The Immortal Game (20 page)

The book was obviously more of a thought experiment than a chess guide, and perhaps its most profound effect had nothing to do with the game. Nearly two decades after his series of chess games with Duchamp, Beckett published his second play,
Endgame
, which was inspired in part by Duchamp’s endgame chess book. Aside from its title, Beckett’s play does not explicitly refer to chess, but alludes strongly to the feeling of pointlessness often experienced by a chess player in the final moves. The protagonists are a master and his servant who seem existentially bound to one another, to the lifeless life they live together in their cramped seaside home. Hamm, the master, Beckett later explained, is “a King in a chess-game lost from the start. From the start he knows he is making loud senseless moves.” The hopelessness of the play marked other gloomy Beckett works, including
Waiting for Godot
. Beckett’s entire literary career, in fact, is nicely summed up by his proposed ideal chess game—the chess pieces may move around for a while in futility, but in the end are back in their starting positions.

Beckett’s celebration of futility nicely contrasts with the optimistic energy of Duchamp, one of whose mottos was “yes and chess.” Each artist and intellectual, of course, has his or her own particular temperament. Chess has proven to be a pliable enough tool to help deliver a variety of aesthetic statements. Duchamp’s optimism and Beckett’s pessimism make elegant bookends on a very wide shelf of beautiful problems.

THE IMMORTAL GAME
Moves 20 and 21

A
NDERSSEN WAS AGAIN UNDER
attack, and needed to escape check immediately—the ultimate in tempo-losing positions. He had only two choices: moving his King to e2 or moving it to g2.

20. Ke2

(White King to e2)

He chose e2.

20….Na6

(Black Knight to a6)

Kieseritzky, unable to find the perfect offensive move to keep Anderssen off balance, instead fell back to defense, developing his Knight to threaten any piece that moved onto the c7 square. Having lost his own momentum, he knew that Anderssen was about to mount a strong attack.

21. N×g7+

(White Knight captures Pawn on g7; check)

Anderssen now began his final assault, putting the Black King in check with his Knight on g7. (He had previously made this square safe by moving his e Pawn to e5, blocking the Queen from a diagonal rescue mission.) A close observer could see that Anderssen was in good attack position, even without his two Rooks. In fact, it was the Rook sacrifices that enabled him to so quickly put such a tight squeeze on the Black King.

21…. Kd8

(Black King to d8)

Kieseritzky escaped check with his only possible move, feeling the vice squeezing tight on his precious King. But how would Anderssen press his attack?

III.

ENDGAME

( Where We Are Going )

H
AL:
Bishop takes Knight’s Pawn.

F
RANK:
Lovely move…Rook to King one.

H
AL:
I’m sorry, Frank, I think you missed it. Queen to Bishop three, Bishop takes Queen, Knight takes Bishop, mate.

F
RANK:
Yeah, looks like you’re right. I resign.

H
AL:
Thank you for a very enjoyable game.

—2001: A Space Odyssey

J
ANUARY
2003. U
P ONSTAGE,
microphone in hand, former world champion Garry Kasparov was effervescent. He’d just trounced an opponent that, until this day, had not lost to a single person in two years, a player that was beginning to seem invincible—a player that never, ever worries.

This was a new sort of chess match. Only one of the contestants could sweat; only one required sleep or food. Towering over Manhattan’s Central Park, on the twelfth floor of the well-appointed New York Athletic Club, Kasparov was taking on the world computer chess champion, a ruthlessly efficient Israeli software program known as Deep Junior. After months of exhaustive preparation, he had just won the first of six scheduled games in a scant twenty-seven moves. He was ecstatic, not just for his victory, but also for how easily it was accomplished. Though he was careful not to suggest it himself, this rout obviously augured well for the rest of the match. “Computers still have plenty of weaknesses,” a visibly relieved Kasparov told a large crowd of grandmasters, club players, and schoolkids in his rich Azerbaijani-accented English after the game.

Although these two champions had never played an official game together, it was publicly a kind of rematch for Kasparov, who in 1997 became the first world champion ever to be beaten by a chess machine—the customized IBM supercomputer known as Deep Blue. That loss was a humiliation for Kasparov, who later charged that the rules (which he had agreed to) were unfair, and that Deep Blue’s chess-expert operators cheated by giving their machine some human help during the match. (“I do not want to go into legal details,” he said. “I do not want to waste money for the lawyers.”)
^*29
Now, six years later, came his opportunity to replay history. This contest, recognized as the first official “man-versus-machine” match by the World Chess Federation (also known by its French acronym, FIDE), was Kasparov’s chance not only to revitalize his image but also to cleanse the past. This was, he declared, the first “purely scientific match, because we had fair conditions for both the human player and for the machine.” He wanted history to regard the Deep Blue match as so badly tainted that it could not be taken seriously.

In fact, the Deep Blue win in 1997 was fair and unambiguous. It was also a historic achievement, the culmination of a fifty-year odyssey whose implications went far beyond chess. Since the mid-1940s, scientists had aimed to create a thinking machine, an apparatus that could compete with or even surpass the human brain in logical operations, pattern recognition, problem solving, and even language. Chess was found to be a useful testing ground because of its combination of simple rules and mind-bending complexity. Playing chess was also a goal whose progress could be easily measured: a chess machine could compete against expert players and be ranked according to its wins and losses. Chess was a founding and enduring experimental model for what came to be known as artificial intelligence, or AI.

For many decades, chess computers fell woefully (laughably) short of their designers’ ambitions. Then in the 1980s, as computing made important strides, chess engines finally began to sharpen. In the early 1990s, the Carnegie Mellon–trained engineer Feng-Hsiung Hsu emerged with a spare-parts machine called Deep Thought that dominated other machines and even seemed competitive with humans. After taking on IBM sponsorship, Hsu’s newly named Deep Blue played its first match with world champion Kasparov in 1996, losing decisively. With further tinkering, though, it quickly became even stronger, and a year later it won a close rematch.

The victory was a profound and chilling moment whose importance was immediately and intuitively understood around the world: technology was now moving into an ominous new realm. It was one thing to build machines that could move earth or fly over the ocean or even recognize a face. Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov signaled that we were now making machines that could conceivably compete with us. “We are sharing our world with another species,”
Newsweek
’s Steven Levy would later write, “one that gets smarter and more independent every year.”

This 2003 rematch of sorts seemed to be yet another important milestone. The world was watching to see if we were yet one more step closer to “Hal,” the highly intelligent and manipulative computer from Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s film,
2001: A Space Odyssey
. Reporters from the
New York Times
to
Pravda
to
Libya Online
were following it game by game. ESPN would be broadcasting the finale—the first live national and international TV coverage of chess since the 1972 Fischer–Spassky match in Reykjavik.

So how did Kasparov pull off such a spectacular win in the first game? “One of the ways to win [against computers] is to find a hole in the opening preparation,” he explained afterward. By mutual agreement, Kasparov and his seconds possessed a copy of the Deep Junior program for six months prior to the match, and they had been relentlessly competing against it ever since, probing it for weaknesses, trying out innumerable different combinations to learn how it “thought.” They also relied on other computers to help them beat this computer: sophisticated new databases like ChessBase, which contained over two million chess games played over the last five hundred years; and spectacular analysis software such as Fritz, which could analyze millions of positions per second and rank them for human consideration. With these advanced tools in place, the pile of collective knowledge increased game by game; players of Kasparov’s (and Deep Junior’s) caliber appeared, game by game, to be doing the unthinkable—
mastering
chess.

But they weren’t there yet. Even with the enormous electronic database at hand, there were still plenty of new tricks to be discovered. In preparation for Game 1, the Kasparov team unearthed a little-used combination that knocked Deep Junior off balance. It was a surprise Pawn sacrifice on Kasparov’s seventh move. After a fairly conventional opening where the Pawns and Knights jockeyed for control over the center board, Kasparov suddenly thrust out his King’s Knight Pawn two spaces to the g4 square, weakening his Kingside.

G
ARRY
K
ASPAROV VS.
D
EEP
J
UNIOR

J
ANUARY
26, 2003

N
EW
Y
ORK

G
AME
1

7. g4

(White Pawn to g4)

This was a terrific gamble and could have backfired. “In order to expose [the computer’s weak spot],” said Kasparov after the game, “you have to have a lot of courage. All morning I was saying, ‘Should I play g4 or should I not play g4?’” The strength—and weakness—of this move was in its unpredictability and counterintuitiveness. It left his entire position surprisingly vulnerable on both the Kingside
and
the Queenside. (Notice how disconnected the White Pawns are across the entire board; disconnected Pawns cannot defend one another.) But that was also precisely the advantage of the move as well. From his practice experience with the Deep Junior program, Kasparov knew that this unusual move, 7. g4, was not included in Junior’s openings database (its “opening book”), and would thus force the computer to start thinking on its own earlier than expected. Every computer has to come “out of book” at some point during the opening. Kasparov knew that it was advantageous to trigger this early, and in an unexpected way.

The most striking thing about this and other Kasparov decisions in Game 1 was that they were both tactical (short-term)
and
strategic (long-term). Until recently, human masters had successfully thwarted even the best computer programs by carefully avoiding short-term tactical skirmishes. Modern computers’ ability to calculate at blinding speeds made them tactical masters, but strategic advantage still lay with expert human players who could think through long-term strategies in a way that had more to do with spatial perception and planning than mathematics. Whole-game strategies in chess were ideas, not calculable equations. One of the things chess computers still could not do was to grasp an idea.

Against Deep Junior, Kasparov was signaling something new. He was not employing classic anticomputer chess. Rather, he played it as he would play another human grandmaster. It was the highest compliment he could pay to Junior’s programmers: they had developed a machine with true strategic ability. They had developed a machine that appeared to be thinking.

This was not much consolation in the immediate wake of such a powerful defeat of the computer program. Kasparov’s performance left many experts in the observation hall wondering aloud whether he would not merely win the match but crush Deep Junior and humiliate its creators. Perhaps the fearsome computers weren’t as advanced as many had thought. Perhaps human players possessed the ability to adapt and improve even more quickly than machines.

Amir Ban and Shay Bushinsky, the Israeli creators of Deep Junior, were fearing the exact same thing. As Kasparov departed for his New York victory dinner, the vanquished programmers shuffled onto the stage looking pale and somewhat embarrassed. They had expected much more of a fight from their baby. “If Kasparov does this to Junior every game, then we don’t deserve to be here,” Ban admitted. He shook a few hands and quietly headed down to Fifty-eighth Street to smoke a cigarette.

G
ARRY
K
IMOVICH
K
ASPAROV
was born in 1963 in the ancient port city of Baku, Azerbaijan, on the western edge of the Caspian Sea. In the ninth century chess migrated directly through Baku on its way from Baghdad to Kiev. The game came to be known in the region as
shahmaty,
after the Persian term
shah-mat
, which later evolved into the English
checkmate
—
shah
(the King)
mat
(is defeated). The eleventh-century Azerbaijani poet Khagani wrote that “time checkmates shahs like elephants gone far astray” and made a reference to “Ne’eman, the great master of chess.” Over time, chess in Baku became like ice fishing in Norway, an indelible part of the culture stretching back more generations than anyone could count.

When Kasparov was six, he shocked his family by solving a difficult endgame puzzle from the newspaper. “Since Garry knows how the game ends,” his father remarked, “we ought to teach him how it begins.” Sixteen years and many thousands of training hours later, Kasparov became the youngest-ever world chess champion at twenty-two. His greatness was also enduring. Kasparov held the world championship from 1985 to 2000, and even after losing the title he retained the highest ranking in the world. Perhaps more significantly, as he neared middle age at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Kasparov was one of the few human beings left who could effectively compete with the top chess computers.