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Chess BumpThe triumphant teamwork of humans and computers.

By William Saletan
Posted Friday, May 11, 2007, at 6:05 PM ET
Illustration by Rob Donnelly. Click image to expand.

Ten years ago today, a computer beat the world chess champion in a six-game match. Since then, human champs have played three more matches against machines, scoring two draws and a loss. Grandmasters are being crushed. The era of human dominance is over.

It's not just chess. Everywhere you look—switchboards, ATMs, post offices—machines are replacing us. First they took farming and manufacturing jobs. Then they took service and office jobs. Chess was supposed to be a bastion of human ingenuity, an art they'd never conquer. Now they're conquering it. The smarter they get, the more we feel threatened.

Don't be afraid. We, too, are getting smarter, and computers are a big reason why. They're not our enemies. They're our offspring—our creations, helpers, and challengers.

We certainly needed the challenge. Chess computers, in particular, have exposed our complacency. Grandmasters used to dismiss computers as calculators, unfit for elite competition. Our vanity was so blinding that in 1997, when world champion Garry Kasparov lost to a machine called Deep Blue, he implied that the computer had received human coaching during the match.

Computers kept winning, and we kept whining. Commentators sniffed that the machines were making oafish moves and being generally outplayed. In postgame press conferences, players swore they'd been winning right up until the moment when, for unclear reasons, they lost. Five months ago, the current champ, Vladimir Kramnik, overlooked an instant checkmate by his artificial opponent, Deep Fritz. "I rechecked this variation many times and analyzed quite far ahead," Kramnik protested. "It seemed to me I was winning."

Kramnik's blunder was no accident. It happened because of flaws in the human brain. We thought we were smarter than computers for two reasons. First, we could choose a goal and figure out how to get there, whereas computers had to start with the available moves and see where they led. Second, computers had to think through every possible move, whereas we could recognize crucial patterns and focus on the moves that mattered. But that's why Kramnik missed the checkmate: It looked different from the usual threat pattern, and he was thinking too far ahead. Even the best brain sometimes needs computer assistance.

The remarkable thing about us isn't our supremacy over computers. It's our interaction with them. Yes, chess programs have been getting smarter. But they didn't do that on their own. Humans design the hardware and write the code. Grandmasters test and refine it. The machines get smarter because the code gets subtler because the programmers get wiser. That's how Deep Junior, the machine that played Kasparov four years ago, eclipsed Deep Blue's skill with just a fraction of Deep Blue's computing power.

In the old days, chess programs went around killing enemy pieces at every opportunity. Their human opponents understood that in chess, like war, other factors often matter more: territorial control, mobility, initiative, reach, coordination, supply lines, impregnability, and safety from decapitation. By trading material for these advantages, the humans won. So, programmers taught the machines to recognize and consider the same factors.

Unable to win with their old tricks, human players learned new ones. They played quirky openings to throw computers off-script. They plotted attacks a dozen moves ahead, beyond the machines' range of calculation. They hunkered down in defenses that to a computer looked impregnable. They cluttered the battlefield with obstructions, making it harder for computers to see threats or payoffs. They left irrelevant pieces on the board to absorb the machines' attention. It was a whole new game layered on top of the old one. The humans named it "anti-computer chess."

Now programmers are adding a third layer: anti-anti-computer chess. They're teaching machines to break old habits, see through clutter, and force the wide-open bloodbaths at which computers excel. In 2003, Deep Junior flummoxed Kasparov with a kamikaze attack unprecedented in computer annals. Last year, when Kramnik forced Deep Fritz off its opening script, the program invented a new variation and went on to win the game.

If we humans are so good at seeing the big picture, let's see it. In the big picture, whether the computer beats us isn't important. Either way, it's a human triumph. In fact, it's a greater human triumph when the computer wins, because the only thing harder than outsmarting a computer is figuring out how it got outsmarted and teaching it to recognize that kind of trap next time, when you won't be there to coach it. As a player, you can conceive a brilliant move without understanding where it came from. As a programmer, you have to do something much harder: articulate rules that will generate such brilliance.

From microwaves to cell phones to word processors, computers are extending our intelligence. At their best, and at ours, they're challenging us, forcing us to higher levels of thought. Pitting my brain against yours is hard. Pitting my program against yours—teaching one machine to spot and exploit another's subtle flaws—is much harder. The toughest chess matches in the world today aren't between players like Kramnik and Kasparov. They're between players like Fritz and Junior. May the best algorithm win.

When the cosmic game between humans and computers is complete, here's how the sequence of moves will read. In the opening, humans evolved through engagement with nature. In the middle game, we projected our intelligence onto computers and co-evolved through engagement with them. In the endgame, we merged computers with our minds and bodies, bringing that projected intelligence back into ourselves. The distinction between human and artificial intelligence turns out to have been artificial.

You don't have to be a machine to see the endgame unfolding. Last year, a Missouri teenager reached the third level of Space Invaders by operating the gun through wires attached to his brain. Today, the European Union is developing a cybernetic dental implant that can medicate you according to a dosage and schedule programmed by your doctor. In Russia, Kasparov has retired from chess and moved on to what he calls "larger competition"—leading a movement against the country's authoritarian regime. You can read all about it on his Web site. All you need is a computer.

A version of this article also appears in the Outlook section of the Sunday Washington Post.

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William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.
Illustration by Rob Donnelly.
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Remarks from the Fray:

From a computational standpoint, chess is a piece of cake. It feels hard to us because we don't have dedicated cognitive machinery for doing that kind of thing. We have to co-opt other brain systems designed for other purposes (social interaction? Keeping track of foraging patches in our environment? Coordinating collective actions?) in order to play chess.

Now, compare the champion chess computers to the most advanced vision and facial recognition programs. We are nowhere near getting a computer to be able to make sense out of the dizzying confusion of light wavelengths that reach a camera lens. Sensing discreet objects, occlusions, distances, etc. are things that we do effortlessly, but (again) only because we have insanely complex but dedicated cognitive machinery for doing so.

So, interestingly, the harder something is for us, the easier it is to program a computer to do it. The simple stuff for us (walking, language, etc.) will be the tough stuff for computers. Hopefully, the more we learn about how hard it is to teach a computer to do something, the more people will realized that our traditional theories of human cognition (we just learn stuff) are way out of date. If it was just a matter of teaching and learning, then the easy and hard things for people and computers would be the same. Apparently, human cognitive development gives us a great deal of functionality for free, without having to learn much at all.

--Mangar

(To reply, click here.)

I have a ton of respect for chess players, but it's always been my opinion that the processor era has exposed an essential weakness of the game. It's 1-on-1 and can be broken with a little computational horsepower. In the 20th century, we've moved away from these kinds of heads up sports (like sprinting) towards team sports (soccer) with a heavy emphasis on improvisation and teamwork.

Part of why computers can dominate us in chess is because it's an essentially finite game against a single opponent. But no one has invented a script that can sit at a table of 9 poker players (even of mediocre skill) and come out on top at an above-average rate. Managing your chips against a group of players who have varying levels of aggression and skill may be a more specialized human trait than we've realized. Chess has a long pedigree of intellectual credibility, but maybe poker is a better place to test the limits of an AI. Similarly, when a script can beat out hedge fund managers time and time again, maybe we'll know that it's time to take a collective vacation as a species. But I think that day is still a ways off.

We used to think that memorization was the key link to intelligence -- until Ctrl-C wiped that smile off our faces. Retaining information is actually not something we're terribly impressive at. The decoupling of intelligence and chess is just another sign that 19th century notions of our own strengths and weaknesses are finally giving way to a more realistic sense of our skills. Maybe when we get around to inventing a game of chess that seats 10 players instead of 2, we'll finally start beating the machines again.

--CaptainBadonkadonk

(To reply, click here.)

(5/14)

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