Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine - The Fallacy of an Old Theme

The following review was originally published on cinekklesia on July 13, 2005.

With new discoveries regarding our neurological makeup hitting the news constantly, perhaps the "Man vs. Machine" theme will fade into a quaint obscurity, replaced by the debate over whether Man is a machine. However, in the meantime, we remain fixated with the tools and toys that we have created, constantly fretting over whether we are going to "lose control" of our machines, whether they will come to surpass (and dominate) us.

Vikram Jayanti's Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine (2003) touches upon this fear, among other themes. Documenting the second contest between Garry Kasparov, commonly regarded as the greatest chess player ever, and Deep Blue, IBM's attempt at building a computer that could not just compete, but win, at the highest levels of competitive chess, Jayanti takes us on a fascinating, behind-the-scenes tour of the emotional tumult, egos, and conspiracy theories surrounding this legendary showdown.

While Kasparov handily won his first match against Deep Blue in 1996, his second performance in 1997 proved less-than-stellar: He lost 3.5 to 2.5 in six games. Not only was Kasparov crushed after his defeat, but during the match, he suffered from extreme stress and perhaps paranoia. For instance, he and his supporters were convinced that IBM hired operatives to spy on Kasparov's hotel room from the windows of adjacent buildings. In addition, during the film, we join Kasparov on a tour of the hotel where the contest took place, winding down hidden corridors and back rooms where IBM reportedly prevented outsider access (what corporate shenanigans did transpire in those back rooms?). Finally, in a brash move after his second-game loss to Deep Blue, Kasparov publicly implied that the IBM team was cheating, arguing that there was a major difference between how Deep Blue played between the first and second game: in the former, it played like a machine, while in the latter, it played differently...like, well, a human. Did an IBM programmer intervene during Game 2?

It appears that Jayanti wants us to believe that something sneaky was afoot, since he stacks up a long list of circumstantial evidence against IBM. Besides noting the aforementioned accusations, the documentary crew interviews a reporter who says that he was forcibly detained by IBM after word got out about Kasparov's accusatory implications; they talk with Kasparov's publicist, who flatly stats that IBM was playing games of psychological warfare against the world champion; and they point out how IBM stopped all work on Deep Blue after it beat Kasparov (and after IBM's stock subsequently climbed 15 percent), implying that the computer giant had no intellectual interest in the project but rather, was concerned solely with PR.

While Jayanti puts forward a plausible hypothesis (or conspiracy theory, depending on your preference), he lacks the hard evidence to make any of the accusations stick. I certainly can believe that a large institution, such as IBM, would be willing and able to play dirty tricks in order to achieve its ends; however, fairness and civility dictate that I consider it innocent until proven otherwise. Lacking hard evidence, Jayanti should have taken his documentary on a new path, asking more intriguing questions: Even if IBM could prove conclusively that it did not cheat, would that matter? Was Kasparov ever playing "just" a machine?

Kasparov had bet his reputation on the fact that he could beat a cold, soulless computer, an entity which could "just" run millions of calculations per second, but which could not analyze a game as a conceptual, even abstract, whole. His frustration stemmed from the fact that the Deep Blue of the second game seemed to have a human-like command of its moves; it seemed to operate at a more "intelligent" level, beyond that of mere calculation. He knew that he would look bad losing to the machine that he so despised, and his frustration was compounded by his suspicions that he really was losing to a conniving programmer. It's one thing to be humiliated; it's quite another to be humiliated by duplicitous means that only you can see.

At this point, the narrative falls apart because in reality, Kasparov never played against a Machine. During the course of Game Over, we learn that not only did the Deep Blue team include a bunch of computer scientists but also chess grand masters, who served as consultants to IBM. Deep Blue was not some random object, arising ex nihilo to challenge Kasparov; it was the product of years of human effort. Kasparov wasn't playing against a machine so much as a cadre of his colleagues, armed with lots of computer power and programming know-how.

Thus, Game Over is another example of the problems associated with the "Man vs. Machine" theme. Such a theme creates an unnecessary, even irrational, fear of our devices, electronic or otherwise. Almost inevitably, every round of technological innovation brings with it public hand-wringing and apocalyptic cries from Neo-Luddites and Chicken Littles. While such alarmism often is proven unwarranted, its continual resurgence serves as a constant distraction from both innovation itself and the real source of our discontent: other people.

If the old slogan, "Guns don't kill people; people kill people," holds any water, then certainly machines don't beat chess grand masters...other grand masters do. When we place the focus of our fears on machines, we give those machines too much moral agency and inadvertently release humans from their responsibility. The idea that technology is basically neutral, that our use of technology is what counts, may have become a cliché by now, but I have yet to come across a scenario that contradicts it. Technology is no panacea, but neither is it an uncontrollable monster.

At the end of the day, Kasparov wasn't beaten by a random "machine." He was beaten by many people with years of education, millions of dollars, and hours of time to devote to his humiliation. The real source of our anxiety does not stem from our tools, but sadly, from our fellow human beings.