[Chess]Ba'o Time: Kasparov versus a "Deeper Blue"

[AnHai Doan <anhai@cs.washington.edu>]

Thu+' Ba?y na`y Kasparov se~ dda^'u co+` vo+'i sie^u ma'y ti'nh Deep Blue
ta.i My~. Tra^.n dda^'u 6 va'n na`y ddu+o+.c tuye^n truye^`n nhu+ mo^.t 
su+. ddu.ng dda^`u quye^'t tu+? giu+~a tri' tue^. con ngu+o+`i va` tri' 
tue^. cha^'t Silicon. Ngu+o+`i tha('ng se~ ddu+o+.c 700.000 ddo^ la, ke? 
thua 400.000, nhu+ng nhu+~ng va^'n dde^` ddu+o+.c thua trong tra^.n na`y 
la` nhu+~ng va^'n dde^` sa^u xa ho+n nhie^`u so vo+'i tie^`n ba.c.

Ba'o Newsweek tua^`n na`y ddu+a ca^u chuye^.n ve^` vu. dda^'u co+` na`y 
le^n trang bi`a (story of the week). Ba'o Time (Newsweek va` Time la` hai 
to+` ba'o tua^`n tin tu+'c no^?i tie^'ng nha^'t n'c My~ va` the^' gio+'i)
ca'ch dda^y ho+n mo^.t tha'ng cu~ng ddu+a tin ve^` vu. na`y. Xin dda(ng 
la.i ba`i na`y cho ca'c ba'c xem. Ba`i vie^'t ra^'t hay va` di' do?m.
Ba`i na`y xin ta(.ng ba'c Hu`ng (Vietnam), ngu+o+`i ddang quan ta^m to+'i 
AI. To^i se~ vie^'t the^m ve^` AI va`o nga`y mai.

Tha^n, Ha?i.


MARCH 10, 1997 VOL. 149 NO. 10
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TECHNOLOGY

DEEPER IN THOUGHT

CHAMPION GARRY KASPAROV WILL SOON BATTLE A SMARTER VERSION OF DEEP BLUE, THE
IBM COMPUTER THAT SPOOKED HIM--AND MANKIND--A YEAR AGO

BY MICHAEL KRANTZ
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It's move 16, and Deep Blue is thinking. Or rather, Deep Blue's 512
processors are reviewing 200 million chess positions per second in order to
create the illusion that Deep Blue is thinking. And it isn't really Deep
Blue either. It's what the guys at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in
Yorktown Heights, New York, call Deeper Blue: the second generation of the
original Deep Blue, the infamous chess program that one year ago threw a
stunning uppercut to human self-esteem by winning the first game of its
six-game match against world champion Garry Kasparov. Kasparov, of course,
went on to score three victories and two draws to win the match and save
mankind; the 33-year-old Russian isn't considered the best player in history
for nothing.

The Deep Blue team, led by senior manager C.J. Tan, has been plotting
revenge ever since, and is now prepping for the rematch, which will take
place in Manhattan in May. Today, in this cramped lab at T.J. Watson, Deep
and Deeper are playing their first father-son game, a sort of silicon
Oedipal struggle. The first 15 moves are what chess types yawn at as
"standard"--established openings. Very safe. No surprises.

Move 16 is when Deeper Blue pauses to "think." Finally, its human monitor
announces, "F4." F4? An excited buzz sweeps the room. F4! Deeper Blue has
advanced the knight's pawn two squares, loosening its kingside defense with
an assumption of the superiority of its position that would surely be
considered arrogant if a carbon-based life-form were making it. "This move
was special," murmurs Joel Benjamin, a former U.S. champion and current Deep
Blue consultant. The room nods in agreement. Deeper Blue is thinking.

Pretty soon, Deeper Blue is kicking butt. From F4 onward, its inexorable
kingside march swallows one pawn after another, and Deep Blue resigns 18
moves later. The room erupts in applause. The same thought is on everyone's
mind: the new program is better. The new program is a lot better. We're
gonna crush Kasparov like a bug.

The bug in question isn't nervous, though--at least not yet. "I'll have to
play well and have a couple of surprises, but I feel that my chances are
still superior," Kasparov says over lunch in Manhattan the next day to an
audience of six, including Tan. "I know quite a lot, and I'll control my
temper and my psychology."

In person, Kasparov is something of a surprise. Handsome and burly, he has a
temper and psychology more befitting a garrulous European uncle than a
genius geek who spends his life hunched over a chessboard. During appetizers
he enthralls the table with discourses on a diverse array of topics,
including hot chocolate (the world's best is found at Cafe Angelica on the
Rue de Rivoli in Paris), Kremlin politics ("Russia has no choice other than
Lebed!") and his infant son Vadim--"I want to stay on top long enough for
him to recognize his father as a champion."

Over entrees a smug Tan hits Kasparov with the news of Deeper Blue's
smashing victory over the program that made him sweat last February, and
suddenly he focuses, laserlike, on his favorite subject. Before last year's
match, he admits, the chess world felt "a computer would have very little
chance of beating a top grand master." That myth faded quickly. Halfway
through Game 1, faced with daunting circumstances--"an open position, my
king is exposed, many weaknesses"--Kasparov undertook a blitzkrieg aimed at
Deep Blue's king, the sort of hell-bent gambit that has devastated every
pretender to his throne. "Any human being," he explains, "feels
uncomfortable feeling his king under pressure."

Deep Blue didn't flinch. His gambit, Kasparov admits, was "a complete
disaster, because the computer simply doesn't care. If the threats are not
real, it sees that. So the machine simply took all the pawns and defended
its king." And for an industry that IBM had built in the first place, scored
the first win over a world champion. "Then I realized," he says, "that this
will be tough."

But so is Kasparov, and in the ensuing games he mercilessly exposed his
opponent's weaknesses. Deep Blue is a data-grinding engine of staggering
proportions: a 1.5-ton supercomputer able to sort 40 billion combinations in
an average three-minute move, shining its searchlight far into a game's
future to find a winning strategy. When your opponent is Kasparov, though,
it's (thus far) impossible for even a 1.5-ton supercomputer to search far
enough to be sure it chooses wisely. "Deep Blue sees everything in the
searchlight very well," says research scientist Murray Campbell. "But after
that, in the black beyond, it has to guess. And humans guess better."

What the program lacked was intuition--the ability to set traps, hatch
plots, smell danger and generally enact the violent and paranoid predator
from which the human race evolved and to which all great chess players
return. What's left is playing percentages. Deep Blue refused to follow a
strategy it recognized as a likely loser, even one that any decent grand
master could see offered the best chances for victory due to, say, a blunder
by a rattled foe. The machine just didn't go for it.

So if intuition remains solely the province of human intelligence, why not
just fake it? Why not teach the machine how the chess building blocks it can
understand relate to one another? Benjamin has spent the past year helping
Deep Blue's programmers encode thousands of positional evaluation rules,
leavening the program's computational prowess with what one might call
street smarts. "The hardware can detect certain features of a chessboard,"
says Campbell. "Rooks on open files, pins, pawn structure. It's a matter of
assigning weights to how important these features are in a given position."

In the final game of last year's match, for instance, Deep Blue let its
bishop get trapped on the edge of the board, with little power and zero
mobility. The awful tragedy of the edge-locked bishop wasn't fully salted
into its code base at the time, so the poor computer was oblivious to the
depth of its positional peril, and Kasparov won the game handily. But things
won't go so easily for mankind this time around. Says a pleased Benjamin:
"Deeper Blue understands more about bishops--when they're good, when they're
bad, how to use them better. It understands rooks better. It understands
knights better."

After lunch last week, Kasparov ran into the rest of the Deep Blue team in
the lobby of his midtown hotel. Hands were shaken all around, but the smiles
seemed a bit strained. There will be lots of emotion on both sides of the
board come May 3. Everyone involved knows the match will make history,
whichever way it goes. Last year's virgin Deep Blue campaign brought chess
its widest audience since the Fischer-Spassky cold war match in 1972. "Chess
is of secondary importance to the wider audience," says Kasparov, who
nonetheless hopes to launch a chess-themed Website called Club Kasparov
later this year. "It's the social contest. It's about the machine."

He's right. Modern history teems with tales of the potential usurpation of
mankind by its own technology: John Henry vs. the steam drill. Dr.
Frankenstein vs. the monster. Linda Hamilton vs. the Terminator. The genius
of chess lies in the sublime tension between logical analysis (call it
Truth) and human intuition (call it Beauty). Our fascination with Deep Blue
derives from fearful wonderment at the possibility that computers, which
have already surpassed us at the former, may soon produce some chilling
emulation of the latter. Kasparov, the latest standard bearer in humanity's
war against our own obsolescence, is stoical in the face of the challenge.
He muses that God, observing tomorrow's computers, may feel something akin
to grandfatherly pride. "Maybe the highest triumph for the Creator," he
says, "is to see his creations re-create themselves."

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