The Immortal Game (23 page)

Chomsky seemed to have a point. Deep Blue was no Hal. Over the course of many decades, chess computing had not actually enabled computers to think very much like humans at all. “Turing’s expectation was that chess-programming would contribute to the study of how human beings think,” says Jack Copeland, director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing at the University of Canterbury. “In fact, little or nothing about human thought processes has been learned from the series of projects that culminated in Deep Blue.”

Thinking like humans, though, had never really been the intention of the AI community. That had been Turing’s original dream, but the practical consensus from the very beginning was to suss out a new kind of intelligence. And in fact, they had done just that. As the twenty-first century began, machines were able to make all sorts of intelligent actions that went far beyond mere calculations. “There are today hundreds of examples of narrow AI deeply integrated into our information-based economy,” explains Ray Kurzweil, author of
The Age of Spiritual Machines
. “Routing emails and cell phone calls, automatically diagnosing electrocardiograms and blood cell images, directing cruise missiles and weapon systems, automatically landing airplanes, conducting pattern-recognition-based financial transactions, detecting credit card fraud, and a myriad of other automated tasks are all successful examples of AI in use today.”

Add to that list: speech recognition, hazardous-duty robots, swimming pool antidrowning detectors, the Mars
Sojourner
explorer vehicle, and bits and pieces of most contemporary cars, televisions, and word processors. Looking at it under the hood, machine-based intelligence may look entirely different from human intelligence, but it
is
intelligence, proponents argue. “Believe me, Fritz is intelligent,” Frederic Friedel, cofounder of ChessBase software, says of one of his company’s most popular programs. “It is a
kind
of intelligence. If you look at anyone playing against a computer, within minutes they say things like, ‘Oh God, he’s trying to trap my Queen,’ and ‘Tricky little bloke,’ and ‘Ah, he saw that.’ They’re talking about it as if it is a human being. And it
is
behaving exactly like someone who’s trying to trick you, trying to trap your Queen. It seems to smell the danger.”

In other words, it passes the Turing test. In front of the curtain, it displays what seem like the actions of a very smart human being, even though, behind the curtain, its mechanics are in no way attempting to mimic the functions of the human brain. The AI community has already succeeded in substituting computers for functions formerly thought to require human intelligence, which implies that (1) we need to broaden our understanding of intelligence, and (2) the smart machines
are
coming. “This machine intelligence is completely different from what people thought it would be,” says Friedel. “We have to acknowledge that intelligence, like life forms, has incredible variety. We [in the chess community] are the first to see a completely different form of intelligence. But we all have to understand it is coming.” Friedel continues:

Can you imagine in ten or twenty years having judges who are made of silicon? I’m sure somebody will come along and say, “Wait a minute, does this thing know anything about justice, about human feeling, about human dignity? It knows nothing about that. It is only doing a billion statistical analyses per second—brute force statistical analysis. Of course it cannot possibly pass judgment over human beings!” Which is valid. Except—what happens if most people say, “You know, I want to go to the silicon one, because the humans are not good enough. These machines are better.”

The smart machines are coming. Garry Kasparov, leader of the humans, did not maintain his exuberance and cloak of invincibility through the rest of his 2003 match against Deep Junior. After his victory in Game 1 and respectable draw in Game 2, he ran into trouble. Game 3 saw Kasparov again playing a fearless and ingenious game (as White) for a long while, then making a mistake and having to resign. This evened the match score, with three games to go. Game 4 was another tough contest, which eventually tilted toward Deep Junior and forced Kasparov into fighting for a draw. Game 5 seemed to find a dispirited Kasparov without much fight in him; he settled for a draw in just nineteen moves.

Then came Game 6, watched by an estimated 200–300 million people around the world on the sports network ESPN2. For a while, Kasparov did not disappoint. He played a stunning and creative game, eking out what commentators considered a potentially winning position. But then, shockingly, he requested a draw. The audience was dumbfounded. The great Kasparov had caved to the pressure of an awesome and near-flawless opponent. Afterward it became clear from his comments that as badly as Kasparov wanted to win, he wanted more badly not to lose; the machine’s consistency and intelligence had spooked him, he admitted. Knowing that any tiny mistake would be ruthlessly exploited by the computer, he was simply unwilling to take that risk in front of such a large audience. So he settled for a draw—in the game and the match.

The symbolic message was unmistakable: Without actually mimicking the function of the human brain, well-designed computers could now perform some extraordinarily complex tasks as well as, if not better than, human beings. Whether or not we would ultimately call such machines “intelligent” would be far less relevant than what tasks we would actually allow them to perform.

THE IMMORTAL GAME
Moves 22 and 23 (Checkmate)

T
HERE’S A FAMOUS SAYING
in chess: “You had a won game, but I won the game.” A
won game
refers to a board position in which one player has an advantage such that, given flawless play by both sides through the end of the game, that player will win. But—fortunately—even among chess experts, imperfection reigns, and won games are frequently lost. Out of ignorance or under great time pressure or simple exhaustion, people frequently make obvious and not-so-obvious blunders, and a winning position will slip away. Human frailty helps to ensure that chess between mortals will always be interesting.

When one player closes in on the other player’s King, the pressure rises. The defender becomes desperate, of course, not to lose. The attacker wants desperately not to blow it. And the best answers are rarely obvious.

It was extraordinary enough that Anderssen was even on the attack. He was, after all, two Rooks and a Bishop down. Even more amazing, his position actually looked good, as long as he could maintain offensive momentum. But how would he press his attack?

22. Qf6+

(White Queen to f6;
check
)

It was time for Anderssen’s final surprise, his
immortal
flourish. He’d already sacrificed three major pieces; now, as much for the thrill as the tactical advantage, it seemed, he also let go of his Queen. Putting Kieseritzky in check, Anderssen offered up his Queen to Kieseritzky’s g8 Knight.

22….N×f6

(Black Knight captures Queen at f6)

Once again, Kieseritzky took the offer. But in doing so he brought his Knight out of a critical position and…

23. Be7++

(White Bishop to e7;
checkmate
)

…allowed Anderssen to checkmate with his Bishop.

So ended the casual masterpiece forever to be admired by patzers and grandmasters alike. “In this game,” Wilhelm Steinitz later wrote, “there occurs almost a continuity of brilliancies, every one of which bears the stamp of intuitive genius.” The brilliance of the win was also immediately recognized by Kieseritzky, the loser, who, at the expense of his own ego, quickly arranged to telegraph it back to Paris and personally annotate it for publication in his own chess journal,
La Régence
. “This is not the right move,” he remarked about his own move 8. After Anderssen’s move 11, Kieseritzky observed that “from this moment, White plays better.” But he reserved his most pregnant comment for his move 17….Q×b2 (Black Queen captures Pawn at b2). “The taking of this Pawn and the attack against the two Rooks don’t produce the result that one would have hoped.” His final published note on the game comes just one stroke later, after Anderssen’s move 18. “
Coup de grâce
,” Kieseritzky writes, “that renders null all the efforts of the adversary. This game was conducted by M. Anderssen with remarkable talent.” Broadcasting his own brutal loss was a testament to Kieseritzky’s humility, his respect for Anderssen, and his devotion to the game.

For all its subsequent durability, the game itself lasted just under an hour. This puportedly casual encounter behind them, both men returned their full attention to the remaining three and a half weeks of the grueling seven-week international tournament which had brought them to London in the first place. This was the spotlight event chess lovers from all over the world were following breathlessly, game by game, move by move. All the sensational chess talents of the world were present—an unprecedented gathering—and the onlookers naturally expected landmark-quality play. But brilliance cannot be scheduled or predicted, and this extended clash of the chess titans turned out to be somewhat of a letdown. Most of the eighty-five tournament games were of no lasting consequence. As master player and analyst Andy Soltis would observe over a century later, they were “forgettable.”

Instead, what emerged as the tournament’s central drama was Adolf Anderssen’s surprising triumph. Continuing on from his casual brilliance at the Divan, the underdog Anderssen dominated the tournament as well, twice more defeating Kieseritzky along with many of the other masters. It was the beginning of an extraordinary streak: in his seven subsequent tournaments, Anderssen won six, including two other elite international tournaments—London in 1860 and Baden-Baden in 1870. In hindsight, his astonishing performance against Kieseritzky at the Grand Divan was his quick debut as one of the most extraordinary chess minds of all time. He also came to be universally regarded as a fine human being. When Anderssen died in 1879, his obituary in the German chess newspaper
Deutsche Schachzeitung
ran nineteen pages long.

Life was not as kind to Kieseritzky, who would forever carry the moniker “Immortal Loser.” Upon returning home to Paris from his three consecutive losses to Anderssen, he was soon forced to fold his failing chess magazine as he struggled with his finances and his health. He died in a Paris mental hospital in 1853, just two years after his loss in the Immortal Game. He had no money to his name. No one in the chess world contributed to give Kieseritzky a decent burial. No one stood by his grave.