How AI Changed Chess Forever
How AI Changed Chess Forever
Garry Kasparov is perceived by many chess players to be the
greatest chess player in history. After becoming world champion in 1985, he
dominated the game, for almost 20 years, with a dynamic style of play and a
very strong personality. People who do not know much about chess are however
aware that Kasparov is best known for losing to a machine in a chess match. In
1997, Kasparov was beaten by an IBM supercomputer called Deep Blue. To be fair
to him, this was the second match as he convincingly won the first one a year
before, in 1996. However, his defeat introduced the beginning of a new era of
machine mastery over man.
Since then, personal computers have grown more powerful to
the point that even mobile phones are now capable of running chess engines as
powerful as Deep Blue alongside other apps. More significantly, thanks to
progress in artificial intelligence, machines are learning and exploring the
game for themselves and are now surpassing all the top players in the world, as
demonstrated by Google’s Alpha Zero.
Where Deep Blue followed hand-coded rules for playing Chess,
Alpha Zero, a program originally created by the Alphabet subsidiary of DeepMind
in 2017, taught itself to play the game at a grandmaster level simply by
practicing against itself to develop its own understanding of the strategies
and tactics of the game, over and over. Furthermore, Alpha Zero uncovered new
strategic approaches to the game that dazzled chess experts. Today’s top chess
grandmaster like the current world champion, Magnus Carlsen, uses AI to further
his mastery of the game. As Carlsen recently stated in an interview: “I’ve been
influenced by my heroes recently, which is Alpha Zero… In essence, I’ve become a very different
player in terms of style than I was a bit earlier and it’s been a great
ride.” Magnus Carlsen can be said to be
the first chess player to successfully reinvent his style of play, with the
help of Alpha Zero.
Kasparov has stopped playing professionally for years now and
is mostly dwelling in politics as well as AI. His loss against Deep Blue is
well behind him and he acknowledges the importance of the match loss as a
learning experience. A lesson on human humility at its best as the old mindset
from the 1970’s and 1980’s was to think that no computers would ever beat top
players in Chess, Go and Shogi, just
to be proven wrong. International Master Edward Lasker stated in 1978, "My
contention that computers cannot play like a master, I retract. They play absolutely
alarmingly”. In view of this type
of statement that reflected an unrealistic and negative view of software
capabilities in becoming more and more clever at what they are doing, it is not
surprising that Kasparov felt the burden of being the first knowledge worker
whose job was threatened by a machine. Today, he is now questioning: “how we
can turn AI to our advantage”. There is no doubt that AI is here to stay, and
its presence and impacts will be more and more felt over the next coming twenty
years.
We must take into consideration that technology first
destroys jobs then creates new ones but never on the same volume and
scale. We must realise that our education systems have
been training people to act like machines, and the results of misusing human
interaction with technology has been quite destructive as we have developed a
civilisation of mindless doers rather than creators or decision makers. The fact
that we are also not evolving our societies’ infrastructures quickly enough to
be aligned with our technology, has resulted in many of us becoming the victims
of the negatives aspects of disappearing jobs resulting in uncontrollable
unemployment. Instead of making the computing technology become our servant,
more than often we have made it become our master. So now, more than ever, we
must look for opportunities to create new jobs that will emphasise our
strengths and creativity to make
us different from robots. As Kasparov
understood, we must collaborate with AI and not fear it or give it the wrong
win-lose foundation rather than the collaborative model. With old jobs
disappearing, there is a need to
revamp society by creating new industries where we work together with the
machine on an equal stand. But from a political viewpoint, this also mean that
changing the structures of the way we operate in societies also means that we
must introduce comfortable universal basic income, to create a financial
cushion for those who are left behind. Right now, the challenge is either not
fully understood by politician, sociologists, educators, etc… or completely
ignored. This is a totally unacceptable position to be in as it will create major
social unrest and degradation of positive human values before 2040.
There is no doubt that machines are helping us at making
things faster and stronger. Even may be in some cases for some of us as shown
with the Magnus Carlsen example, making us smarter. In any case, where machines
are not yet surpassing humans is in the fact that they are not capable of
transferring knowledge from one open-ended system to another, but of course
they excel in closed systems. For example, AI chess mastery cannot be transferred
to Shogi, the Japanese chess. In this case, AI must start from scratch and
learn new patterns that are unique to Shogi. The human approach to mastering a
game and then learning another similar one could differ as some of the acquired
Chess knowledge would naturally be transmuted into a Shogi compliant framework.
This is a positive sign for humanity as its role with its interaction with AI
will make it an important participant in the dynamic human and machine
relationship.
The traditional fear with technology and nowadays with AI,
has been highlighted for years by Hollywood. From Stanley’s Kubrick’s “2001, a
Space Odyssey” to the multitudes of “Terminators” and “Matrix” films, the fear
of creating a machine that will destroy us, has been an important element in
human psyche. Of course, as the spaceship AI, called HAL, explained in
Kubrick’s film, the mistake in its judgement comes from a human error…
something we tend to forget. If we create technology for carrying over a
win-lose strategy in politics, business, and all other facets of our lives,
then we will create tragedies…. No doubt about that. But let us never forget
that there is an alternative:
collaboration. With collaboration we all win, and then we can finally
create the Eden that our technology can achieve for all human on the Earth. But
we must be clear…. Collaboration must be deployed at all level of human
interactions as there cannot be any exceptions if we want it to prevail. This
is where AI, implemented as a proper collaborative partner, can help humanity
at resolving its multiple social and environmental challenges.
So, the final question is: Do we want to create a world where
collaboration prevails, where AI works with us to achieve it? And, if the
answer to this question is yes, then why do we carry on delegating our
political and social powers to individuals, businesses, institutions, and
political parties who obviously do not care about collaboration? The ultimate
danger is that by doing so, beyond the human suffering this is creating, we are
also maintaining a dangerous political model of countries that as the US
President Obama once stated, solely perpetrates opportunistic agendas.
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