ON Sunday May 4, 1997, representatives of almost every major media outlet in the world crammed into a room on the forty-ninth floor of The Equitable Center, on 7th Avenue in New York City. They were there to cover the match of the century: a historic confrontation between Garry Kasparov, the reigning world chess champion and possibly the greatest player of all time, and IBM’s supercomputer, lovingly nicknamed “Deep Blue.” In size, the crowd present matched those that show up for title fights at Madison Square Gardens. Another 500 spectators watched the game on video screens in the ground-floor auditorium. Every move was broadcast live on the Internet and scrutinized by millions of people all over the world, some of whom called in sick so they could watch the game at home.
When the match was first announced, it was billed as Man v. Machine. Newsweek put Kasparov on its cover with the caption “The Brain’s Last Stand,” as though chess’s man of steel were all that stood between us and hordes of rampaging metal and wire, bent on taking over the world. But the campaign soon took a more attenuated position. Even IBM backed off the Man v. Machine comparison, though one supposes it was less because they thought the thrills were too cheap than out of concern that their customers might come to identify Big Blue with the Terminator. “Deep Blue is stunningly effective at solving chess problems,” an IBM press release said, “but it is less ‘intelligent’ than even the stupidest human.” At the end of the day, all that remained was the question: How did a sport that had, outside of Russia, fewer fans than the Montreal Expos, attain the status of the Super Bowl?
One answer has to do with our fascination with genius. It is, after all, to our geniuses that we pin our profoundest hopes. Expressions of genius offer us momentary respite from the quotidian, and sometimes even grant us a brief glimpse into eternity. Small wonder, then, that we feel so threatened when one of our most enigmatic talents faces the threat of being reproduced, reduced to the mere mechanical powers of a computer.
Garry Kasparov possesses such a genius. At the time of the match, the Azerbaijani-born Kasparov was thirty-four. He was already a mature thinker with an intellectual swagger. Here was a mind to reckon with – a beautiful, bold, self-assured example of masterful ability in areas where most of us are duffers. Here was a grandmaster who held the distinction of being the first world champion to have reached this pinnacle without having lost a single match.
Kasparov’s whole manner radiated invincibility. He was a master of psychological warfare, known in the inner circles of chess for that Medusa-like gaze called the “Garry glare.” But he was also a master strategist, and careful observers understood this about him early on – for example, in 1984, when he came up against the then-titleholder and Soviet poster boy Anatoly Karpov. Kasparov was brash and independent, two qualities the Soviets did not particularly respect, and, to the Kremlin’s great satisfaction, he lost the first five games. Then, as though the losses had been his way of marking time while he got to know his opponent, Kasparov began forcing draws: forty in a row. By the time the last draw was declared, more than four months later, Karpov had lost twenty-two pounds. Only then did Kasparov move in for the kill, scoring decisive victories in games 47 and 48, at which point the president of FIDE, Florencio Campomanes, intervened, suspended the match, and drew to a close one of the ugliest days in the history of chess. Kasparov did not get another opportunity to compete for the crown until 1985, when he met, and trounced, Karpov, and easily held on to the world championship title for the next fifteen years.
Deep Blue ended his winning streak. Vikram Jayanti, the director of the documentary film Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine, tells viewers this right off the bat. Thankfully, Jayanti chooses not to focus on the struggle between “man and machine”; what really interests him is the manner in which the film’s hero, Garry Kasparov, unravels.
Dramatizing a historical event always presents the documentary filmmaker with a challenge, even more so when the emotional state of the main character is the central theme. What makes this film compelling is that, during the actual match, one of Kasparov’s crew followed the champion around with a movie camera. Throughout the doc’s eighty-five minutes we get the rare opportunity to follow history in the making. Jayanti also had plenty of archival footage to choose from, which allowed him to avoid the mind-numbing prospect of constructing a film of talking heads. Kasparov’s unravelling is presented as though it were scripted in advance – which, in some profound way, it was.
The first time Kasparov played Deep Blue, in 1996, the match was rather low-key, more a scientific experiment than a real competition. But the attention it garnered – an estimated $100 million dollars of free publicity and a perception that IBM was doing cool stuff – took Deep Blue’s corporate sponsor by surprise and opened shareholders’ eyes to the potential of a rematch.
The next time he played the computer – the 1997 match – IBM decided to give Kasparov a run for his money. An early indication of the company’s new mindset came when Kasparov requested printouts of Deep Blue’s training matches. In fact, there was nothing unusual about this request: chess players always prepare by studying their opponents’ games. But even though each of Kasparov’s games had been fed into Deep Blue’s database, IBM refused to turn over records of any of Deep Blue’s performances. The contract between IBM and Kasparov stipulated access to the computer’s public games only; IBM declared that all of Deep Blue’s games had been played in private. As Deep Blue’s senior project manager, C. J. Tan, growled, after the rematch was announced, “This isn’t a scientific experiment any more. We’re here to play chess.”
When it is played competitively, chess is never just a cerebral contest between two highly tuned intellects. Like any sport played at the championship level, it is a battle of wit and will, physical stamina, and huge mental concentration. When one of the challengers is made of something more durable than flesh, the balance shifts. Some purists even argue that when chess is played between a computer and a human being, the game is not chess at all.
