Kasparov on AI & chess
25 January 2010, 11.52 CET | By Peter Doggers | Filed under: Reports | Tags:
“It was an impressive achievement, of course, and a human achievement by the members of the IBM team, but Deep Blue was only intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent. Not that losing to a $10 million alarm clock made me feel any better.” This quote comes from an article by Garry Kasparov in the New York Review of Books, in which the 13th World Champion reviews Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind by Diego Rasskin-Gutman. You can read Kasparov’s piece here.
 ShareThis
|  Print
|
It’s an interesting piece I guess, but Kasparov does not, in fact, review the book. All he does is talk about himself, his own ideas, and the stuff in the book that can be related to himself. In fact the book itself is mentioned for the first time only after 11 (!) introductory paragraphs and the stuff that can’t be related to Kasparov (like, well, science, history and philosophy) is deemed so boring that it ‘tempts the reader to skip ahead’ … to the parts where Kasparov is mentioned again. Indeed, whenever Kasparov is not mentioned in the book, this seems to be a ‘major omission’ of the author.
Pretty disappointing for the best chess writer of the past 25 years.
Well, i liked this article by Garry, even though you are right, Arne: There is not much of a review in it.
But it still puzzles me why Garry refers to Norway and Magnus by: “Countries with little by way of chess tradition and few available coaches can now produce prodigies.”
Norway has a rich and old chess tradition, even though it is not to be compared to Russia or Soviet Union. And Magnus has in fact had some very competent, NORWEGIAN trainers all the way.
I hope Magnus will correct him at their next session.
To Kasparov, if there have been no World Champs it means there is no strong tradition….
Human genius mystery: “How many moves ahead do you see?” Capablanca´s answer: “Just one. The best one”. Seems to be true not only for chess
when was the first chess game played in Norway? europe? year 1500? or when?
too bad that Capablanca could not see the best move again Alekhine:(
but Alekhine was younger.
what when Kaspa did not wrote this text? or alone.
if alone great text.
february 11 ??? do we live in future???
Val, it was not Capablanca who said that, but an anonymous player who actually beat Capablanca, in a tournment in New York (I think).
i doubt if a today chess player with computer assistants (chessengine+chessbase)
is better chess player than Capablanca, Fischer, Tal.
should be proved.
Many – although not all – NYRoB reviews are like that Arne; i.e. essays related to books, and not book reviews at all in the traditional sense.
I know, Tom, but most reviews in NYRB that are like that are at least inspired by the books they’re about, and actually use the information that’s inside the book. That’s clearly not the case with the current Kasparov article.
My guesstimate would be otherwise! Although I only read the ones that interest me.