Garry Kasparov

“In 2016, nineteen years after my loss to Deep Blue, the Google-backed AI project DeepMind and its Go-playing offshoot AlphaGo defeated the world’s top Go player, Lee Sedol. More importantly, as also as predicted, the methods used to create AlphaGo were more interesting as an IA Project than anything that had produced the top chess machines. It uses machine learning and neural networks to teach itself how to play better, as well as other sophisticated techniques beyond the usual show more alpha-beta search. Deep Blue was the end; AlphaGo is a beginning.”

In “Deep Thinking - Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins” by Garry Kasparov, Mig Greengard

My personal experience with Go dates back at least a decade. I remember getting slaughtered every time by the free GNUgo software, just as I had been by every human opponent for the last 20 years. Never got the hang of it, though I was school chess captain back in the day. Totally different mindset. I first came across it in a little-remembered crime series called 'The Man in Room 17', with Richard Vernon and Denholm Ellit eponymously solving crimes without leaving their office, where they were always playing go. I also remember a funny little story while I was attending the British Council. Back in the 80s, a Korean guy gave me a game. After every move I played, he stifled a laugh and started a rapid fire of, "No! Cos you purrin ['put in', I presume] there, then I purrin here, after you purrin there an' I purrin here, you lose these piece" None of which made anything clearer. At chess, the first (okay, tenth) time I got mated on the back row by a rook, I learned not to leave the king behind a wall of pawns. Never got my head round the simplest 'joseki' (corner opening) at Go. Beautifully elegant game though.

When reading about the game in Kasparov’s book, I just got sidetracked. Back in the day, along with Chess, I tried to develop a Go AI engine. Sad to say, I could never build it to my full satisfaction; I was able to beat it 9 out of 10 times. Not so with chess. My AI Chess developed in C, if I may say so, was quite good. Does AlphaGo's success tell us something about the mindfulness of its technology, or does it instead tell us something about the mindlessness of games like chess and Go? Back in the day I studied AphaGo's performance, and impressed though I was by its playing strength, I did notice that it seemed to not understand two basic concepts of Go called "sente" (seizing the initiative) and "aji" (leaving a rock in the road for the opponent to trip over later), as was evidenced by opportunities it missed. What is quite remarkable is that AlphaGo doesn't understand a single thing about Go, except how to count the final score! AlphaGo circumvents the problem of understanding the toy world of Go by using two mathematical tricks: (1) learning knee-jerk reactions and (2) statistically sensible guesswork. A knee-jerk reaction is an automatic reaction to an event that seems to match a pattern; we rely upon such reactions to avoid dangers such as the edge of a cliff or a fire. Such reactions are essential for survival, but they are also unreliable because what we think we see is not always what is there. A pretty face does not necessarily imply a pretty mind. Anyone who has used Google's search engine will know that whereas it is superb at finding information, it is also somewhat clueless as it pulls up a wastepaper basketful of irrelevant snow as well as the one or two nuggets you were looking for. Because Google doesn't speak English. It knows nothing about the world we live in so relies instead solely upon statistical pattern matching to find its answers, much the same as IBM's Jeopardy champ "Watson" does. Jeopardy and document search are tasks well-suited to mindless association-seeking. AlphaGo is of the same breed as Google search and Watson; there are nuances of difference in their pattern-matching algorithms, but the underlying principle is the same: they all search for matching patterns, without troubling to understand what the patterns mean in terms of an ontology of cause and effect. In AlphaGo's case, the patterns it looks for are ones it has inferred by using an artificial intelligence technology called an "(artificial) neural network" that has had some success in learning to recognise a specific object in photographs - most famously, whether there is a cat in a YouTube video.

A Go game in progress is nothing more complicated than a very simple digital photograph, made of just 19x19 pixels, each of which can have just one of three colours: black, white, or empty. So people thought that what works for seeing cats in videos might also work for seeing good moves in Go.

And it does.

In convolutions of artificial neurons, information flows both ways through a stratified network. They are capable of learning patterns more complex than simple one-way networks - although perhaps it would be better to say that they can learn probable patterns, since the mathematics they use creates a probability spectrum of possible identifications. And that is just what's needed to play Go against people, for not even a Go grand-master can say unequivocally what is the best move in the middle of a game. AlphaGo's neural network was trained by showing it what good players did in over 30 million positions taken from a database of expert-level games. It produces a spectrum of knee-jerk reaction good move possibilities, but it doesn't stop there. It goes on to imagine what might happen in the future. AlphaGo's future-guessing methods are different from those used by Deep Blue to defeat chess champ Gary Kasparov, but both their methods are essentially brute-force techniques, relying on sampling millions of possible sequences rather than examining a few pertinent lines by goal-directed knowledge-based search.

AlphaGo can do one thing that Deep Blue could not: it can learn. Right now, it is learning to improve its stockpile of patterns by playing itself every day and teaching itself which moves worked out well during those experiments. However, the rate of improvement of a convolutional neural network reduces over time, so there is every reason to doubt that AlphaGo will become strong enough to beat Lee Sedol.

Nevertheless, both Deep Blue and AlphaGo have reached a game-playing ability higher than 99% of those of us who have also tried to play chess or Go, so we humans should perhaps hang our heads in shame at being so incompetent at reasoning that an unreasoning machine can better us at games we thought to be intellectual challenges requiring sophisticated strategy and tactics! However, although computers can now beat us at board games as well as see a cat in a video, we need not fear that they are about to take over the world and turn us into their domesticated animals. The 0.1% have already won that game.

NB: I closely followed the match between Deep Blue and Kasparov at the time. The 6th (last) game was especially unfathomable. I remember thinking how could Kasparov play into a well-known opening trap in the Caro-Kann. WTF? When a world champion plays like a beginner, there is not much to be said, and much to be sad about. It wasn’t that Deep Blue “outmaneuvered” Kasparov, it was that Kasparov defeated himself. My disenchantment with chess started with this specific game. This match was a travesty and I never recovered from it. show less

This is a really excellent and important book, still important two years after publication and with a new president in office. Kasparov is intelligent, knowledgeable, thoughtful, has watched Russia's transition from communism to Putinism from the inside, and has been actively involved in pro-democracy, anti-Putin resistance for years. There's a lot to be learned here, and you're making a mistake if you don't read this book.

But I have one criticism, and it's a big one.

Kasparov's entirely show more natural and appropriate focus on the concerns of his own country, especially since that country is a major nuclear power, has resulted in some major blind spots. That's what I'm going to talk about.

One of his great concerns is that morality should play a role in foreign policy. I totally agree with him on that. Unfortunately, he thinks Ronald Reagan and at least the first term of George W. Bush are examples of moral clarity in foreign policy. Reagan told Gorbachev to tear down that wall! GWB didn't turn back from taking down Saddam Hussein like his wimpy father did! (That's hyperbole; Kasparov doesn't call Bush 41 a wimp.) They made western democratic values a key factor in foreign policy decisions!

Except, of course, they didn't, and it's only possible to think they did by a laser-focus on US-Russia relations.

They did, however, talk a lot about morality in foreign policy, while doing some utterly outrageous and, in GWB's case, seriously destabilizing thing.

Reagan did tell Gorbachev to tear down that wall. His strong stance on related matters did contribute to helping break up the USSR. But he also (1) traded arms for hostages to Iran, (2) to raise money to fund right-wing rebel forces to overthrow the very suspect but democratically elected left-wing forces led by Daniel Ortega, (3) a policy which had been decisively rejected more than once by the American people and our elected representatives. You can't support democracy while rejecting the right of democratic peoples to make decisions you disagree with. Even if you believe selling arms to Iran to get hostages released and to fund the activities of forces opposing a distasteful but lawfully elected foreign leader was a good idea, the American people still had the right to disagree with you, and to vote for people who disagree with you.

It doesn't get better when we look at George W. Bush, not even in his first term.

There's nothing moral about lying your country in to a war.

GWB built a structure of lies to convince the American people and the world that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks, or supported Al Qaeda, or was pursuing the building of nuclear weapons, or perhaps all three. None of these things was true. Yes, Saddam Hussein was a bad guy. No, he wasn't the source of the 9/11 attacks. Religious fanatic Osama bin Laden and secularist Saddam Hussein hated each other; they weren't working together. Saddam Hussein wasn't at that time trying to restart either a nuclear weapons program or a chemical weapons program.

And Bush 41, even though Saddam was really a bad guy, wasn't wrong to turn back from Baghdad. Taking out Saddam without pouring in enormous resources with a well-thought-out plan for rebuilding Iraq could only destabilize the entire Middle East, increasing the danger to the entire world. Bush 41 said that. No one really listened to him. When GWB quite determinedly shifted as much as possible of the blame for 9/11, as well as dreaming up fantasies of new Iraqi weapons programs, quite a lot of people, at all levels, did try to point out that defeating Saddam would mean occupying Iraq, and that occupying Iraq would require enormous resources to stabilize and rebuild it afterward in order to avoid destabilizing the Middle East. GWB and those around him brushed all objections aside and spun more fantasies, this time about how democracy and western values would just naturally break out in Iraq after Saddam was killed.

It didn't work out that way, and we are still paying the price for the badly conducted war and occupation that GWB led us into under false pretenses.

Lying your country into an unnecessary war isn't moral.

There are other areas where I disagree with Kasparov, but those are areas of simple disagreement. Intelligent people of goodwill can disagree, even profoundly, on many issues. But lying your country into a war under false pretenses, or funding death squads in other countries because you don't like that country's elected government, or trading arms for hostages, are not mere matters of disagreement. They are profoundly immoral, anti-democratic practices.

(Among those mere matters of disagreement are Georgia and Ukraine. He thinks Europe and the US need to get actively, militarily involved in these acts of aggression. I agree that we can't ignore them, and need to find a way to address them, but Europe won't be committing its armies anytime soon, and American armed forces have been run through the wringer for the last decade and a half. Some of that has been for good reasons and some for bad, but, they've been run through the wringer. And getting involved in Ukraine is perilously close to committing one of the Classic Blunders, "Never get involved in a land war in Asia." [It's possible Mr. Kasparov has never either read or seen The Princess Bride. If not, you really should at some point, Mr. Kasparov. If nothing else, it will be fun.] But that, as I think you'll agree, is merely a disagreement, a different view of a real issue that I think naturally concerns him more directly and immediately.)

Having said all that, you may think I disliked this book or think you shouldn't bother to read it. Mr. Kasparov is worth arguing with because he is knowledgeable, thoughtful, and serious. You will learn a lot about Russia, what has happened there, ans why we shouldn't ignore Putin that you won't learn as easily or in as interesting a way anywhere else. You may agree with him on matters where I disagree with him. You may disagree with him where I agree with him.

But read him. And take him seriously.

Highly recommended.

I bought this audiobook. show less

Insofar as chess can be riveting as a spectator sport (despite the fact that Kasparov "won't be deflected into pointless arguments about whether or not chess is a sport", he does maintain that "it contains most of the elements that define all sports" (p. 79)), Deep Thinking had me on the edge of my seat for the first 80% of its pages. In this "long opening," Kasparov traces the history of computer chess, leading up to (and including) his two matches against IBM's Deep Blue (the first, in show more 1996, won by Kasparov, and the second, in 1997, won by Deep Blue).

In the Introduction, Kasparov asks, "Could these machines really play chess at the world championship level? Could they really think?" (p. 3). The answer to the former question has been affirmatively known for 20 years, but it was the answer (or lack thereof) to the latter question that left me wanting. The book's subtitle ("Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins") remains a grey, unanswered area. For the final 20% (or less) of the book, I would've liked a more theoretical discussion of not only this, but also machine learning and artificial intelligence, and perhaps a futuristic view of where it all might lead us. It may just be that Kasparov sticks to his knitting -- he argues early on that being a chess grandmaster is not tantamount to being a genius -- and he may feel unqualified to give his prognostications outside of the game. But it would have made for a richer, more multidimensional work, and pulled Deep Thinking out of the realm of chess nerd Nirvana. show less

I read this after the second invasion of the Ukraine. Kasparov is bang on the money for where Putin was headed. And I’m ashamed to say that I may have been duped by some of Putin’s rationalizations although I’ve never agreed the resort to brutal invasion was ever justified. If only more western leaders had read this book before we got to where we are now, Putin may have been prevented from going as far as he has. Now we’re faced with a much more intractable problem. My one complaint show more with the book is that Kasparov seems to repeat some of the same messages over and over. Makes it tougher to get through. show less