A grandmaster’s rage against the machine

Deep Thinking by Garry Kasparov John Murray 304pp £20 The Week Bookshop £16.99

“Garry Kasparov is arguably the greatest chess player of all time,” said John Naughton in The Observer. For two decades, until his retirement in 2005, he was the game’s dominant force, holding the world No. 1 ranking for 225 out of 228 months. Since retiring, he has become a leading human rights activist and a prominent critic of Vladimir Putin. Yet to many, Kasparov is probably best known as the “first world champion to be beaten by a machine”. In 1997, he narrowly lost a six-match game to the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue – an event hailed at the time as a “major milestone” in the march towards artificial intelligence. Twenty years later, at a time when fears about computer intelligence have become “existential”, Kasparov has revisited the experience in a timely, thoughtful memoir. Part “page-turning thriller”, part meditation on the idea of thinking machines, Deep Thinking is both gripping and “measured”.

Kasparov (pictured), a “sore loser” by his own admission, has never fully come to terms with his most famous loss, said Daniel Johnson in The Times. One “crucial fact” that emerges is that the contest was imbalanced: whereas Kasparov “thought he was taking part in a scientific experiment”, the IBM team, eager to capitalise on massive publicity, had “one aim only: to win”. As such, they weighed the match heavily in their favour, refusing Kasparov the chance to study Deep Blue’s previous games (though they had access to his); and even allegedly hiring a Russian-speaking guard to eavesdrop on him. But Kasparov was also tactically outmanoeuvred and, eventually, “emotionally crushed”; in the second game he made a terrible mistake, resigning when he could have forced a draw. Today, he can “hardly bear to look at these games” and finds his play “unrecognisable”.

One thing the book makes clear is that the significance of the computer’s victory was, in fact, vastly overstated, said Tim SmithLaing in The Daily Telegraph. Deep Blue’s win was less a triumph of artificial intelligence – “the Brain’s Last Stand”, as Newsweek called it – than a demonstration of the “brute force calculation that computers are so good at”. It was not a “thinking machine”; it made calculations, refined using algorithms designed by a team of grand masters. Quite apart from what Deep Thinking reveals about AI, however, it will prove enormously absorbing to chess aficionados. For them, reading Kasparov’s “inside track” on this gripping battle will be “like reading Nelson’s post-match analysis of Trafalgar”.