Less human and becoming better for it

When computers join the game, do you trust your intuition over solid data?

IF playing chess is a hobby of yours, then you will probably know that the World Chess Championship is currently taking place in London. World No.1 Magnus Carlsen is facing World No.2 Fabiano Caruana – man on man, one on one – in a battle of wits and wills over chequerboard.

These modern-day gladiators pit against each other to calculate the best moves over the board, all on their own.

Except it’s not quite true, of course.

Each player has a team of seconds to help them prepare. These assistants, who are strong players in their own right, peruse the opponents’ past games trying to find potential weaknesses and strengths. And then they look for the “right” moves using computers.

The truth is, sometimes up to the first 20 moves of a game may have already been prepared, with each player hoping to be the first to spring a “surprise” move. The role of computers in top-level chess is now commonplace and people who play top-level chess really represent a hybrid of the best man and machine have to offer.

Computers don’t only help the players but the fans too. I don’t think most people would describe watching a chess game as being “fun” and even I would be pressed to sit still and watch a single game for hours on end (the exception being if it was a game I was playing).

On top of that, you have to understand how to play chess to appreciate and enjoy watching games, unlike for other sports.

That’s why it helps a lot if you have expert commentators. They are usually grandmasters in their own right and give insight into what kinds of tactics and plans are possible from certain positions, and if you’re lucky, they’re entertaining as well.

They also use technology, usually running chat rooms so that the audience can ask questions online.

One thing they don’t seem to use the computers for is to analyse games for commentary purposes. It’s a little strange, because they do respond to viewers in the chat room, and those members of public use computers to help highlight moves, but the commentators themselves don’t seem to run analysis programmes.

These commentators do use computers in their post-game analyses, so it isn’t that they are averse to them.

You see something similar in the corporate world. A study conducted of CEOs around the world by management consultancy KPMG found that the majority of those surveyed chose to “overlook data-driven insights to follow intuition instead”.

The argument they make is that they sometimes find that what the computer says contradicts their own experience or intuition, and thus they are not confident about the accuracy of predictive analytics.

This result somewhat puzzles me. Is it saying that these leaders, who are presumably among the most informed people in our society, don’t think results generated by computers are good enough? Or is it that they don’t know?

I can accept the argument by chess commentators that they want to give a human perspective on a game being played live, to possibly peek into the mind of the best players in the world, so that you, the audience, can empathise with the competitors.

In other words, you don’t want to be biased by the “right” answer too quickly, because it is the journey following down the path of imperfect choices that make chess interesting.

Perhaps CEOs feel that computers can never completely capture that element that makes us human. What about creativity? Intuition?

Well, I wrote previously about the Alpha Zero project, where a chess program used a self-learning AI which seemed to make “intuitive” moves in games.

And let’s look at other games, such as poker.

Poker is a game seen to be very human, because there is bluffing and guessing.

Well, guess what? In January 2017, a programme named Libratus went up against four professional human players and beat them all. (Although the humans lost the challenge, they still went home with US$20,000 (RM84,000) each as compensation.)

I think the reason why humans prefer to trust themselves over computers is pride. Or even hubris. We want to look down on computers, we talk about the fear that they are taking over our jobs and way of life, when in fact it is yet another element of change.

I think the real value in the ever-growing power of computing ability is to accept and embrace the change they are bringing. The regulation surrounding it should not be about what we fear, but about what we can do.

It reminds me about what one speaker said about GDPR (the European laws related to data privacy), that it’s not about what companies can’t do in their businesses, it’s about what they should do if they want to do it properly.

You are beginning to see this in terms of how computers are used in chess.

As mentioned before, grandmasters accept it as commonplace for preparation and analysis, and I know some correspondence players (those who play one move per day over mail or the Internet) who think it’s okay to use computers to “suggest” moves in the middle and end game.

On top of that, to discourage over-preparation, there are variations such as chess 720 where the starting positions of some pieces have been randomised.

Perhaps the ultimate are chess tournaments played exclusively by computers.

They’re not popular to watch, but there are those out there who select games for analysis. Sometimes it’s to feature a new idea in the opening, but other times, it’s to highlight a computer doing something it isn’t supposed to: Playing like a human.

Logic is the antithesis of emotion but mathematecian-turned-scriptwriter Dzof Azmi’s theory is that people need both to make sense of life’s vagaries and contradictions. Write to Dzof at star2@thestar.com.my.

I think the real value in the ever-growing power of computing ability is to accept and embrace the change they are bringing.