The Most Human Human (18 page)
Read The Most Human Human Online
Authors: Brian Christian
And what of life? Is this kind of “opening randomization,” out-of-book practice useful to us humans, already certain of each other’s humanity but looking, nonetheless, to get in contact with new vectors of it? The more I think about it, the more I think it is.
An old friend and I, as teenagers, used to be in the habit of doing this on long car trips: confident of our ability to riff on anything and in any direction, we’d name a subject out of thin air—“corn” was one of them that I remember—and just figure out what we wanted to say about it. Likewise, I remember a childhood game I had with my father—again, usually in the car—where I’d give him a topic and he’d just start some kind of improvised yarn. One day it might be the Civil War (“You know, the Civil War wasn’t actually very civil at all: there was spitting, name-calling …”), another day, flatbed trucks (“You know, flatbed trucks didn’t always used to be flat: things were constantly rolling off, and no one knew what to do …”).
At a friend’s wedding recently, the bride and groom gave each guest a “Proust questionnaire” to fill out at some point during the evening. It was adapted from a list of questions common in nineteenth-century diary books and famously answered (twice) by writer Marcel Proust, first in 1896 as a young teen, and again at age twenty. (Various contemporary celebrities now answer it on the back page of
Vanity Fair
each month.) The questions include offbeat and revealing things like “On what occasion do you lie?” “What trait do you most deplore in yourself?” “When and where were you happiest?” and “How would you like to die?” My girlfriend and I filled them out, and then we traded forms and read each other’s answers. We are both, I would venture to say, very open and forthright and forthcoming people, and fluent conversationalists—by which I mean to say, whatever emotional depths we hadn’t yet plumbed in our relationship were simply a factor of time and/or of not always knowing the best verbal routes to get there. Reading that questionnaire was a stunning experience: the feeling, one of doubling in an instant our understanding of the other. Proust had helped us do in ten minutes what we’d taken ten months to do on our own.
We don’t always
have
to initiate a conversation with some offbeat never-before-heard utterance, of course. Grandmaster Yasser Seirawan, commentator for the Kasparov–Deep Blue match, in fact criticized Kasparov’s decision to play strange openings:
Well, the mythology of how to play against computers is, they’re loaded to the gills with this fantastic database … and what we ought to do is immediately get them out of their opening library—… I think it’s quite okay to play main-line openings.
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Because why are the opening library’s moves being played and why are they put into the computer? Well, the reason they are is because guys like Garry Kasparov are playing these fantastic moves that become established as the best opening moves. But Garry is constantly reinventing the opening book, so my attitude, if I were Garry, is to say “Look, I’m going to play main-line stuff, the stuff that the computer will play. I’ll go right down—right down the primrose path, and I’ll ambush the computer with an opening novelty that it’s never seen.” And he’s not doing that. Instead he’s saying, “I want a completely unique, original game as early as I possibly can.”
The same can be said conversationally: the reason things get established as the “main lines” is that, by and large,
they work
. This isn’t always true; for instance, Robert Pirsig gives a pretty trenchant takedown of “What’s new?” in
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
, and Yaacov Deyo, the inventor of speed dating, had to go so far as to
ban
the question “So, what do you do for a living?” because it was so ubiquitous and so unproductive. Notice, though, that Seirawan’s
defense of “main-line” openings is contingent on the fact that there
will
be a deviation eventually.
Of course, in the five-minute Turing test (unlike a seven-hour chess match at world-championship time controls) we don’t
have
an “eventually.” If we tread the primrose path in a Turing test, we do it at our peril. Far better, I think, to bushwhack.
Fischer wanted the same thing from chess that Kasparov wanted in his match against Deep Blue, and the same thing that Strauss wants in bar flirtation. It’s what
we
want, chatting with old friends, when our familiar opening book of “Hi!” “Hi! How are you?” “Good, how are you?” “Good!”—which is not so much a conversation per se as a means for
arriving
at one—gives pleasantly way to the expectedly unexpected, awaitedly idiosyncratic veers; it’s what
anyone
wants from
any
conversation, and what artists want from their art: a way to breeze past formalities and received gestures, out of book, and into the real thing.
And the book, for me, becomes a metaphor for the whole of life. Like most conversations and most chess games, we all start off the same and we all end up the same, with a brief moment of difference in between. Fertilization to fertilizer. Ashes to ashes. And we spark across the gap.
1.
See figure “Chess Computer Ratings Over Time,”
Scientific American
, October 1990.
2.
Here I’m using the words “program” and “computer” interchangeably. There’s actually a profound mathematical reason for this, and it’s Turing of all people who found it. It’s known as “computational equivalence,” or the “Church-Turing thesis.”
3.
How something like an array of numbers is represented in computer memory—because you still have to get down from base 10 to base 2 (binary), and from base 2 down to electricity and/or magnetism, etc.—is something I leave to the interested reader to look up in a computer science or computer engineering textbook.
4.
In contrast, this is how many Kasparov could look at: 3.
5.
In essence, Deep Blue v. Kasparov was a matter of the former’s vastly superior (by a factor of roughly 100 million) search speed versus the latter’s vastly superior pruning and heuristics—which moves are worth looking at, and how they bode—what you might call
intuition
.
6.
(move sequences)
7.
Again, most
games
are over in 30 to 40.
8.
The endgame database that they’re referring to is the work, in the 1980s, of Ken Thompson at the very same Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where Claude Shannon wrote the breakthrough paper on computer chess in 1950.
9.
See, e.g., the figure from Jonathan Schaeffer’s landmark
Science
paper on computer checkers, of his program Chinook’s live search-tree analysis looking quite literally like a lightning bolt between the opening and ending book.
10.
Granda is known for being in all likelihood the strongest player, and possibly the only grandmaster, not to study opening theory. Against weaker players, his unpredictability gives him an edge, but against the world’s elite any inaccuracy or imprecision whatsoever in the opening will usually be fatal. The irony is that in the game Seirawan is citing, the one that established “that the move h6 was wrong,” Granda, after tenaciously clinging on for dear life, actually goes on to win.
11.
Hsu claims in
Behind Deep Blue
that most chess programs of the day were programmed specifically to
avoid
8.Nxe6, because, although the best move and only clear refutation of 7 … h6, it led to tricky follow-throughs. He argues that Deep Blue merely called Kasparov’s bluff: that his 7 … h6 was played on the assumption that Deep Blue was muzzled in that line. “A $300,000 gamble,” Hsu calls it. I see the logic, but I don’t buy it. It’s pretty clear Kasparov simply screwed up.
12.
The most famous of which is arguably the “jealous girlfriend opener,” popular enough that by the end of
The Game
two women say to Strauss when he approaches them, “Let me guess. You have a friend whose girlfriend is jealous because he still talks to his ex from college. Like, every guy keeps asking us that. What’s the deal?” See also, e.g., the “cologne opener,” “Elvis opener,” “who lies more opener,” “dental floss opener” …
13.
A small handful of openings are excluded for being simply too bad for one of the players: in general, slightly off-balance openings are fine so long as each player gets a turn with the stronger side.
14.
It’s worth noting that out of the 156 legal starting configurations of the three-move restriction, top checkers program Chinook has only “solved” 34 of them. Go-As-You-Please, though, it has completely locked up.
15.
Indeed, he virtually flabbergasted the commentators, opening the third game of the rematch with 1.d3, a move that is almost unheard of at the grandmaster level (over 43 percent of grandmaster games begin with 1.e4, the most popular; only one in five thousand starts with 1.d3). Jaws dropped. International master Mike Valvo: “Oh my God.” Grandmaster Maurice Ashley: “A cagey move, a shock of shocks in this match. This match has everything.” Grandmaster Yasser Seirawan: “I think we have a new opening move.”
16.
From a 2006 radio interview: “It’s … degenerated down to memorization and prearrangement … Chess, you know, so much depends on opening theory. Champions of, say, the last century, the century before last, they didn’t know nearly as much as, say, I do, and other players know, about opening theory. So, if you just brought them back, you know, from the dead, and they played cold, they wouldn’t do well, because they’d get bad openings … Memorization is enormously powerful … Some kid of fourteen, today, or even younger, could get the opening advantage against [1921–27 world champion José Raúl] Capablanca or especially against the players of the previous century … And maybe they’d still be able to outplay the young kid of today, but maybe not … So it’s really deadly. It’s very deadly. That’s why I don’t like chess anymore … And, you know, [Capablanca] wanted to change the rules already, back in, I think, the ’20s; he said chess was getting played out. And he was right. (Interviewer: ‘It’s even more so now.’) Oh, now, now it’s completely dead. It’s a joke. It’s all just memorization and prearrangement. It’s a terrible game now. (‘And the computers … ’) Yeah. It’s a very
un
-creative game. (‘And everything is known, and there is nothing new.’) Well … let’s not exaggerate. But it … it’s really dead.”
17.
I.e., the most popular, well-trodden, and well-studied ones, the ones with the largest and deepest “books.”
Existence and Essence; Human vs. Hole-Puncher
It’s hard to say we’re lucky when we face a crisis, but we at least have the luxury of knowing that action is called for—of being forced to move. The truest tests of skill and intuition come when everything looks quiet and we aren’t sure what to do, or if we should do anything at all
.
–CARRY KASPAROV
One of the classic thought experiments in existentialism is the difference between humans and hole-punchers, in other words, the difference between people and machines.
Here’s the crucial thing. The
idea
of the hole-puncher exists before the hole-puncher exists. Before the hole-puncher you got at Staples, there was a hole-puncher factory built to make that hole-puncher to particular design specifications that someone drafted up and had in mind. Before the hole-puncher was the idea of paper, and holes, and of punching holes in paper, and of making a machine for that purpose. As soon as the machine exists, it is playing the part assigned it by its designers. You buy it and put paper in it, and it punches holes into your paper. This is its essence, and to use it as a doorstop or paperweight or hammer or cudgel is to go against the grain of this essence.
The essence of the hole-puncher precedes its existence. We humans are not like this, argue the existentialists. With us, existence comes first.
A human being, writes Jean-Paul Sartre, “exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself.” What defines us is that we
don’t
know what to do and there
aren’t
any revelations out there for us waiting to be found. Profoundly disoriented and lacking any real mooring, we must make it all up from scratch ourselves, each one of us, individually.
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We arrive in a bright room, wet, bloody, bewildered, some stranger smacking us and cutting what had been, up to that point, our only source of oxygen and food. We have no idea what is going on. We don’t know what we’re supposed to do, where we’re supposed to go, who we are, where we are, or what in the world, after all this trauma, comes next. We wail.
Existence without essence is very stressful. These are not problems that the hole-puncher can understand.
Existence-and-essence arguments like these are actually rather familiar to most early-twenty-first-century Americans, because they are basically the “intelligent design” debate going on in our school system. A human being
is
a designed thing, the intelligent-design camp says, and in that sense very
much
like a paper cutter or (their preferred metaphor) a pocket watch. Along with this comes the idea of
discovering
your own “design”/function/purpose as you go through life. In children’s book form, it’d be the watch who, one day, learns that he was made to tell people the time. Our everyday idioms are full of such references: “Man, that guy was
born
to speed skate,” we say of a trunk-thighed Olympian.
The existentialists would protest: purposes aren’t discovered or
found, because they don’t exist ahead of us. Purpose, in their view, can never be found, but must be
invented
.
Of course, thighs
are
made to contract and move the legs. One of the intriguing things about the existentialist argument is that it is a kind of more-than-the-sum-of-the-parts argument. My bicep has a function. My cells’ tRNA has a function. I don’t.
(Interestingly, even the opponents of intelligent design, supporters of Darwinism, are sometimes guilty of making life sound more teleological, goal-oriented, than it is. Harvard zoologist Stephen Jay Gould, for instance, takes pains in his 1996 book
Full House
to show that it’s inappropriate to point, as many do, to the emergence of a complex species like ourselves from a world that was mostly bacterial as evidence that there’s any notion of biological “progress” at work in the world.
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