Review: "Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine"

Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine examines the infamous 1997 rematch between then world-champion Garry Kasparov and IBM's chess supercomputer, Deep Blue. Kasparov had defeated an earlier incarnation of Deep Blue the previous year, but in 1997 the new and improved computer defeated him in a six-game match: two wins to one with three draws.

Speculation was rampant that IBM had rigged the match by allowing a human player to override the computer on certain key moves. As evidence, conspiracy theorists pointed to moves wherein Kasparov offered the sacrifice of a pawn, and the computer turned it down. Pawn sacrifices, which strong players often use to garner positional advantages or to gain initiative, were long considered too abstract for a computer to understand. A machine, many argued, could not possibly see far enough ahead to truly appreciate the subtle positional edge that a good sacrifice can provide. Therefore, a human must have been helping the computer out. Who could expect a human player, even one as brilliant as Kasparov, to defeat the combination of human and computer?

The film makes frequent reference to "The Turk", a chess-playing automaton that was famous in the 18th century. Travelling around Europe, it impressed monarchs and noblemen with its astonishing ability. The Turk was a hoax; a human player, concealed beneath the machine, operated the arms and made the moves himself. Dramatizations of the historical episode, borrowed from black and white films, appear frequently throughout Game Over (in fact they constitute something of a thematic refrain). The analogy is obvious, and certainly compelling. Could Deep Blue have been a modern day Turk, an elaborate fraud perpetrated by IBM to garner publicity? It's hard not to be intrigued by the question, but unfortunately, the intrigue ends there. "Game Over" does not present a single shred of evidence to support its hypothesis. Instead, it relies esclusively (and I do mean exclusively) on innuendo.

Over and over, a shaky camera presents us with blurred visuals while a hushed voice wonders aloud about the supposedly "un-computer-like" moves that Deep Blue made during the match. One interviewee after another questions the machine's strangely profound understanding of the game. The film ends with a gradual interior tracking shot of the warehouse in which the de-commisioned supercomputer now resides (it's hard not think of the final shot from Raiders of the Lost Ark), while the narrator laments that the truth may never be known. All this is very mysterious, yes, but it's also utterly unconvincing.

It wasn't so long ago that otherwise rational people proclaimed with certainty that no computer would ever beat a human world champion. Chess, they said, is too full of pattern-recognition, of strategy and subtlety, for a computer to grasp in full. How could any person with even a basic knowledge of chess and computer science have legitimately believed this? While the number of possible positions in chess is astronomical, it is still finite, and a sufficiently powerful computer should, in theory, be able to "solve" the game (that is, determine the ideal move for every position). Even today, no computer is capable of this. But as processors grew more and more powerful, it was inevitable that they would come close enough to their lofty goal that they would surpass the limits of human chess ability. From then on, the world champion would never again be a human.

Should it really surprise us that an exceptionally powerful computer (which, at the time, Deep Blue was) would be able to look far enough ahead to see that a small material gain now would cost it dearly later on? "Game Over" sustains itself on nothing more than baseless insinuations about the IBM programming team. What is most offensive about this is the way that the programmers are demonized for crushing humanity's hopes of perpetual chess supremacy. Should it not be viewed as an equally great triumph of human ingenuity that a team of computer scientists was able to create a machine more skilled even than Kasparov, a genius who had devoted his life to the study of chess?

Compounding the absurdity is the fact that a year before this film was released, world champion Vladimir Kramnik drew an eight-game match against the chess program Fritz, which can be purchased for a small sum at your local Best Buy and installed on your home computer. One wonders if the producers of Game Over were aware of this.