The Most Human Human (16 page)

Now, every time Deep Blue starts a game, from that standard initial position of chess, it gets cranking on those 300 million positions a second, looks around for a while, and makes its choice. Because it’s a computer, and unless it has randomness specifically programmed in, it’s likely to be the
same
choice. Every time.

Doesn’t that seem like a lot of effort? A waste of electricity, from the environmental perspective alone?

What if we just calculated it
once
and memoized it, that is,
wrote down
what we decided—and then we simply
always did that?

Well—and what if we started doing this game after game, position after position?

And what if we were able to upload databases of hundreds of thousands of grandmaster games and write them down, too?

And what if we looked at every professional game ever played by Garry Kasparov and did some 300 million positions/second analysis
ahead of time
of the best responses to the positions likely to come up against him? What if we did, in fact, several
months
of analysis ahead of time? And, while we’re at it, what if we employed a secret team of human grandmasters to help the process along?

But I’m making it sound more sinister than it was. First of all, Kasparov knew it was happening. Second, it’s what all professional chess players do before all professional chess games: all the top players have “seconds,” slightly weaker professional players who prepare analysis—personalized for the opponent—before a match or tournament. This, in addition to the massive repertoire of openings and opening theory that all top players know. That’s how the game is played. And this corpus of pre-played positions, untold thousands, if not millions, of them, this difference between discovery and memory, is called
the book
.

All chess games begin from the exact same position. Because there are only so many moves you can make from that starting position, games will naturally take a while to differentiate themselves. Thus, a database of, say, a million games will have a million examples of a player making a move from that initial configuration; all other configurations will be a diminishing fraction of that. The more popular lines
⁶
maintain that “density” of data longer, sometimes beyond 25 moves, whereas the more unpopular or offbeat lines might peter out much more quickly. (The world’s top computer program in recent years, Rybka, supposedly has certain lines in the Sicilian “booked” up to 40 moves, or longer than many
games
—for instance, only one game in the Kasparov–Deep Blue rematch went to move 50.)

At the other side: once enough pieces have been taken off the board, you begin to arrive at situations where the computer can
simply preprocess and record every single possible configuration of those pieces. For example, the simplest endgame would perhaps be king and queen vs. king—three pieces on the board. That makes for, let’s see, 64
X
63
X
62
=
249,984 positions (minus some illegal ones, like when the kings are touching), and if you factor in the horizontal and (in this case) vertical symmetry of the board, you’re down to at most 62,496. Very manageable. Once you start adding pieces, it gets progressively hairier, but all positions involving six or fewer pieces have already been “solved.” This includes positions like some rook-and-knight versus two-knight endings, where, for instance, every move leads to a draw with perfect play except one—with which the strong side can, with inhumanly perfect and unintuitive play, force a checkmate in 262 moves.
⁷
That used to be the record, actually; but now programmers Marc Bourzutschky and Yakov Konoval have found a seven-piece endgame with a forced mate in 517.

Positions like this seem to me to be vaguely evil—there’s absolutely nothing you can say about them to make them make sense. No way to answer the question, “Why is that the best move?” other than by simply pointing to the move tree and saying, “I don’t know, but that’s what it says.” There is no explanation, no verbal translation, no intuition that can penetrate the position. “To grandmasters, it may turn out that the dismaying message of the latest computer analysis is that
concepts do not always work
in the endgame” (emphasis mine), the
New York Times
wrote in 1986, and quoted U.S. Chess Federation administrator, and grandmaster, Arthur Bisguier: “We’re looking for something esthetic in chess—logic is esthetic. This bothers me philosophically.”
⁸

Maybe, as a person who is always, always theorizing, always, always verbalizing, this is what disturbs me, too: there is no such thing to
be done. Computers’ lightning-fast but unintuitive exploration of the game tree is known as the “brute force” method to game AI. This is what the “brute” in “brute force” means to me; this is what’s brute about it. No theory. No words.

Anyway, these tables are known as “endgame databases” or “endgame tables,” or “tablebases” or “telebases,” but we’re fairly safe in calling them “books.” The principle—look up a position and play the prescribed move—is the same.

So: there’s an opening book, and an ending book.

The middle game—where the pieces have moved around enough so that the uniform starting position is a distant memory, but there’s enough firepower on the board so that the endgame is still far off—is where games are most different, most unique.

“The whole strategy in solving a game is to shrink that middle part until it disappears, so your beginning game and your endgame connect,” says Rutgers University computer scientist Michael Littman.

“Fortunately,” says Kasparov, “the two ends—opening research and endgame databases—will never meet.”

Letter writing is a great example of how “opening book” and “endgame book” occur in human relations. Every schoolchild learns the greetings and closings of a letter. They’re so formalized, ritualized, that, well, computers can do them. If I end a paragraph in MS Word, and begin a new paragraph “Your,” I immediately see a tiny yellow box with “Yours truly” in it. If I hit return, it auto-completes. If I type “To who,” the “m it may concern” auto-completes. “Dear S” gives me “ir or Madam,” “Cord,” “ially,” etc.

We’re literally taught this “opening book” and “ending book” in schools. Then we go through life with our ears out—whether we know it or not—for subtle trends and indications of connotation, of context, of fashion. “What’s up” originally felt awkward to me as a kid, imitative and unnatural, inauthentic—I couldn’t say it, I found, without
some kind of quotation marks—but it became as natural to me as “Hi.” Then I watched, a few years later, the same process happen to my parents: their first few “What’s up’s” seeming like pitiful attempts to be “hip,” and then increasingly I found I barely noticed. Abbreviations and truncations like “What up” and “Sup,” which seemed poised to take over the hip-greeting spot among the cool kids of my middle school, never quite made it. When I started negotiating the tricky formal-yet-informal, subordinate-yet-collegial space of email correspondence with my professors in college and then graduate school, my instinct was to close with “Talk to you soon,” but gradually I began to wonder if that didn’t feel like a coded demand for promptness on their part, which could be read as impolite. I observed, imitated, and quickly warmed to the closing “Best,” which then over some months started to feel curt; at some point I switched to “All the best,” which is my old standby these days. Etiquette is a bit like fashion: you never quite stop wising up to it.

And
, I should add, it’s a bit like fashion in that you should be careful where you get your advice from: this afternoon I idly Googled “business letter closings,” and the top hit is a list that includes “Adios” and “Ta ta.” I don’t think so.

When I started translating poetry, and began an email correspondence with a Venezuelan writer in Spanish—which I do not use conversationally very much, and certainly had never written emails to native speakers in before—I quickly learned and began mimicking the author’s “Estimado amigo” opening and “Salud y poesía!” or “Recibe un abrazo fraterno” closings. I remember looking up websites that showed traditional Spanish greetings and closings, but couldn’t trust them: you never know what sounds too stiff or too casual, too old-fashioned or too newfangled—not to mention the effects of all the national and regional deviations among the Spanish-speaking world. This is seriously tricky territory. I want to personalize my own openings and closings, but it’s a delicate thing: without a broader sample of what gets used, I’m hopelessly out of my depth. So I repeat back the few greetings and closings I know.

Try starting or, even worse, ending a conversation with a non-stock phrase. It feels almost unmanageably awkward, abrupt. You can barely
think
of something non-stock to say; if you do think it up, you can barely bring yourself to say it. The ritual tugs hard at us.

It’s pretty clear that if you want to get a flavor for a conversation by sampling, say, one or two sentences at random, you don’t sample from the beginning or the end; you sample from the middle.

It’s odd, in a way, how much etiquette and social ritual—which is not the same thing as formality, as, for instance, the long and elaborately choreographed handshakes you used to see in the 1980s and ’90s go to show—threaten, and it is a threat of sorts, to lengthen those “books.”

“Of course, the culture writes … first, and then we write …,” says playwright Charles Mee.

And when I write a letter, my culture gets the first word and, other than my name, the last.

I can express myself through my
choice
of openings/greetings, but, in some sense, the words aren’t mine. It isn’t me saying them.

Fortunately the two ends will never meet, says Kasparov. But I think we’ve all—haven’t we?—had that experience, the conversation that plays itself
entirely
out, the conversation where the formalities of the greeting reach all the way to meet the formalities of the closing, the conversation that at some level, as Kasparov puts it, “doesn’t even count” because it has probably been had, verbatim, before.

As it turns out, this is the conversation that the bots want to have in a Turing test. The conversation that the confederates are, in a fairly tangible way, fighting against (if keystrokes can be blows). The statistical, cultural, ritual regularities of human interaction are the weaknesses that these machines exploit.

Grandmaster games are said to begin with a
novelty
, which is the first move of the game that exits the book. It could be the fifth, it could be
the thirty-fifth. We think about a chess game as beginning with move one and ending with checkmate. But this is not the case. The game begins when it gets out of book, and it ends when it goes into book. Like electricity, it only sparks in the gaps.
⁹

The opening book, in particular, is massive. The game may end before you get out, but it doesn’t
begin
until you do. Said differently, you may not get out alive; on the other hand, you’re not alive
until
you get out.

Like many people in the competitive chess world, both Deep Blue’s developers and Garry Kasparov subscribe to a kind of metaphysics of the book: the book isn’t the person. Deep Blue’s lead engineer, Feng-hsiung Hsu, has quotations about wanting to play “the World Champion, not his home preparation against our openings”; Kasparov says the same thing about the machine.

So the book is not the person—and the book is not the game:
“Today’s game doesn’t even count as a game because probably it has been published before elsewhere.” An extremely strong statement: a game of chess that fails to get out of book is not a game of chess at all.

A “real” game or no, here it is, with some of the original live commentary: Deep Blue (white) v. Kasparov (black), 1997, Game 6.