by David Shenk
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)
THERE’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
.
“WE LEARN BY CHESS,” wrote Benjamin Franklin in 1786, “the habit of not being discouraged by present bad appearances in the state of our affairs, the habit of hoping for a favorable change, and that of persevering in the search of resources.”
It was only about a month after I began researching the deep history of chess’s entanglement with the human mind that I realized this wasn’t just a story about our past, but also one about our future. We have always needed to learn good habits, and we always will. In August 2002, ABC News Nightline featured a profile of Eugene Brown, an ex-con whose chance encounter with chess in prison had become a part of his personal salvation. Through the game he learned discipline, focus, patience, and persistence. After his release, Brown made it his mission to use chess as a tool to rescue disadvantaged youths before they got into serious trouble. He opened up a youth recreation center called Chess House. “When I came out [of prison],” Brown said, “I was carrying chess with me. Everywhere I was going, I had a board, and I was teaching people: There’s three phases to a chess game—the opening, the middle and the end, and you have to put them all together to win. You just don’t win in the opening. That’s what I was trying to do when I went into that bank. I was trying to win in the opening. I was trying to get instant results…. You keep making bad moves, you’re going to get checkmated. And on the street, it ain’t checkmate. It’s your life. It’s a wheelchair. It’s incarceration.”
One striking thing about Brown’s story was that it did not seem ridiculous. The producers at ABC News, and subsequently their viewers, found it interesting and not at all bizarre that this sixth-century Persian war game, with pieces named after medieval European figures and rules that have not substantially changed for more than five hundred years, would give a down-and-out American in the twenty-first century some insight into his own flaws and a philosophy on how to repair them. In the era of Xbox and PlayStation, chess was no longer the most popular game around, but it was still very much a part of the fabric of our culture, and even seemed to be enjoying yet another popular resurgence. Membership in the United States Chess Federation was at an all-time high. Sales of chess sets in Britain were booming. The game was attracting a storm of attention on the Internet—with upwards of 100 million games played online annually. There were also large swells in urban and suburban youth competition, and among trendsetters. Will Smith, Don Imus, Bill Gates, Julia Roberts, Sting, and Salman Rushdie all played. Madonna was taking lessons. Arnold Schwarzenegger, prior to his California governorship, established a permanent chess table in his movie set trailer, with one chair labeled “Loser” and the other—his—labeled “Winner.” The improvisational rock band Phish had recently made history by arranging the two most populous chess games ever: the band versus its entire 15,000-person audience. Each side collectively offered one move per show (the audience voted during intermission), stretching out each game for several weeks. The band won the first game, the audience the second.
Part of the game’s modern appeal, in a world increasingly interconnected in finance and culture, might be its universality. By the late twentieth century, the western European standardized form of the game had long since spread to every part of every continent, including all of Africa and South America, and had even overtaken the older chatrang/shatranj in its original quarters: India, Iran, Russia, and the Arab nations.
Most important of all, though, the game was becoming an integral part of school life in many nations, including the United States. A growing number of school systems were even making it a part of their curricula. In New York City, where I live, chess had recently worked its way into the classrooms of 160 public schools. It was also widely taught in private schools, where competition was fierce for the most sought-after instructors. To witness this growing school–chess connection, knowing the game’s profound history, was nothing short of surreal.
“GOOD MORNING, CLASS.” In a well-lit classroom in the Sheepshead Bay neighborhood of Brooklyn, roving chess instructor Nicholas Chatzilias introduced himself to a group of curious, well-disciplined eight-year-olds. The large, rectangular room on the second floor of Public School 52 had three computers in the corner, a row of shallow coat closets on the east wall, and a table full of snacks and small plant aquariums at the far end. Nestled close to the blackboard, nineteen second graders were arranged in four desk clusters. Chatzilias gently set his plastic poster-tube case against a table, picked up a piece of chalk, and wrote his name up on the board.
“You can call me Mr. Nicholas,” he told the group. A longtime amateur chess competitor, Chatzilias was now being paid to teach his passion by the New York-based Chess-in-the-Schools foundation. He taught weekly chess classes in five different public schools and supervised their after-school chess clubs. Of the wide range of elementary, middle, and junior high kids that Chatzilias would be working with this semester, this youngest group would perhaps be the most challenging—and yet, at the same time, the most promising. At their tender age, they could only so quickly learn the nuances of the game. Once they took to it, though, the benefits could be extraordinary. Contemporary studies were helping to establish with modern scholarship what Benjamin Franklin and others had been saying for centuries about chess’s wide range of intellectual and character benefits. The earlier the kids started, the better. Chess literacy was like its own unique language: anyone could learn it, but the very youngest players could hardwire it directly into their brains.
Bringing chess into school classrooms was an experiment with roots in mid-twentieth-century Russia that began to catch the attention of Western educators in the late 1960s. In the mid-1970s, studies in Belgium and Zaire suggested that chess could improve students’ spatial, numerical, and verbal abilities—as well as overall cognitive development. Other promising studies followed from Hong Kong, Venezuela, New Brunswick, Pennsylvania, and Texas. With each new study came an increasing number of communities inclined to give chess a try. After all, schools are not only supposed to impart knowledge; they’re also supposed to teach kids how to learn, to instill curiosity and critical thinking skills. “It’s the finest thing that ever happened to this school,” remarked one New York City principal. A Florida superintendent echoed that sentiment: “Chess has taught my students more than any other subject,” he said. “I used to teach for schools in the poor neighborhoods and that’s why I came here,” explained Maria Manuri, an educator working with a Toronto-based program called Chess’n Math. “With chess, you can learn all kinds of things. It’s not just concentration, not just logic, it’s everything. It’s how to lose, how to win, how to be social. In schools today there’s no ethics anymore. Chess can teach that to you too.”
Indeed, researchers were finding that chess might help kids with skills far beyond math and logic. “Chess can enhance concentration, patience, and perseverance,” concluded the University of Sydney’s Peter Dauvergne, “as well as develop creativity, intuition, memory, and most importantly, the ability to analyse and deduce from a set of general principles, learning to make tough decisions and solve problems flexibly.” At Memphis State University, Dianne Horgan investigated the cognitive mechanisms involved. She came away with a few powerful conclusions:
1. More learning longer. Chess teaches children to sharpen their information evaluation skills, and to build those skills for a longer period of time—to keep their “acquisition and revision processes active.”
2. More efficient learning. Chess training and tournaments require an unusual amount of “process feedback”—not just acknowledging that something has gone wrong after a lost game, but having to learn what went wrong. Honing feedback skills could have wide implications for future development.
3. More self-perception. Serious chess training improves “calibration,” the correlation between a person’s ability and that person’s perception of his or her ability. (In the general population, calibration skills are poor.) Improving calibration can greatly enhance the value of feedback.
Chess was ob
viously not the only way to give the young brain a tune-up. But schools needed an array of tools to help them consistently produce disciplined, curious, persistent minds. The world is awash in information, scientific nuance, and fragmentation of culture and perspectives. Failure to deliver at least a basic education has greater consequences than ever before.
In New York, Chess-in-the-Schools, formerly known as the American Chess Foundation, had been offering free instruction to underprivileged New York City students since 1986. By 2005, thanks largely to support from New York philanthropist Lewis Cullman, they had a $4 million annual budget supporting fifty instructors in 160 schools. “Chess is not a game of luck,” the foundation declared in its mission statement. “Children who practice and develop skills will reap rewards. The confidence they develop extends to other areas of their academic and emotional lives…. Our program has proven to be a cost-effective way to inspire and empower children to succeed, one move at a time.”
Even after learning so much about chess’s potential impact on the mind, I was still highly skeptical of this notion of actually importing the game directly into our school classrooms. At a time when public education was in such disrepair, did chess really deserve to be a priority agenda item? Wouldn’t students’ time and energy perhaps be better spent elsewhere? I wanted to witness this firsthand. Mr. Nicholas invited me to sit in on his class.