The Day the Museic Died
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Transcript of The Day the Museic Died
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8/13/2019 The Day the Museic Died
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Economic & PoliticalWeekly EPW december 28, 2013 vol xlviII no 52 139
POSTSCRIPT
The Day the Muse(ic) Died
As computers take on grandmasters and often beat them convincingly, the game of chess has undergone
a significant transformation.
Mukul Sharma
By the middle of the match, I found myself unprepared for what turned
out to be a totally new kind of intellectual challenge.
Garry Kasparov
Do our chess championships really matter any longer?
True, the recently concluded World Chess Champion-
ship, where an ageing 42-year-old Viswanathan Anand
was comprehensively creamed by Magnus Carlsen, a Norwe-
gian prodigy half his age, had a huge number of people rivet-
ed to the board. Yet, for another huge lot of other people, the
music ended long ago in New York on 3 May 1997.That was when a very gung-ho grandmaster, Garry Kasparov,
the reigning world champion with the highest Elo rating in
history till then, sat down to play the most important game
of chess in his li fe. Eight days and six outings later, the champ
was an emotional wreck. To begin with, he could barely check
his tears. Following this, he went into a frenzy of hurling
accusations against the sponsors, charging them
with having biased the entire tournament in his
opponents favour (including the air-conditioning,
if you please). Finally, he threw out a petulant
challenge, saying if only he could be given the
chance of a rematch of 10 games, this time he
would show them who was the real boss.The reason for the maudlin dramatics was
simple: the man had been convincingly beaten
3.5-2.5 by a machine IBMs Deep Blue computer under
standard tournament regulations and time control. Speaking
to newspersons later, Kasparov is supposed to have said
that it wasnt so much a defeat for him as it was for the whole
of humanity.
Actually, he should have seen it coming when, just a year
earlier, he had played against the same computer program.
He may have beaten it at that initial encounter but not before
Deep Blue had also managed to wrest one game away, which
was a historic first for a computer. If that wasnt a sufficient
heads-up, Kasparov should at least have kept abreast of
something his lesser peers had been saying for years. For
instance, way back in 1968, David Levy, who was only an
International Master, made a famous thousand-pound writing-
on-the-wall bet with four artificial intelligence researchers,
that no computer program would win a chess match against
him within 10 years.
Clearly, I shall win my...bet in 1978, and I would still win
if the period were to be extended for another 10 years, he
said. Prompted by the lack of conceptual progress over more
than two decades, I am tempted to speculate that a computer
program will not gain the title of International Master
before the turn of the century and that the idea of an elec-
tronic world champion belongs only in the pages of a science
fiction book.
Okay, so in 1978, when he played against MacHack, which
was the best chess-playing computer at the time, he beat it
2-0 in a two-game match, but the very next year he became
seriously busy eating his own words. Thats because even
though he got the better of another program called Chess 4.7,
it was not before it too had been able to beat him in one gameout of six. Suddenly, Levy was not so cocksure at all. I had
proved that my 1968 assessment had been correct, but, on
the other hand, my opponent in this match was very, very
much stronger than I had thought possible when I started the
bet. Now nothing would surprise me very much, he said.
And it didnt. Ten years later, in 1989, when he was totally
thrashed by a third program called Deep Thought,
Levy had no choice but to retain his newfound
equanimity while swallowing huge chunks of his
all-too-human hubris.
But to get back to the death of our music: it
wasnt only because a human being had lost to
what was ultimately just a set of cold equations ina highly-refined automaton but due to another
very revealing remark made by Mr Sore Loser.
The reason he had lost, he whined, was because it was not a
machine he was playing against but up to four or five expert
players playing in tandem against him through the machine.
Now that sounds terribly like a successful Turing test.
The test, which is named after the British mathematician
Alan Turing, is based on the premise that if a computer and
a human are concealed behind screens and a human judge
who interacts with both is fooled into thinking the machine
is a human, then the computer can be said to possess an
intellect equivalent to a humans. In Kasparovs case, thats
exactly what happened. The moment he said he was not
playing against a computer brain but a human one, a new
class of chess intellect was created one that has, in sub-
sequent years, become streets ahead in the games tactical
and strategic capacity.
Which is why a lot of people dont get enthused by world
chess championships any longer. Its like watching local
league cricket, they say. Not in the same class as that of
test-playing Titans.
Mukul Sharma ([email protected]), former Editor of Science Today, continuesto write screenplays and science fiction.
CHESS
...a new class of
chess intellect was
created one that
has, in subsequent
years, become
streets ahead in thegames tactical and
strategic capacity
