GAMES & TECH

One of the most notable assaults on humanity’s intellectual stronghold in recent history came in 1997. The battleground was New York City, and the combatants were chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov and the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue. Over a six-game series, the supercomputer squeezed Kasparov in the Spanish opening, while showing finesse in the English and the Caro-Kann, and resolve against the Réti, a chess opening Kasparov had selected due to its open-endedness, intending to confuse the machine. The series ended in fireworks and dismay for the flesh when the artificial intelligence computer played a knight sacrifice in the final game. A sacrifice, a move in which a player gives up a piece in exchange for a piece of lower value, is a move that had previously been reserved for humans exclusively. To play one effectively, the player must analyse many permutations and assess whether the potential gain justifies the cost. In Deep Blue’s case, it did not arrive at this move on its own, as it had been programmed into its opening database that morning by skilled players. Deep Blue went on to win this match, and ever since AI has marched on.

Modern chess AIs reject all the common wisdom of the game, playing sacrifices with little regard for material totals, and willingly entering into incredibly precarious positions that a human grandmaster wouldn’t dare play. This is because we sapiens often evaluate chess positions using intuition. We look at the board and feel the position using our prior experience to inform us. Thoughts like “that weak king could lead to problems”, “my pieces are far more active”, and “her position is paralysed” come to mind. This sometimes leads us astray, leading us to be afraid of threats that aren’t there. Chess AIs can navigate positions that resemble minefields using calculated steps, analysing every relevant permutation with blistering speed. While a young Kasparov was rising to the top of the chess world, cognitive psychologists were learning about the nature of the human brain. We can run permutations like computers do, but we do it nowhere near as efficiently, and it requires a great amount of effort, creating a fundamental difference in the way humans and machines approach tasks with well-defined rules such as chess. Modern chess AIs will always beat the best representatives of humankind, and as such the best players are now students of the machine.

While AIs have dominated the world of well-defined games, we have taken solace in the idea that no machine could gain mastery of the distinctly human endeavour of art. Our complex brains are wired with richly interconnected neurons that allow us to store experiences and support symbolic thinking that is