Garry Kasparov is most probably the greatest chess player in history. He became a world champion in 1985. Two decades after that, he dominated the game with a ferocious style of play and an equally fierce swagger.
Nevertheless, outside the chess world, Kasparov is best known for losing to a machine. At the heights of his power, in 1997, Kasparov was intimidated and crushed by an IBM supercomputer called Deep Blue. After his loss, the shock waves were sent across the world. It seemed to herald a new machine era of mastery over man.
The years since have put things into perspective—personal computers grew powerful and vastly. Now smartphones can run chess engines as powerful as Deep Blue alongside the other apps. Thanks to recent progress in artificial intelligence, more significantly, machines are exploring and learning the game for themselves.
Deep Blue kept in line with hand-coded rules for playing chess. AlphaZero is a program revealed in 2018, by the Alphabet subsidiary DeepMind. So, Alphazero taught itself how to play chess at a grandmaster level by merely practicing over and over. Most remarkable is that AlphaZero uncovered new approaches for the game that dazzled chess experts.
Kasparov returned to the scene of his famous Deep Blue defeat last week. He was in the ballroom of a New York hotel. He had a debate with artificial Intelligence experts organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Will Knight is a Wired senior writer. Garry Gasparov talked with him to discuss chess, strategy for staying a step ahead of machines, and artificial intelligence.
Chess
Garry Kasparov said that at the end of the day of the match, it was not a curse, but it was a blessing. He thinks that he was part of something important.
He says that the 1997 experience was not pleasant. Nevertheless, it helped the chess player to understand the future of machine-human collaboration. Kasparov thought he was unbeatable.
He was the first knowledge worker whose job was threatened by machines.
People should recognize the element of inevitability.
Every technology is destroying jobs before they create jobs. For example, in the United States, only 4 percent of jobs require human creativity. Thus, 96 percent of jobs are computer jobs.
Garry Kasparov says that we humans need to create jobs that will emphasize our strengths. Technology is one of the reasons why some of us are still alive.
The world needs new industries and new foundations that will serve us. Chess experts added that they need to create a financial cushion for those who need it most.
Magnus Carlsen is the current World Chess Champion. He said that he had studied AlphaZero games. The current World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen also said that he discovered certain connections, some aspects of the game. Carlsen said he could have thought about the move, nevertheless never dated to considered it. Now everything is possible.
In the current world, it is the fact that computers can dominate the game. That fact is creating a feeling of uneasiness. Nevertheless, it has expanded interest in chess.
