Kasparov and Humanity

On Saturday afternoon, Gary Kasparov, reigning world chess champion, took his seat for another match. Across the board sat his opponent, showing no signs of nervousness even though he has played only a few matches in his short lifetime.

Kasparov's opponent, Deep Blue...is a computer?

Surely there must be some mistake. "The chessmaster today must have courage, a killer instinct, stamina, and arrogance," chess grandmaster Larry Evans once said. Yet an object possessing none of these emotions can dominate the game.

Some argue that chess is not a good test of intelligence for computers or humans. But chess does require a player to be far-sighted while dealing with smaller details and to discover and prepare for all the possibilities that do not occur. These skills might be useful in, say, business, government, science or life in general. If the federal government operated perfectly under these tenets, we might not even have a deficit. Chess does test some life skills, and we now have a computer, a lifeless object, that has mastered the game.

Do we have before us Pygmalion's Galatea or Frankenstein's monster?

In a way, this is our victory. We have created something that surpasses our own abilities, our Galatea. Some have compared this moment to that of the invention of the automobile. In that case, we built a machine that accomplished something not only better than we did, but also better than we ever could. But we never thought we were the fastest; there was always a cheetah in the way. This time, it is different, for we have always thought that we were the best thinkers. In the past, intelligence supposedly made up for lack of speed or strength.

Our stature has slowly been shrinking. At one time, people thought the planets revolved around them. Now, all these dreams of importance having been shattered, while we are feeling so small in the vast universe, we find that not even our minds are that special. And while our minds are still more able than any existing computer, that may change soon. Computers can already process information hundreds of times faster than we can because our brains are physically limited from achieving that speed. "Monster" may be too strong a word, but a computer that can beat Kasparov is very frightening.

But the computer did not create itself, nor did a single Frankenstein craft it in secrecy. Instead, the computer has been a collective effort over years. Deep Blue is a composite of many individuals, no single one of whom could hold the information or chess power it has. Perhaps this is a victory for society, demonstrating that the collective effort of a group of people is always stronger than the power of one person, however brilliant he or she may be.

However, the most threatening aspect of Deep Blue stems from the same victory. Deep Blue and its progeny will be able to hold more information than one individual could ever dream of seeing in his or her lifetime. We already have to take so much of the technological world for granted. Much of it is magic to us for all that we pretend to understand it through science. How many of us actually know how a telephone works or a how a videocassette records? Slowly, knowledge and information have been slipping form our grasp.

In Newton's time, people with a limited education and some numerical ability could understand all of the mathematics in existence. With time, the amount of information exploded, and people began encountering less and less of all the information in the world. We have become so specialized that each scientist has his or her own vocabulary, and a politician's jargon is different from a lawyer's. Now the game of chess has also been placed beyond one person's reach.

Perhaps it is inevitable that Deep Blue or its progeny will become the world chess champion. But let us stave off the future a few moments longer. Let us keep the world within the grasp of an individual. Kasparov, all of humanity is behind you.

Tanya Dutta's column appears on alternate Mondays.