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June 6, 2005
Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine
I caught Vikram Jayanti's 2003 documentary, Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine tonight on video. The film documents Kasparov's notorious 1997 chess rematch against the IBM-designed Deep Blue. Previously, Kasparov had defeated an earlier version of the Deep Blue computer, but during the second game of the 1997 match, Kasparov became flustered when the computer began "playing like a human." After the second match, the normally charming Kasparov begins making accusations that there was "human involvement" that allowed IBM to win. The result is, of course, a profundly ambivalent victory for the computer's designers: they'd managed to design a computer that could defeat the world's greatest living chess player, quite an accomplishment but also a potential sign of human limitations against a powerful machine.
Vikram Jayanti's film seems to embrace Kasparov's accusations of conspiracy. Voice-over whispers imply that IBM stood to gain considerably from a victory of the golden boy of chess (their stock apparently increased by 15% the day after Deep Blue's victory). They remind us that Kasparov's request to see Deep Blue's game logs initially was accepted, but the logs were never provided. Kasparov also speculates about "corporate responsibility." Would we be as willing to trust corporations now, after the fall of Enron? I think the whispers of conspiracy are relevant to the narrative, to our perception of the relationship between increasingly powerful computers and the increasingly powerful corporations who build them, but because of the lack of compelling evidence of wrongdoing, the conspiracy narrative remains inelegant and unconvincing.
The film relates Kasparov's match to the legendary Baron von Kempelen's 18th-century chess player automaton, "The Turk," that mysteriously beat all competition, including Napoleon (it was later revealed that a man squatting behind the figure was directing it), both through staged scenes of an automaton playing and, through clips from Raymond Bernard's 1927 silent film, The Chess Player (as Dennis Lim notes). Both Lim and New York Times critic Ned Martel comment that these "hokey" paranoid trappings undermine the conspiarcy argument, which seems about right to me, though the film clips could have been designed to undermine subtly Kasparov's credibility.
That being said, for me, the inclusion of Baron von Kempelen's story only emphasized the film's lack of attnetion to the larger implications of the Kasparov-Deep Blue competition. During an early sequence, philosopher John Searle illustrates the mathematical difficulty of programming a computer to play chess under tournament conditions against a grandmaster (though processing speeds have changed this fact to some extent). Because a player can make one of eight moves, with each of those moves potentially countered by eight moves, and so on, you're talking millions of possible moves very quickly. But the film only briefly explores these philosophical questions, considering only tangentially how Deep Blue's victory raised questions about definitions of humanity. Further playing up the emotional aspect of chess (computers don't get psyched out by their opponents; they're not distratced by the smell of cigar smoke) might also have helped.
The film also seemed to struggle with how to make filming chess visually interesting, especially chess against an inert box. Many of the matches themselves were compelling, if only because of Kasparov's animated reactions, which stand in stark contrast both to the machine itself and the human interpreter (I can't think of a better term) who physically moved the pieces. Game Over had all of the material for a compelling documentary, but the conspiracy narrative seemed to work against what I found most interesting about this story.
Posted by chuck at June 6, 2005 12:08 AM
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Hi guys, I think this might interest you; If you wish to see chess IA on action against the world champion, on June 21 at 5 p.m NY time, reigning FIDE world champion Rustam Kasimdzhanov is scheduled to play an interesting man vs machine match. The opponent is the "AI Accoona ToolBar". The event is being staged by the search engine company Accoona and the venue is the Accoona Toolbar for a live match . You can download it here download !
The company says they have big plans on chess for the future.
Posted by: blabla6 at June 21, 2005 5:33 AM