lawyers! Is this what we want for a universal platform that intrinsically transcends state boundaries?

After all, if Germany can exert enough pressure on a social media company to enforce its censorship standards outside of Germany, what about the standards of other nations and groups, especially authoritarian ones? Religious fundamentalists of quite a few religions already press to ban images of women wearing attire they consider inappropriate. China would be happy to extend its domestic internet censorship of names of dissidents and terms like “Tiananmen Square” to the entire internet. Patrolling the limits of hate speech online is much harder than patrolling the national borders of a nation-state.

We can see how this ties back to our central question: how does the internet magnify what is already a delicate balance between regulating defamatory language and allowing for free expression? We must contend now not just with the politics and culture of a single country, but with a globalized digital sphere that brings dozens of ethnicities, languages, and religions into contact. Often, the confrontation with so many discordant worldviews can be jarring. How can we create policies that allow individuals to gain new perspectives through their online experience, without negating universal conceptions of right and wrong?

On this topic, I believe we cannot be relativists, arguing that every opinion deserves equal standing. Objectively, certain countries and cultures are ahead of others in what I will call “moral evolution.” America’s Founding Fathers did not see slavery as amoral; today, we find the practice morally unconscionable. I believe other countries will come to the same conclusions about certain belief systems that they currently sanction. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights would be a fine objective to make truly universal. In the meantime, we must find a way to coexist on platforms so many of us share—and that means instituting regulations that respect our most deeply-held values without inhibiting cultural sharing and learning.

The debate over the substance of hate speech is inseparable from practical concerns about its policing. On this point, too, current legislation does not offer a satisfactory answer. It shifts the responsibility from the government to tech companies, to either create large task forces of employees for this purpose, or to develop human-trained algorithms that can make the call. While some cases are obvious, the exceptions are where complications arise both technically and ethically.

A westerner might think that the swastika is a clear case, and one easily detected by an image matching algorithm. That might be accurate 95% of the time, but this hated Nazi symbol is quite common in Asia, even today, especially in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and China, as a Buddhist, Hindu and Taoist symbol, and where its traditional and religious uses predate the Nazis—and Germany. A knowledgeable human can tell the difference between the swastikas at a neo-fascist rally in Hamburg and a mosaic in an Indian temple, but can a machine? As usual, context is everything, and context is exactly what machines are bad at, limited as they are to their data set and strict rules. You can expand the machine’s context by giving it even more data, especially about the person posting, but then we crash into the privacy issue. How much information should we have to provide to a company or government to prove our innocence to an algorithm?

But as the saying goes, the Devil is in the details. Both humans and computers will have to work harder to determine context, intent, and impact. What kinds of guidelines will tech companies put in place for workers charged with flagging and taking down content? What calculations will they embed into the AIs tasked with removing defamatory material? Where in this process can we, as concerned citizens, be sure that our values are being captured and embedded into the mechanisms that are going to govern our public discourse?

As usual, I do not pretend to have the ideal answer, or even state that one definitely exists. Defining hate speech, let alone monitoring it and controlling it (and even if that is desirable), is an enormously complicated undertaking. My goal here is to delineate the parameters for an informed discussion, which I hope the above questions accomplish. The larger goal is to keep making progress toward realizing our ideals, even while admitting perfection will never be in our grasp.

I also need to issue a few words of caution, given my very personal experience with repressive governments. The line between outlawing defamation and all-out censorship is a very easy one to cross. As we consider the tradeoff between free speech and controlled supervision, we would do well to keep in mind that restrictions passed in the free world with good intentions can, and will, be misused by authoritarian governments. Russia’s notorious anti-gay propaganda law, for example, bans any type of speech that “endorses homosexual behavior to minors,” and it has also been abused for political persecution. Such a broad and vague restriction means that enforcement is entirely up to the Kremlin-controlled legislature, which can pick and choose instances to prosecute based on its whims. It is an easy and convenient way to silence all non-traditional or dissenting views that threaten the regime.

Similarly, laws against “extremism” may sound like a good idea in places struggling with radicalized populations spreading hateful propaganda and calls to violent action. But in Russia and other places battling authoritarian regimes, any opposition to the government is quickly labeled extremist and banned, from pamphlets to rallies to websites, with arrests usually to follow. Democracies are not immune to abusing such laws, it is true, but at least there is political recourse, debate, and a free media to push back.

Legalistic language that attempts to codify hate speech is not a true solution. Instead, we should aim for broad language that enshrines our overarching principles, which will be much harder for cynical regimes to subvert, and which will keep the door as wide open as possible for free expression and individual freedom—to keep the free world free. The best we can do to protect against truly hateful speech, while retaining the freedom of expression essential to human development, is to define and refine the moral framework of the society we want, online and offline. The specifics of what exactly can be said, where, when, and so on, will always be debated, of course. But it’s not so bad to have the Devil in the details if the angels are painting the big picture.

 

Donald’s Pravda: Trump and his apologists spookily echo Vladimir Putin | July 16th, 2017

by Garry Kasparov

READ ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT THE DAILY NEWS

For autocrats, angry denial is the first phase of responding to accurate charges against them. “No! Never! A complete fabrication!”

As evidence accumulates, this shifts to feigning ignorance and claiming misunderstanding, along with attempts to distract by slandering the accusers, blaming others for similar sins and discrediting the concept of knowable truth. “I didn’t know it was wrong! The media is out to get me! Others have done worse! Who knows what really happened?”

When even this proves insufficient, it’s time for the final step, confession. Not the kind that is said to be good for the soul, but the aggressive, defiant boasting of someone who is sure that they won’t be punished in this life or the next for the crime they denied for so long. “I did it, but so what? There’s nothing wrong with it! What are you going to do about it?”

After many months of denials, lies and distractions in an effort to dismiss the mounting evidence that the Trump campaign knowingly worked with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election, the Trump train is approaching the final station. What else is left after it was revealed last week that Donald Trump Jr. eagerly took a meeting on June 9, 2016, to receive supposedly damaging material about Hillary Clinton from the Russian government?

Last week, as the New York Times prepared to publish an exposé on the meeting, Trump Jr. released excerpts of an email chain in a bizarre effort to claim transparency. It was as if a robber was caught red-handed in the jewelry store, surrounded by police, and then asked for leniency for turning himself in.

Among other things, the emails showed that top Trump aides Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner also participated in the meeting and knew about its scurrilous content in advance. Instead of refusing the meeting or contacting the FBI, they went ahead with it. It’s almost as if such an arrangement did not come as a surprise.

As usual, when news from the Trump-Russia front looks bad, it soon turns out to be even worse. On Friday, the list of attendees of the June meeting was expanded to include Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-American lobbyist who just happens to be an alleged former Soviet counter-intelligence agent.

Other reports later added a translator and at least one other person from the Russian side of the equation to the cast of characters Don Jr. must have forgotten to mention in his burst of transparency.

Mark Twain wrote that if you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything. Ironically, this profound phrase was tweeted by none other than Donald Trump Jr. in 2013.

The Trump team has made a full-time job of forgetting things. To be fair, it must be difficult to keep so many difficult Russian names straight, along with so many changing stories.

The next wave of revelations about collaboration between the campaign team and administration of Donald Trump and Russia will surprise only in their specifics, not their character. That treasonous nature, of collaborating with a hostile foreign power, has been exposed once and for all.

There will almost surely be more names, more meetings, more smoke and more fire, but the raw truth of collusion is now undeniable. Further evidence will decide if it’s also legally actionable.

This steady drumbeat has served one useful purpose whether it leads to Trump’s early departure from the presidency or not. It has exposed a class of pundits, politicians and supporters for whom nothing is too foolish, too sleazy or too un-American to defend him from. Every time you imagine the lines of good conscience cannot be drawn any lower, they slide under the bar like a subpoena slipped under an office door.

Their constant excuses for Trump’s behavior are nearly as outrageous as his statements and actions.

The countless personal insults and offensive statements Trump made during the campaign were just his blunt personal style, they said. His unprecedented praise of dictators like Vladimir Putin was either geopolitical naivete or clever brinkmanship. (Why not both?)

Trump would change once in office, we were told. He would rise to the level of the presidency, hire competent communications experts and foreign policy advisors — and listen to them — and run the country like a business.

In his six months in office, Trump has lowered the American presidency to his level, speaking directly to America and the world in mangled exclamations on social media. When his top national security official, retired Gen. Michael Flynn, turned out to be working for foreign governments, Trump did hire a few competent advisors.

The formidable duo of National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster and Defense Secretary James Mattis spend much of their time quietly reassuring America’s allies by contradicting Trump on American policy, military strategy and basic geography.

As for running the country like one of his businesses, we have been reminded vividly that Trump filed for six bankruptcies. His undeniable commercial success was a TV show in which he played a businessman, exploiting his brand name and his ability to sound tough while following a script. Now that he’s the President of the United States, Trump is unwilling or unable to follow a script, leaving the world trembling anxiously each morning for his arrival on Twitter.

Through it all, Republican leaders like Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have stayed loyal to Trump’s increasingly incoherent agenda. The pundits of Fox News either defend Trump’s latest outrages or, since many are indefensible, simply ignore them in favor of running more attacks on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton — neither of whom, it should be pointed out, is the President of the United States.

It is painful to do so, but Trump’s critics must admit that his clownish character and hateful demagoguery have substantial support in the American electorate.

Still, it has been startling to find that defending Trump on these emotional and nationalist grounds extends readily to matters of national security. It is here that we see the real impact of 18 months of demonizing the media and attacking every investigation and critique as fake news.

There is no other explanation for the partisan defenses of the latest developments in the Trump-Russia storylines, one past and one present.

To start with current events, Trump met with Putin a little over a week ago in Hamburg, Germany. That two-hour-plus meeting was the culmination of a public dance between the two men that has been carried on in their interviews, speeches and remarks to the news media for well over a year.

Their personal relationship, which has been alternately touted and denied by Trump numerous times, has faded into the background as more Russia connections between Trump’s staff and family have fueled the daily news cycle.

The Hamburg encounter brought their strange bromance back to the front page, despite a lack of anything substantial coming out of the meeting. The White House had already admitted that there was no real agenda from the American side — which makes sense because there is nothing the United States really needs from Putin’s Russia. That fact has frequently been overlooked as Trump’s camp defended its many Russian connections as vital engagement.

There is no significant official business between the United States and Russia unless you include Putin’s sustained propaganda and cyberwar against the United States as official business, but Trump said he accepted Putin’s claims of innocence and was eager to put that behind him.

Every national security department and expert is warning about the next Russian attack, but Trump says to forget about it, let’s just move on. Of course he does, since the hacking and misinformation campaign were both in his favor during the campaign. This is the clearest example of how Trump always puts what benefits him personally over U.S. interests and his oath to defend the Constitution.

There is a clear parallel here to what we have experienced in Russia for the past 17 years under Putin: the intentional conflation of the private interests of the few with the public good. When Putin talks about what’s best for Russia, he always only means what is best for him and his cronies — what keeps them wealthy and in power.

There is now a similar dynamic with Trump, especially where Russia is concerned. His Hamburg meeting with Putin was a great gift to the Russian dictator, who needs prominent photo-ops to reassure his gang back home that he’s still a big boss who can protect their investments abroad.

Meanwhile, the U.S. needs nothing from Russia. No, despite Trump claims to the contrary, we’re not really on the same side in Syria. And U.S. sanctions are locked to Russia’s exit from Crimea, which is not going to happen any time soon.

So why the meeting? It’s a case of “Ask not what Russia can do for America, ask what Putin can do for Trump — and what has he been doing for him already?”

Trump also loves photo ops and feeling like a big man on the international stage, especially with his domestic agenda of health care, tax reform, infrastructure and immigration foundering.

Immediately after the Putin meeting, Trump boasted about potential U.S.-Russian cooperation in Syria and, laughably, in cybersecurity. It revealed Trump’s desperate desire to be seen as a global dealmaker — a desire easily exploited by Putin. Ukraine and other key topics for Putin will likely now become areas of focus for Trump’s State Department — led, lest we forget, by Rex Tillerson, a favorite of Putin’s while Tillerson was the Exxon-Mobil CEO.

Collaboration during the campaign is making the headlines today, and that investigation must continue. But any cooperation between Trump and Putin in the future will be even more dangerous, both for Russians and Americans.

Trump has no international agenda and Putin is happy to fill in the blanks. Trump can follow a script, after all, and right now it looks like that script is being written in Moscow.

Kasparov is the chairman of the Human Rights Foundation and the author of “Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped.” His latest book is “Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins.”

Kasparov Thinks Deeply about His Battle with a Machine | “Deep Thinking” | July 10th, 2017

A new book offers the chess master’s account of his famous match against Deep Blue—and some thoughts on the future of AI.

by Jonathan Schaeffer
July 10, 2017

Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov is long overdue for telling his side of the story regarding his famous match with the IBM computer Deep Blue in May 1997. The six-game exhibition has been described as a milestone in artificial intelligence, but also as a sad day for the (human) world of chess.

But then, important matters are seldom black and white. In the new book Deep Thinking, Kasparov and longtime writing partner Mig Greengard intertwine his experiences—before, during, and after the match—with a historical overview of chess-playing AI to produce a well-written, accessible book that provides food for thought about our future alongside increasingly intelligent machines.

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Many in the chess community, who may buy the book for insight into the match’s outcome, will be surprised to see a side of Kasparov that the general public has not seen before—a man who has mellowed over time. When at the top of his game, he oozed confidence and was often viewed as arrogant. He was relentless in his drive for perfection and unapologetic about his actions and public statements. But in Deep Thinking it is obvious that Kasparov has done a lot of reflection about the match. Accusations have been replaced by admissions. The big surprise is that in several places he apologizes for his actions. The following text undoes many of the claims he made in the heat of the battle:

I have been asked, “Did Deep Blue cheat?” more times than I could possibly count, and my honest answer has always been “I don’t know.” After twenty years of soul-searching, revelations, and analysis, my answer is now “no.”

He still has the competitive fire in his belly, as evidenced by his anger with the aftermath of the match. He did not get the rematch that he expected and that the public wanted. Instead of belaboring this point, however, he laments that “the real victim of this betrayal was science.”

Those in the artificial-intelligence and technology communities may buy this book because of the intriguing tag line “Where machine intelligence ends and human creativity begins.” The book gives a good but brief discussion of the potential for symbiosis between human and artificial intelligence, whether that means “outsourcing” simple cognitive tasks like memorizing phone numbers to a faithful computer servant or achieving a partnership of equals where both sides contribute to decision-making, as seen in man-plus-machine versus man-plus-machine chess.

Throughout, Kasparov is optimistic about AI technology and its potential to enhance human lives. This is refreshing to read, given the recent spate of negative publicity. The following quote nicely sums up his attitude:

If we feel like we are being surpassed by our own technology it’s because we aren’t pushing ourselves hard enough, aren’t being ambitious enough in our goals and dreams. Instead of worrying about what machines can do, we should worry more about what they still cannot do.

It is nice to finally have Kasparov’s story on the record, albeit possibly clouded by the passage of time. However, it does not really change the way history will judge this event. To date, building programs that beat humans at checkers and chess have meant creating a series of idiots savants. Each feat has been a massive software and/or hardware project, requiring many person-years of effort. Clearly, this type of progress is not scalable. What’s more, games like chess represent a tiny subset of the problems that humans tackle. The rules are set and do not change. The board is small. There is no chance or hidden information. The game result is a zero sum. In the real world, none of that applies. While the technology deployed in Google DeepMind’s Go-playing program AlphaGo may have the potential for wider applicability, Deep Blue lacks any general-purpose problem-solving abilities. Thus, it remains an interesting historical data point with little long-term impact on the field of AI.

Garry Kasparov reached supremacy at chess, but with his retirement in 2005, he tried to move on to a much harder game: politics. In his career, he checkmated many kings and supposed kings. Now he pours his heart and soul into toppling Vladimir Putin. That he can decide to dramatically switch careers, train himself for his new challenge, plan a course of action, and execute such a plan in an ever-changing, high-stakes environment fraught with personal risk speaks volumes about the differences that remain between man and machine. So does the writing of this book itself. Though both Deep Blue and AlphaGo are impressive accomplishments, they still fall far short of what Kasparov is capable of as a human being.

Jonathan Schaeffer is a professor and dean of the faculty of science at the University of Alberta. He is also a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

Can Garry Kasparov stay a move ahead of Vladimir Putin? | Sports Illustrated | July 10th, 2017

READ ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT THE SPORTS ILLUSTRATED

by Jack Dickley

In February 2013 the Investigative Committee of Russia gave Garry Kasparov’s 76-year-old mother a call. They were looking for her son.

Kasparov had been one of the nation’s brightest lights for decades. In 1985, at 22, he became the youngest winner in the history of the world chess championship. He was suave and cocky, a virtuoso, and he captivated the chess-mad U.S.S.R., where every world champion became a household name. He is widely considered the greatest player ever. Twelve years would pass, and the Soviet Union would fall, before he lost his first match, and even then he remained ranked No. 1 until his 2005 retirement, when he abandoned chess to become a political activist.

Russian president Vladimir Putin had been running the country for only five years, but already Kasparov saw the nation hurtling backward. Kasparov and his compatriots called for fair elections; instead Russia held votes that were presumed to have been rigged. The more Putin clamped down—silencing dissent, eliminating enemies—the more urgent Kasparov’s mission became. In 2007, he was jailed for protesting and then denied the opportunity to run for president. (Putin’s comment on the arrest: “Why did Mr. Kasparov, when arrested, speak out in English rather than Russian?”) Then, in 2012, Kasparov was arrested and detained while protesting the imprisonment of the dissident feminist punk band Pussy Riot. A Russian court acquitted him soon after on the charges that he bit an officer. But still the Investigative Committee, Russia’s equivalent of the FBI, wanted to have a chat.

“They ‘invited’ me,” Kasparov says, “to be questioned as a witness in one of the many political cases they were investigating.” For guidance he called his friend Boris Nemtsov, another opposition leader. Nemtsov told him, “Garry, you enter the building as a witness, and if you exit the building, it’s as a suspect. Stay away.”

Kasparov by then was spending most of his time in New York City. Now, more than four years later, he has yet to return to Russia. He lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side with his wife, Daria, and their daughter, Aida, 11, and son, Nikolas, 2. (He has another daughter and son from two prior marriages.) He crisscrosses the U.S. and Europe as chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, which promotes democracy around the world.

As for Nemtsov? He was gunned down in Moscow in 2015, hours after he spoke in support of a protest against Russia’s war in Ukraine. “I wish Boris had followed his own advice,” Kasparov says.

According to Akhmed Zakayev, a Chechen leader in exile in Great Britain, Putin and Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov resolved after protests in 2012 to punish four major opposition leaders: Alexei Navalny and Sergei Udaltsov would be jailed, and Nemtsov and Kasparov would be killed. Kasparov notes that indeed Navalny and Udaltsov were sentenced to prison terms, and Nemtsov was killed—“so maybe it’s a real story.”

Kasparov has even been getting an unusual question at book signings recently: Why aren’t you dead? To these queries he replies that at this point, his death would only negligibly burnish Putin’s strongman credentials; he has already made his point.

As the grandmaster sees it, Putin reached a point in early 2014 where he had run out of moves domestically. “You need confrontations with the free world to stay in power [in Russia],” says Kasparov. So Putin invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea. Although the new territory bolstered his neo-Soviet reclamation project, retaliatory sanctions from the West manacled the Russian economy. (A coincidental collapse in the price of crude oil had already jeopardized Putin’s agenda.) But Putin, pressured to retreat, chose instead to counterattack. He increased Russian involvement in Syria, casting his country as the courageous enemy of ISIS.

The menace Putin posed troubled Kasparov enough for him to publish a book, Winter Is Coming, his first nonchess title, in 2015. In it he likened Putin’s past decade to Hitler’s 1930s, and he fingered Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Gerhard Schröder as latter-day Neville Chamberlains.

As with most every Hitler comparison, it struck some as hyperbolic and alarmist. Well, it did back then. “I tried to tell people that winter was coming, and they didn’t want to hear it,” Kasparov says. “Now people all want me to tell them to be afraid.”

Kasparov was reminded recently of his 2015 book-tour appearance on Bill Maher’s HBO talk show. Maher told Kasparov to wake him up when Putin invades Poland. Kasparov says it took all he had not to jump up and down on his chair. “Well,” Kasparov says now, “it seems as though he skipped over Poland and went straight to Wisconsin.”

Do you really want to know what happened with the Russian meddling in U.S. affairs?

Kasparov is a man of many theories—that’s all they are, theories—but they’re shaped by years of tussling with Putin, and untainted by any great yearning for President Hillary Clinton. (Kasparov’s American political hero is Ronald Reagan, thank you very much.)

“In Putin’s eyes, Trump was the perfect counterpart,” he says. “The way Trump views the world is all about doing business, about deals.” Kasparov figures Putin aspired to approach Trump with the deal of all deals: “NATO, the EU, who gives a damn? Let’s redesign the map; you’re FDR, I’m Stalin. Maybe we bring in Angela Merkel, or the president of China—we’ll be the new Big Three. Equals! Who cares about Estonia, Latvia, Syria? We’ll play the game. Mmm, for Trump, that’s music to his ears!”

How would such a deal get done? Who would even be able to put it in front of the president, knowing that it contravened American doctrine and would not make it through the ranks of career foreign service officers at the State Department?

That, Kasparov says, is where Michael Flynn came in: “I’ve been saying from Day One that he was compromised.” Former acting attorney general Sally Yates says she told the White House in January that Flynn was vulnerable to Russian blackmail. Kasparov says Putin must have figured Flynn would quietly advance Kremlin interests.

With Flynn in control of the national-security apparatus and in back-channel communications with Russia, and with Rex Tillerson, a Russia-friendly dealmaker, atop a threadbare State Department (nearly 200 posts stood empty as of late April), all the pieces had fallen into place. Putin had influenced the U.S. election and now he could do the same to U.S. foreign policy.

But in early February, top-level government sources leaked to The Washington Post that Flynn had discussed with Russian ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak the possibility of lifting sanctions Obama had placed on Russia, and then had lied about it to FBI agents. Four days later, Flynn was fired.

Politicians and commentators have long treasured chess as a metaphor for diplomacy. (Even Trump: “You can’t terminate [multilateral pacts]—there’s too many people, you go crazy. It’s like you have to be a grand chessmaster. And we don’t have any of them.”) It’s not a bad metaphor, as metaphors go: Diplomacy, like chess, offers multitudinous but not limitless options for moves and countermoves, and rewards careful evaluation of your position and your opponent’s.

When Kasparov rose to prominence, though, chess was not just a geopolitical metaphor but a vehicle for geopolitics itself. The game has always been thought of as a relatively pure measure of intellect, and the presence of a Soviet atop the world rankings signaled to the empire’s subjects, no matter how poor and starving they may have been, that they possessed some sort of superiority.

An unbroken run of Soviets had held the world championship from Stalin’s tenure to Brezhnev’s. Then came Bobby Fischer. A decade before he beat then champion Boris Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972, a 19-year-old Fischer had alleged in Sports Illustrated that the Soviets had fixed international tournaments and conspired to deny him a shot at the world title for the sake of propaganda. (They almost certainly had.) But he eventually did conquer Spassky.

Anatoly Karpov claimed the title in 1975, when Fischer’s mania prevented him from defending it. And Karpov still held it in 1984, when Kasparov came calling, determined to remake the image of the Soviet chess superstar as the U.S.S.R. itself was loosening up. Karpov was an ethnic Russian and a Communist Party darling; Kasparov was, in his words, “a half-Armenian, half-Jewish menace to this good Russian boy.” His attacking style also contrasted with his predecessors’.

Their first match took five months—and never ended. Karpov led five games to three (there had been 40 draws) when chess authorities called it off, ostensibly to protect the health of the players. (Kasparov contended that Soviet powers had prevailed upon the chess federation to suspend it before Karpov blew the lead.) The 1985 rematch in Moscow, contested under modified rules to prevent another marathon, saw Kasparov win 13–11. Kasparov won again in ’86, and drew in ’87, retaining his title.

Kasparov characterized the matches then, in SI, as a “battle between democracy and totalitarianism.” In Playboy, in 1989, he complained about the U.S.S.R.’s sexual repression, its government and “the Soviet chess mafia.” He threw his support behind the incipient pro-democracy, pro-capitalism movement.

 And what happened to him? Nothing. “Because of my chess success,” he says, “I was untouchable.” That was no way for a Soviet to talk. But he was untouchable, and he had had unprecedented success, beating Karpov again in 1990. What more was there left for him to do in the chess world? The answer would come in the form of a humble “science experiment” backed by the sixth-largest company in the world.

It is unfortunate that a great many people happen to know Garry Kasparov—the pro-democracy crusader and probably the best chess player ever—as the grandmaster who lost 20 years ago to a computer.

After all, Kasparov had beaten two of that computer’s forerunners, and had he played up to his usual standards, he says he would have beaten the computer in 1997 too. He makes this clear in Deep Thinking, his new book concerned primarily with artificial intelligence writ large but which also provides Kasparov’s first extended commentary on his loss to IBM’s Deep Blue.

In the book he writes about the machine’s handlers with the sort of spite usually reserved for dreaded rivals: “Secretive and antagonistic … IBM wasn’t only building a chess machine to beat me at the board, but a machine to beat me, period.”

At the dawning of computer chess, grandmasters could easily tailor their games to machines’ obvious strengths and weaknesses. Carnegie Mellon researchers predicted in 1957 that a computer would beat the human champion by 1967; they were 30 years off. Computers understood chess mathematically rather than intuitively, which meant that while they could thrive in the middle game as pieces were strategically traded, they would struggle elsewhere. Computers simply lacked the processing power to see as far ahead as humans.

Then again, unlike humans, they never lose focus. And by 1997 the machines had gotten stronger and closer to victory—Deep Blue I had taken a game from Kasparov in their match the year before. Even so, to hear Kasparov tell it, he initially saw nothing sinister in IBM’s request for a rematch once the machine had been suitably souped up. He thought it’d be a pleasant rivalry that would challenge (and enrich) both sides.

He was wrong. Kasparov and his team were denied access to records of games Deep Blue had played to train for the rematch, though he had received them before the first match. The machine had been taught human ploys, including pausing before making moves it knew it wanted to make. IBM hired several more grandmasters than Kasparov was aware of to stuff the machine with opening moves chosen for their particular effectiveness against him. Some of this value was lost, though, because Kasparov didn’t play like himself in the Deep Blue matches—he switched to a style he thought would accentuate the computer’s limitations.

The political center cannot hold — and that’s bad for all of us | Op-ed @ Washington Post | June 29, 2017

by Garry Kasparov

READ ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT THE WASHINGTON POST

DemocracyPost columnist Garry Kasparov is the chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation and the author of “Winter Is Coming” (2015) and “Deep Thinking” (2017).

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, a veteran of his party’s far-left wing, is suddenly London’s man of the hour. He surprised everyone by dramatically boosting his party’s share of the vote in the general election on June 8. When he spoke recently to the British House of Commons not long thereafter, he received far more applause than Tory Prime Minister Theresa May. Corbyn drew roars of approval from his backbenchers by saying that May’s government had “run out of ideas altogether,” and in the chaotic aftermath of the Brexit vote — hard Brexit, soft Brexit, no Brexit? — it’s hard to disagree. Now, however, we face the danger of filling a void of ideas with bad ones.

The extremes are thriving these days on both sides of the Atlantic. The traditional swing of the ideological pendulum from right to left and back again is gaining speed — and it is increasingly bypassing the center. Decades of decline and apathy under the establishment status quo have empowered the far right and the far left, both true believers and opportunists.

Corbyn’s success, fueled especially by his popularity among the young, is no one-off. In the first round of the recent French election, the ex-communist Jean-Luc Mélenchon surprised everyone with his strong showing among young voters. And though President Trump remains safely in power in Washington, young Americans are reacting by expressing fondness for socialism and candidates of the populist left like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

Backlash has led to whiplash, a dizzying condition of perpetual overreaction and outrage with no time to catch our bearings. Backlash against Brexit led to the surprising rise of fossilized leftist Corbyn and chaos in British politics. Trump’s shocking election on the back of demagoguery and nationalism has awakened a politically complacent America, but it’s far from clear where things are headed. Will the pendulum slow in the middle, or will it race by once again? If Trump was America’s Brexit moment, will there also be an American Corbyn, ready to meet the far right’s coloring-book fascism and isolationism with socialism and, well, its own version of isolationism?

I’m very worried about the answer, whether it comes from familiar faces like Sanders and Warren or in the guise of some younger, more charismatic figure with whom angry young liberals will identify even more. The siren song of socialism has always been a popular tune among the young. For all the horrors it spawned, socialism possessed a utopian narrative that was genuinely attractive to many. The honeyed promises of justice and equality appealed to those who failed to see that the only way to guarantee equality is coercion, and that those in charge of that coercion soon become “more equal than others,” in George Orwell’s flawless phrase from “Animal Farm.” That every communist state has also been a brutal authoritarian state is not a coincidence — it is the natural and inevitable outcome.

An entire generation has passed since the Soviet Union ceased to exist in the closing days of 1991. Young Americans and Europeans know little of communism beyond the mercantile regimes in China and Vietnam, and an occasional mention of Cuba. Socialism today is more likely to be seen not as Red China but through the rose-colored lens of the wealthy nations of Scandinavia. Inequality in the free world is a huge and growing problem, and the far right’s answer is to demonize immigrants and to try to turn back the clock. Unfortunately, the left is just as focused on scoring political points instead of acknowledging that any remedy will be complex and difficult. Meeting ignorance with ignorance of an equal and opposite value is no solution.

The political response to Trump in America is still pending, but there has been a noticeable salutary reaction in Europe. Elections in the Netherlands and France repudiated the far-right candidates who were associated with Trump by reputation and rhetoric, and Germany looks increasingly likely to follow suit. And the election of Emmanuel Macron showed that the sane center can win with capable candidates presenting a positive vision. But this is no time to relax. The domestic conditions of political, economic and moral stagnation that allowed these threats to arise have not abated.

The center must respond with ambitious plans and bold leaders that address these conditions in order to compete with the heated rhetoric and outlandish ideas coming from the extremists on the left and the right. Just as Trump was against so much and for so little, being against him can only be the beginning. The opposition must work to ensure that the backlash against Trump doesn’t result in something even worse (as hard as it is to imagine such a possibility now).

I have been asked frequently to use my life experience with authoritarian regimes to shed light on Trump’s plans and behaviors, which are very troubling indeed. But I hope the anti-Trump forces on the left will also heed me when I say that those who believe that the government cannot solve anything are easily matched in their potential to do harm by those who believe the government can solve everything.

A Brutal Intelligence: AI, Chess, and the Human Mind | “Deep Thinking” review June 29, 2017

by Nicholas Carr

READ ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

JUNE 29, 2017

CHESS IS THE GAME not just of kings but of geniuses. For hundreds of years, it has served as standard and symbol for the pinnacles of human intelligence. Staring at the pieces, lost to the world, the chess master seems a figure of pure thought: brain without body. It’s hardly a surprise, then, that when computer scientists began to contemplate the creation of an artificial intelligence in the middle years of the last century, they adopted the chessboard as their proving ground. To build a machine able to beat a skilled human player would be to fabricate a mind. It was a compelling theory, and to this day it shapes public perceptions of artificial intelligence. But, as the former world chess champion Garry Kasparov argues in his illuminating new memoir Deep Thinking, the theory was flawed from the start. It reflected a series of misperceptions — about chess, about computers, and about the mind.

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At the dawn of the computer age, in 1950, the influential Bell Labs engineer Claude Shannon published a paper in Philosophical Magazine called “Programming a Computer for Playing Chess.” The creation of a “tolerably good” computerized chess player, he argued, was not only possible but would also have metaphysical consequences. It would force the human race “either to admit the possibility of a mechanized thinking or to further restrict [its] concept of ‘thinking.’” He went on to offer an insight that would prove essential both to the development of chess software and to the pursuit of artificial intelligence in general. A chess program, he wrote, would need to incorporate a search function able to identify possible moves and rank them according to how they influenced the course of the game. He laid out two very different approaches to programming the function. “Type A” would rely on brute force, calculating the relative value of all possible moves as far ahead in the game as the speed of the computer allowed. “Type B” would use intelligence rather than raw power, imbuing the computer with an understanding of the game that would allow it to focus on a small number of attractive moves while ignoring the rest. In essence, a Type B computer would demonstrate the intuition of an experienced human player.

When Shannon wrote his paper, he and everyone else assumed that the Type A method was a dead end. It seemed obvious that, under the time restrictions of a competitive chess game, a computer would never be fast enough to extend its analysis more than a few turns ahead. As Kasparov points out, there are “over 300 billion possible ways to play just the first four moves in a game of chess, and even if 95 percent of these variations are terrible, a Type A program would still have to check them all.” In 1950, and for many years afterward, no one could imagine a computer able to execute a successful brute-force strategy against a good player. “Unfortunately,” Shannon concluded, “a machine operating according to the Type A strategy would be both slow and a weak player.”

Type B, the intelligence strategy, seemed far more feasible, not least because it fit the scientific zeitgeist. Fascination with digital computers intensified during the 1950s, and the so-called “thinking machines” began to influence theories about the human mind. Many scientists and philosophers came to assume that the brain must work something like a digital computer, using its billions of networked neurons to calculate thoughts and perceptions. Through a curious kind of circular logic, this analogy in turn guided the early pursuit of artificial intelligence: if you could figure out the codes that the brain uses in carrying out cognitive tasks, you’d be able to program similar codes into a computer. Not only would the machine play chess like a master, but it would also be able to do pretty much anything else that a human brain can do. In a 1958 paper, the prominent AI researchers Herbert Simon and Allen Newell declared that computers are “machines that think” and, in the near future, “the range of problems they can handle will be coextensive with the range to which the human mind has been applied.” With the right programming, a computer would turn sapient.

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It took only a few decades after Shannon wrote his paper for engineers to build a computer that could play chess brilliantly. Its most famous victim: Garry Kasparov.

One of the greatest and most intimidating players in the history of the game, Kasparov was defeated in a six-game bout by the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in 1997. Even though it was the first time a machine had beaten a world champion in a formal match, to computer scientists and chess masters alike the outcome wasn’t much of a surprise. Chess-playing computers had been making strong and steady gains for years, advancing inexorably up the ranks of the best human players. Kasparov just happened to be in the right place at the wrong time.

But the story of the computer’s victory comes with a twist. Shannon and his contemporaries, it turns out, had been wrong. It was the Type B approach — the intelligence strategy — that ended up being the dead end. Despite their early optimism, AI researchers utterly failed in getting computers to think as people do. Deep Blue beat Kasparov not by matching his insight and intuition but by overwhelming him with blind calculation. Thanks to years of exponential gains in processing speed, combined with steady improvements in the efficiency of search algorithms, the computer was able to comb through enough possible moves in a short enough time to outduel the champion. Brute force triumphed. “It turned out that making a great chess-playing computer was not the same as making a thinking machine on par with the human mind,” Kasparov reflects. “Deep Blue was intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent.”

The history of computer chess is the history of artificial intelligence. After their disappointments in trying to reverse-engineer the brain, computer scientists narrowed their sights. Abandoning their pursuit of human-like intelligence, they began to concentrate on accomplishing sophisticated, but limited, analytical tasks by capitalizing on the inhuman speed of the modern computer’s calculations. This less ambitious but more pragmatic approach has paid off in areas ranging from medical diagnosis to self-driving cars. Computers are replicating the results of human thought without replicating thought itself. If in the 1950s and 1960s the emphasis in the phrase “artificial intelligence” fell heavily on the word “intelligence,” today it falls with even greater weight on the word “artificial.”

Particularly fruitful has been the deployment of search algorithms similar to those that powered Deep Blue. If a machine can search billions of options in a matter of milliseconds, ranking each according to how well it fulfills some specified goal, then it can outperform experts in a lot of problem-solving tasks without having to match their experience or insight. More recently, AI programmers have added another brute-force technique to their repertoire: machine learning. In simple terms, machine learning is a statistical method for discovering correlations in past events that can then be used to make predictions about future events. Rather than giving a computer a set of instructions to follow, a programmer feeds the computer many examples of a phenomenon and from those examples the machine deciphers relationships among variables. Whereas most software programs apply rules to data, machine-learning algorithms do the reverse: they distill rules from data, and then apply those rules to make judgments about new situations.

In modern translation software, for example, a computer scans many millions of translated texts to learn associations between phrases in different languages. Using these correspondences, it can then piece together translations of new strings of text. The computer doesn’t require any understanding of grammar or meaning; it just regurgitates words in whatever combination it calculates has the highest odds of being accurate. The result lacks the style and nuance of a skilled translator’s work but has considerable utility nonetheless. Although machine-learning algorithms have been around a long time, they require a vast number of examples to work reliably, which only became possible with the explosion of online data. Kasparov quotes an engineer from Google’s popular translation program: “When you go from 10,000 training examples to 10 billion training examples, it all starts to work. Data trumps everything.”

The pragmatic turn in AI research is producing many such breakthroughs, but this shift also highlights the limitations of artificial intelligence. Through brute-force data processing, computers can churn out answers to well-defined questions and forecast how complex events may play out, but they lack the understanding, imagination, and common sense to do what human minds do naturally: turn information into knowledge, think conceptually and metaphorically, and negotiate the world’s flux and uncertainty without a script. Machines remain machines.

That fact hasn’t blunted the public’s enthusiasm for AI fantasies. Along with TV shows and movies featuring scheming computers and bloody-minded robots, we’ve seen a slew of earnest nonfiction books with titles like Superintelligence, Smarter Than Us, and Our Final Invention, all suggesting that machines will soon be brainier than we are. The predictions echo those made in the 1950s and 1960s, and, as before, they’re founded on speculation, not fact. Despite monumental advances in hardware and software, computers give no sign of being any nearer to self-awareness, volition, or emotion. Their strength — what Kasparov describes as an “amnesiac’s objectivity” — is also their weakness.

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In addition to questioning the common wisdom about artificial intelligence, Kasparov challenges our preconceptions about chess. The game, particularly when played at its highest levels, is far more than a cerebral exercise in logic and calculation, and the expert player is anything but a stereotypical egghead. The connection between chess skill and the kind of intelligence measured by IQ scores, Kasparov observes, is weak at best. “There is no more truth to the thought that all chess players are geniuses than in saying that all geniuses play chess,” he writes. “[O]ne of the things that makes chess so interesting is that it’s still unclear exactly what separates good chess players from great ones.”

Chess is a grueling sport. It demands stamina, resilience, and an aptitude for psychological warfare. It also requires acute sensory perception. “Move generation seems to involve more visuospatial brain activity than the sort of calculation that goes into solving math problems,” writes Kasparov, referring to recent neurological experiments. To the chess master, the board’s 64 squares define not just an abstract geometry but an actual terrain. Like figures on a landscape, the pieces form patterns that the master, drawing on years of experience, reads intuitively, often at a glance. Methodical analysis is important, too, but it is carried out as part of a multifaceted and still mysterious thought process involving the body and its senses as well as the brain’s neurons and synapses.

The contingency of human intelligence, the way it shifts with health, mood, and circumstance, is at the center of Kasparov’s account of his historic duel with Deep Blue. Having beaten the machine in a celebrated match a year earlier, the champion enters the 1997 competition confident that he will again come out the victor. His confidence swells when he wins the first game decisively. But in the fateful second game, Deep Blue makes a series of strong moves, putting Kasparov on the defensive. Rattled, he makes a calamitous mental error. He resigns the game in frustration after the computer launches an aggressive and seemingly lethal attack on his queen. Only later does he realize that his position had not been hopeless; he could have forced the machine into a draw. The loss leaves Kasparov “confused and in agony,” unable to regain his emotional bearings. Though the next three games end in draws, Deep Blue crushes him in the sixth and final game to win the match.

One of Kasparov’s strengths as a champion had always been his ability to read the minds of his adversaries and hence anticipate their strategies. But with Deep Blue, there was no mind to read. The machine’s lack of personality, its implacable blankness, turned out to be one of its greatest advantages. It disoriented Kasparov, breeding doubts in his mind and eating away at his self-confidence. “I didn’t know my opponent at all,” he recalls. “This intense confusion left my mind to wander to darker places.” The irony is that the machine’s victory was as much a matter of psychology as of skill. [1]

If Kasparov hadn’t become flustered, he might have won the 1997 match. But that would have just postponed the inevitable. By the turn of the century, the era of computer dominance in chess was well established. Today, not even the grandest of grandmasters would bother challenging a computer to a match. They know they wouldn’t stand a chance.

But if computers have become unbeatable at the board, they remain incapable of exhibiting what Kasparov calls “the ineffable nature of human chess.” To Kasparov, this is cause for optimism about the future of humanity. Unlike the eight-by-eight chessboard, the world is an unbounded place, and making sense of it will always require more than mathematical or statistical calculations. The inherent rigidity of computer intelligence leaves plenty of room for humans to exercise their flexible and intuitive intelligence. If we remain vigilant in turning the power of our computers to our own purposes, concludes Kasparov, our machines will not replace us but instead propel us to ever-greater achievements.

One hopes he’s right. Still, as computers become more powerful and more adept at fulfilling our needs, there is a danger. The benefits of computer processing are easy to measure — in speed, in output, in dollars — while the benefits of human thought are often impossible to express in hard numbers. Given contemporary society’s worship of the measurable and suspicion of the ineffable, our own intelligence would seem to be at a disadvantage as we rush to computerize more and more aspects of our jobs and lives. The question isn’t whether the subtleties of human thought will continue to lie beyond the reach of computers. They almost certainly will. The question is whether we’ll continue to appreciate the value of those subtleties as we become more dependent on the mindless but brutally efficient calculations of our machines. In the face of the implacable, the contingent can seem inferior, its strengths appearing as weaknesses.

Near the end of his book, Kasparov notes, with some regret, that “humans today are starting to play chess more like computers.” Once again, the ancient game may be offering us an omen.

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Nicholas Carr is the author of several books about computers and culture, including The Shallows, The Glass Cage, and, most recently, Utopia Is Creepy.

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[1] A bit of all-too-human deviousness was also involved in Deep Blue’s win. IBM’s coders, it was later revealed, programmed the computer to display erratic behavior — delaying certain moves, for instance, and rushing others — in an attempt to unsettle Kasparov. Computers may be innocents, but that doesn’t mean their programmers are.