In May of 1997, Garry Kasparov sat down at a chess board in a Manhattan skyscraper. Kasparov, considered the best chess player of all time, wasn’t challenging another grandmaster. He was playing with an AI called Deep Blue. Deep Blue was one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, built by IBM with a specific goal in mind: to beat humanity at its own game. For IBM, billions of dollars worth of business clout was on the table, and to a certain extent, Kasparov was playing for the fate of chess itself. He had never lost a multi-game match in his entire career. Could a machine beat him? Newsweek ran a cover story with his picture alongside the words “The Brain’s Last Stand.” As Kasparov joked years later, “No pressure.”
Over 25 years later, we’re living through another moral panic over artificial intelligence. Thanks to ChatGPT, once hypothetical questions about the future of work, art, and disinformation are now immediate concerns. The only question is how far AI can go. Google CEO Sundar Pichai offered his expectations a few years ago. AI is “one of the most important things that humanity is working on,” he said. “It’s more profound than, I don’t know, electricity or fire.” It seems we’re dealing with something entirely new—except we aren’t.
In the ‘90s, we went down a similar road, with the same questions, the same fears, and nearly identical conversations. The biggest face-off between man and machine already happened, and it culminated with a single move during a few games of chess. As the world watched Kasparov stare out at a field of black and white pieces, we got our first glimpse of what it feels like when computers start acting like human beings.
“There are very few instances of an arena where the human body and mind can compete on equal terms with a computer or a robot,” Kasparov said in a 2017 TED Talk. “It was my blessing, and my curse, to literally become the proverbial man in the man versus machine competition.”
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It’s a story of cheating accusations, media frenzy, and a final answer to one of life’s great questions: have we created machines so powerful that they can replace us? And if so, what now?
“If you want to know what the future of AI looks like, look at chess,” Frederic Friedel, the co-founder of ChessBase and Kasparov’s computer advisor during the match, told Gizmodo. “It happened to us first, and it’s going to happen to all of you.”
The Contenders
Garry Kasparov wasn’t just a chess savant, he was a cultural phenomenon. He was famous enough to be in a Pepsi commercial. At the height of his stardom, the name “Kasparov” was sort of like “Einstein,” marking the pinnacle of human intelligence. He was rebellious and outspoken, and Kasparov knew how to work the media to his advantage. He’d stunned the chess intelligentsia a decade prior, defeating grandmaster Anatoly Karpov at just 22. That made him the youngest-ever world champion, a record that’s still unbroken.
In 1997, Kasparov was a darkly handsome 34-year-old with piercing eyes and a perpetual look of seriousness. Though he stood at 5’9’’, Kasparov was so intimidating on the chessboard that some opponents said it felt like he towered over them.
“He was a monster,” Friedel said. Kasparov was unstoppable, leagues ahead of all the other grandmasters. “He’s one of the deepest players I’ve ever encountered.”
IBM, on the other hand, wasn’t at the top of its game. Through the 1980s, IBM was one of the most powerful companies on earth, manufacturing 80% of the computers in the United States. But IBM’s dominance slipped away to Microsoft and other competitors as the 20th century wore on. The company wanted to prove it was still a leader, and building the world’s smartest computer was a perfect PR coup.
“For IBM, I think it was an indication that we could sort of swing for the fences,” said Murray Campbell, an AI researcher at IBM and one of the lead architects behind Deep Blue. “It changed the mindset in terms of how the world reacted to IBM. For many people, it was their first experience of a computer doing something they thought only humans were capable of.”
The games were actually a rematch. Kasparov beat Deep Blue, just barely, in a series of games in 1996. But the computer won the first game, and two out of six were a draw. IBM wanted more, and Kasparov was excited about the scientific pursuit, so they agreed to play again. It wasn’t just about bragging rights, either. The loser of the match would take home $400,000, while the winner would net $700,000. The difference meant $300,000 was at stake during the games, not a small amount of cash. But there was even more money at stake. In the weeks after the 1996 match, IBM’s stock rose almost 20%.
‘’Forget the $300,000,’’ said Maurice Ashley, an international grandmaster, speaking to the New York Times. “The future of humanity is on the line.’’
Weighing in at 1.4 tons, Deep Blue was a pair of two hulking computer towers, each over six-and-a-half feet tall. IBM upgraded the machine for the 1997 games, with over 500 processors and 480 specially-designed “chess chips’’ running in parallel. Deep Blue could search through hundreds of millions of chess positions a second to find the best move.
“As soon as computers know how to do something, people say it’s not intelligence anymore, it’s just an algorithm. But I think that’s not really fair,” Campbell said. “Deep Blue was intelligent—if only a tiny bit. But that’s just the bit it needed to handle this problem.”
At the time, no system outside of the human mind could approach Deep Blue’s chess abilities. If Deep Blue could beat Kasparov, it would be the best chess player on earth.
Kasparov arrived in New York in May with his posse just before the match. They stayed at the Plaza Hotel, eating meals as a team and taking walks together through Central Park. “Those were not happy days,” Kasparov said in an interview years later. “From day one we had so much tension.”
Kasparov didn’t have access to any of Deep Blue’s prior games, which put the grandmaster at a significant disadvantage. “It was very intimidating for him,” Friedel said. “Any top player will prepare for their opponent, but this was a blind game for Garry.”
Still, Kasparov was the favorite. “The feeling in the room was Kasparov was the guaranteed winner,” said Monty Newborn, former chairman of the Computer Chess Committee and head of officials for the match.
The games took place on the 35th floor of the Equitable Building in Manhattan. Only a few dozen VIPs were allowed in the room, but on the floors below, hundreds of spectators packed an auditorium to watch the games play out on screen, with grandmasters commentating on stage.
During the games, rotating members of the IBM team typed in Kasparov’s moves and moved the pieces on Deep Blue’s behalf. Murray Campbell was one of them.
“It was the thrill of my life,” Campbell said. “I was nervous going into the first match in ‘96 because the system was brand new and we hadn’t really gotten the chance to thoroughly test it. But by 1997, my expectations were greatly increased.”
The grandmaster drew white, which meant he went first in game one. Kasparov moved his knight out on the board, and Deep Blue responded with its queen’s pawn, which developed into a set of moves known as the Réti opening. For such an unusual match, things we’re off to a normal start.
Deep Blue had analyzed a large history of recorded games, and it was intimately familiar with the norms of chess playing. That meant the machine was prepared for Kasparov’s usual aggressive style. But Kasparov landed on an “anti-computer” strategy.
“Anti-computer chess means you play rope-a-dope chess,” said Kenneth Regan, a computer science professor at the University of Buffalo renowned for his chess research. A computer’s calculating ability gave it an advantage when it came to attacking or defending over the course of one or two moves; it could always find the perfect response. But long-term strategy requires a different kind of “thinking.” Strategy is where great human players excel, but no computer had ever shown an ability to plan ahead for later in the game.
“So you play conservatively,” Regan said. “You don’t go into the attack right away because the computer is going to be able to calculate your attack.” In other words, you try to do as little as possible for as long as possible—but if you’re too timid, that can backfire.
That’s exactly what Kasparov did. He held back, dragging the computer across the board until he was poised to strike. It was a risky strategy.
“He was playing unorthodox chess, sometimes breaking with all known theory,“ Friedel said. Kasparov worked to make moves that threw off Deep Blue, and it kept the computer on its digital toes, but this style of play was just as foreign to Kasparov.
But as the game wore on, his anti-computer playing was lethal. Kasparov wiped Deep Blue off the board. Kasparov pinned Deep Blue’s king between his knight and his rook, and on the 45th move, the computer resigned.
The robot lost Source: Gizmodo