Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine / Canada/UK / 2003

Once in a while I waste some time at work by playing ridiculously easy on-line games via Orbitz advertisements that pop up on the ESPN website that I surf at least once a day. Occasionally I have to play the computer and I always wonder why it’s so easy to beat the technological beast. Obviously, the answer is related to marketing purposes, but logically the computer should clean my clock every time, especially since these games (beach volleyball, shuffleboard, pool) usually just have to do with angles and speed, hence the calculation should be relatively simple for a computer. Yet, the computer always makes “human” mistakes, which usually guarantee my victory so that I can feel more confident about my own abilities as a human who is able to vanquish the machine in a close match-up (and hence play the game and surf the website longer).

In Jayanti’s documentary, Garry Kasparov spends so much time worrying about a chess move (and a chess mistake) that his computer opponent, Deep Blue, makes that he is convinced is far too human, that he forgets that he is in the midst of making a rather crucial human error. Kasparov is so flustered by the move that he was unprepared for that his ego takes a huge blow, which he cannot recover from. His weakness is then exploited by his opponents – the IBM team – who become fully aware of just how rattled Garry has become. Kasparov is then forced to admit defeat, even though he could easily have forced a draw. Somehow you get the sense that a draw wouldn’t satisfy Kasparov once the “human” move comes into play.

Interestingly, throughout the doc, Kasparov and his team keep making references to entities (computers, corporations, governments) no longer behaving rationally and acting more like humans. What they never seem to grasp is that all these entities are actually manifestations of human behavior and that these entities are simply in the early stages of development. What also becomes clear is that ego makes Kasparov continually view himself as a single man battling an entire system. However, such a perspective becomes weakened when Kasparov is humbled by his old rival Anatoli Karpov long after communism has been discarded in Russia. Yet Kasparov still naively craves a rematch with Deep Blue. Kasparov seems to think he can stay ahead of the advancement of computer technology, which has already rendered Deep Blue obsolete. Kasparov’s determination, knowledge, and passion are impressive, but he seems to forget that the IBM programmers equal him in these characteristics, though their fields of expertise differ. He doesn’t seem to understand it’s a game that he will always be destined to lose eventually simply because he is human.

by Chiranjit Goswami | Source: ThinkFilm DVD
23 Jan 2006 11:23 AM | Submit Comment