The Most Human Human

by Brian Christian

  30 My Dinner with Andre, directed by Louis Malle (Saga, 1981).

  31 Before Sunrise, directed by Richard Linklater (Castle Rock Entertainment, 1995).

  32 Roger Ebert, review of My Dinner with Andre, January 1, 1981, at rogerebert.suntimes.com. 94 Before Sunset, directed by Richard Linklater (Warner Independent Pictures, 2004).

  33 George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” Horizon 13, no. 76 (April 1946), pp. 252–65.

  34 Melinda Bargreen, “Violetta: The Ultimate Challenge,” interview with Nuccia Focile, in program for Seattle Opera’s La Traviata, October 2009.

  5. Getting Out of Book

  1 Paul Ekman, Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (New York: Norton, 2001).

  2 Benjamin Franklin, “The Morals of Chess,” Columbian Magazine (December 1786).

  3 For Deep Blue engineer Feng-hsiung Hsu’s take on the match, see Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer That Defeated the World Chess Champion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).

  4 Neil Strauss, The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists (New York: ReganBooks, 2005).

  5 Duchamp’s quotation is attributed to two separate sources: Andy Soltis, “Duchamp and the Art of Chess Appeal,” n.d., unidentified newspaper clipping, object file, Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art; and Marcel Duchamp’s address on August 30, 1952, to the New York State Chess Association; see Anne d’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973), p. 131.

  6 Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979).

  7 “the conclusion that profoundly insightful chess-playing”: Douglas Hofstadter, summarizing the position taken by Gödel, Escher, Bach in the essay “Staring Emmy Straight in the Eye—and Doing My Best Not to Flinch,” in David Cope, Virtual Music: Computer Synthesis of Musical Style (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 33–82.

  8 knight’s training … Schwarzkopf: See David Shenk, The Immortal Game (New York: Doubleday, 2006).

  9 “The first time I”: Hofstadter, quoted in Bruce Weber, “Mean Chess-Playing Computer Tears at the Meaning of Thought,” New York Times, February 19, 1996.

  10 “article in Scientific American”: Almost certainly the shocking Feng-hsiung Hsu, Thomas Anantharaman, Murray Campbell, and Andreas Nowatzyk, “A Grandmaster Chess Machine,” Scientific American, October 1990.

  11 “To some extent, this match is a defense of the whole human race”: Quoted by Hofstadter, “Staring Emmy Straight in the Eye,” and attributed to a (since-deleted) 1996 article titled “Kasparov Speaks” at www.ibm.com.

  12 “The sanctity of human intelligence”: Weber, “Mean Chess-Playing Computer.”

  13 David Foster Wallace (originally in reference to a tennis match), in “The String Theory,” in Esquire, July 1996. Collected (under the title “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness”) in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997).

  14 “I personally guarantee”: From the press conference after Game 6, as reported by Malcolm Pein of the London Chess Centre.

  15 Claude Shannon, “Programming a Computer for Playing Chess,” Philosophical Magazine, March 1950, the first paper ever written on computer chess.

  16 Hofstadter, in Weber, “Mean Chess-Playing Computer.”

  17 Searle, in ibid.

  18 “unrestrained threshold of excellence”: Ibid.

  19 Deep Blue didn’t win it: As Kasparov said at the press conference, “The match was lost by the world champion [and not won by Deep Blue, was the implication] … Forget today’s game. I mean, Deep Blue hasn’t won a single game out of the five.” Bewilderingly, he remarked, “It’s not yet ready, in my opinion, to win a big contest.”

  20 checkmate in 262: See Ken Thompson, “The Longest: KRNKNN in 262,” ICGA Journal 23, no. 1 (2000), pp. 35–36.

  21 “concepts do not always work”: James Gleick, “Machine Beats Man on Ancient Front,” New York Times, August 26, 1986.

  22 Michael Littman, quoted in Bryn Nelson, “Checkers Computer Becomes Invincible,” msnbc.com, July 19, 2007.

  23 Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007).

  24 Charles Mee, in “Shaped, in Bits, Drips, and Quips,” Los Angeles Times, October 24, 2004; and in “About the (Re)Making Project,” www.charlesmee.org/html/about.html.

  25 “doesn’t even count”: From Kasparov’s remarks at the post–Game 6 press conference.

  26 Jonathan Schaeffer et al., “Checkers Is Solved,” Science 317, no. 5844 (September 14, 2007), pp. 1518–22. For more about Chinook, see Jonathan Schaeffer, One Jump Ahead: Computer Perfection at Checkers (New York: Springer, 2008).

  27 Game 6 commentary available at the IBM website: www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/games/game6/html/comm.txt.

  28 Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess.

  29 Vin DiCarlo, “Phone and Text Game,” at orders.vindicarlo.com/noflakes.

  30 “Once you have performed”: Mystery, The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women into Bed, with Chris Odom (New York: St. Martin’s, 2007).

  31 Ted Koppel, in Jack T. Huber and Dean Diggins, Interviewing America’s Top Interviewers: Nineteen Top Interviewers Tell All About What They Do (New York: Carol, 1991).

  32 Schaeffer et al., “Checkers Is Solved.”

  33 “I decided to opt for unusual openings”: Garry Kasparov, “Techmate,” Forbes, February 22, 1999.

  34 Bobby Fischer, interview on Icelandic radio station Útvarp Saga, October 16, 2006.

  35 “pushed further and further in”: From www.chess960.net.

  36 Yasser Seirawan, in his commentary for the Kasparov–Deep Blue rematch, Game 4: www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/games/game4/html/comm.txt.

  37 Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (New York: Morrow, 1974).

  38 “Speed Dating with Yaacov and Sue Deyo,” interview with Terry Gross, Fresh Air, National Public Radio, August 17, 2005. See also Yaacov Deyo and Sue Deyo, Speed Dating: The Smarter, Faster Way to Lasting Love (New York: HarperResource, 2002).

  6. The Anti-Expert

  1 Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007).

  2 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” translated by Bernard Frechtman, reprinted (as “Existentialism”) in Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Citadel, 1987).

  3 Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (New York: Harmony Books, 1996).

  4 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy.

  5 The Terminator, directed by James Cameron (Orion Pictures, 1984).

  6 The Matrix, directed by Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski (Warner Bros., 1999).

  7 Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979).

  8 Mark Humphrys, “How My Program Passed the Turing Test,” in Parsing the Turing Test, edited by Robert Epstein et al. (New York: Springer, 2008).

  9 V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (New York: William Morrow, 1998).

  10 Alan Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 1937, 2nd ser., 42, no. 1 (1937), pp. 230–65.

  11 Ada Lovelace’s remarks come from her translation (and notes thereupon) of Luigi Federico Menabrea’s “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage, Esq.,” in Scientific Memoirs, edited by Richard Taylor (London, 1843).

  12 Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59, no. 236 (October 1950), pp. 433–60.

  13 For more on the idea of “radical choice,” see, e.g., Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” especially Sartre’s discussion of a
painter wondering “what painting ought he to make” and a student who came to ask Sartre’s advice about an ethical dilemma.

  14 Aristotle’s arguments: See, e.g., The Nicomachean Ethics.

  15 For a publicly traded company: Nobel Prize winner, and (says the Economist) “the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century,” Milton Friedman wrote a piece in the New York Times Magazine in 1970 titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” The title makes his thesis pretty clear, but Friedman is careful to specify that he means public companies: “The situation of the individual proprietor is somewhat different. If he acts to reduce the returns of his enterprise in order to exercise his ‘social responsibility’ [or in general to do anything whose end is ultimately something other than profit], he is spending his own money, not someone else’s … That is his right, and I cannot see that there is any objection to his doing so.”

  16 Antonio Machado, “Proverbios y cantares,” in Campos de Castilla (Madrid: Renacimiento, 1912).

  17 Will Wright, quoted in Geoff Keighley, “Simply Divine: The Story of Maxis Software,” GameSpot, www.gamespot.com/features/maxis/index.html.

  18 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001). 141 “Unless a man”: Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (New York: Liveright, 1930).

  19 Allen Ginsberg, interviewed by Lawrence Grobel, in Grobel’s The Art of the Interview: Lessons from a Master of the Craft (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004).

  20 Dave Ackley, personal interview.

  21 Jay G. Wilpon, “Applications of Voice-Processing Technology in Telecommunications,” in Voice Communication Between Humans and Machines, edited by David B. Roe and Jay G. Wilpon (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1994).

  22 Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (New York: Crown, 2007).

  23 Stuart Shieber, personal interview. Shieber is the editor of the excellent volume The Turing Test: Verbal Behavior as the Hallmark of Intelligence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), and his famous criticism of the Loebner Prize is “Lessons from a Restricted Turing Test,” Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, April 1993.

  24 “The art of general conversation”: Russell, Conquest of Happiness.

  25 Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (Boston: Shambhala, 2006).

  26 “Commence relaxation”: This was from a television ad for Beck’s beer. For more information, see Constance L. Hays, “Can Teutonic Qualities Help Beck’s Double Its Beer Sales in Six Years?” New York Times, November 12, 1998.

  27 Bertrand Russell, “ ‘Useless’ Knowledge,” in In Praise of Idleness, and Other Essays (New York: Norton, 1935); emphasis mine.

  28 Aristotle on friendship: In The Nicomachean Ethics, specifically books 8 and 9. See also Richard Kraut, “Aristotle’s Ethics,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta (Summer 2010 ed.). Whereas Plato argues in The Republic that “the fairest class [of things is] that which a man who is to be happy [can] love both for its own sake and for the results,” Aristotle insists in The Nicomachean Ethics that any element of instrumentality in a relationship weakens the quality or nature of that relationship.

  29 Philip Jackson, personal interview.

  30 Sherlock Holmes, directed by Guy Ritchie (Warner Bros., 2009).

  7. Barging In

  1 Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: Morrow, 1994). For more on how listener feedback affects storytelling, see, e.g., Janet B. Bavelas, Linda Coates, and Trudy Johnson, “Listeners as Co-narrators,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79, no. 6 (2000), 941–52.

  2 Bernard Reginster, personal interview. See also Reginster’s colleague, philosopher Charles Larmore, who in The Romantic Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), argues, “We can see the significance of Stendhal’s idea [in Le rouge et le noir] that the distinctive thing about being natural is that it is unreflective.” Larmore concludes: “The importance of the Romantic theme of authenticity is that it disabuses us of the idea that life is necessarily better the more [and longer] we think about it.”

  3 Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59, no. 236 (October 1950), pp. 433–60.

  4 John Geirland, “Go with the Flow,” interview with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Wired 4.09 (September 1996).

  5 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1990). See also Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York: HarperCollins, 1996); and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Kevin Rathunde, “The Measurement of Flow in Everyday Life: Towards a Theory of Emergent Motivation,” in Developmental Perspectives on Motivation: Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 1992, edited by Janis E. Jacobs (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993).

  6 Dave Ackley, “Life Time,” Dave Ackley’s Living Computation, www.ackleyshack.com/lc/d/ai/time.html.

  7 Stephen Wolfram, “A New Kind of Science” (lecture, Brown University, 2003); Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science (Champaign, Ill.: Wolfram Media, 2002).

  8 Hava Siegelmann, Neural Networks and Analog Computation: Beyond the Turing Limit (Boston: Birkhäuser, 1999).

  9 Michael Sipser, Introduction to the Theory of Computation (Boston: PWS, 1997).

  10 Ackley, “Life Time.”

  11 Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965).

  12 Herbert H. Clark and Jean E. Fox Tree, “Using Uh and Um in Spontaneous Speaking,” Cognition 84 (2002), pp. 73–111. See also Jean E. Fox Tree, “Listeners’ Uses of Um and Uh in Speech Comprehension,” Memory & Cognition 29, no. 2 (2001), pp. 320–26.

  13 The first appearance of the word “satisficing” in this sense is Herbert Simon, “Rational Choice and the Structure of the Environment,” Psychological Review 63 (1956), pp. 129–38.

  14 Brian Ferneyhough, quoted in Matthias Kriesberg, “A Music So Demanding That It Sets You Free,” New York Times, December 8, 2002.

  15 Tim Rutherford-Johnson, “Music Since 1960: Ferneyhough: Cassandra’s Dream Song,” Rambler, December 2, 2004, johnsonsrambler.wordpress.com/2004/12/02/music-since-1960-ferneyhough-cassandras-dream-song.

  16 “Robert Medeksza Interview—Loebner 2007 Winner,” Ai Dreams, aidreams.co.uk/forum/index.php?page=67.

  17 Kyoko Matsuyama, Kazunori Komatani, Tetsuya Ogata, and Hiroshi G. Okuno, “Enabling a User to Specify an Item at Any Time During System Enumeration: Item Identification for Barge-In-Able Conversational Dialogue Systems,” Proceedings of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (2009).

  18 Brian Ferneyhough, in Kriesberg, “Music So Demanding.”

  19 David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross (New York: Grove, 1994).

  20 For more on back-channel feedback and the (previously neglected) role of the listener in conversation, see, e.g., Bavelas, Coates, and Johnson, “Listeners as Co-narrators.”

  21 Jack T. Huber and Dean Diggins, Interviewing America’s Top Interviewers: Nineteen Top Interviewers Tell All About What They Do (New York: Carol, 1991).

  22 Clark and Fox Tree, “Using Uh and Um.”

  23 Clive Thompson, “What Is I.B.M.’s Watson?” New York Times, June 14, 2010.

  24 Nikko Ström and Stephanie Seneff, “Intelligent Barge-In in Conversational Systems,” Proceedings of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (2000).

  25 Jonathan Schull, Mike Axelrod, and Larry Quinsland, “Multichat: Persistent, Text-as-You-Type Messaging in a Web Browser for Fluid Multi-person Interaction and Collaboration” (paper presented at the Seventh Annual Workshop and Minitrack on Persistent Conversation, Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science, Kauai, Hawaii, January 2006).

  26 Deborah Tannen, That’s Not What I Meant! How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships (New Yor
k: Ballantine, 1987).

  27 For more on the breakdown of strict turn-taking in favor of a more collaborative model of speaking, and its links to everything from intimacy to humor to gender, see, e.g., Jennifer Coates, “Talk in a Play Frame: More on Laughter and Intimacy,” Journal of Pragmatics 39 (2007), pp. 29–49; and Jennifer Coates, “No Gap, Lots of Overlap: Turn-Taking Patterns in the Talk of Women Friends,” in Researching Language and Literacy in Social Context, edited by David Graddol, Janet May-bin, and Barry Stierer (Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters, 1994), pp. 177–92.

  8. The World’s Worst Deponent

  1 Albert Mehrabian, Silent Messages (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1971).

  2 For more on telling stories backward, see, e.g., Tiffany McCormack, Alexandria Ashkar, Ashley Hunt, Evelyn Chang, Gent Silberkleit, and R. Edward Geiselman, “Indicators of Deception in an Oral Narrative: Which Are More Reliable?” American Journal of Forensic Psychology 30, no. 4 (2009), pp. 49–56.

  3 For more on objections to form, see, e.g., Paul Bergman and Albert Moore, Nolo’s Deposition Handbook (Berkeley, Calif.: Nolo, 2007). For additional research on lie detection in the realm of electronic text, see, e.g., Lina Zhou, “An Empirical Investigation of Deception Behavior in Instant Messaging,” IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication 48, no. 2 (2005), pp. 147–60.

  4 “unasking” of the question: This phrasing comes from both Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979), and Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (New York: Morrow, 1974). Pirsig also describes mu using the metaphor of a digital circuit’s “high impedance” (a.k.a. “floating ground”) state: neither 0 nor 1.

  5 Eben Harrell, “Magnus Carlsen: The 19-Year-Old King of Chess,” Time, December 25, 2009.

  6 Lawrence Grobel, The Art of the Interview: Lessons from a Master of the Craft (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004).

  7 For more on the topic of our culture’s rhetorical “minimax” attitude, see, e.g., Deborah Tannen, The Argument Culture (New York: Random House, 1998).