In a 1997 showdown billed as the final battle for supremacy between natural and artificial intelligence, IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov.
Deep Blue evaluated two hundred million positions per second. That is a tiny fraction of possible chess positions—the number of possible game sequences is more than atoms in the observable universe—but plenty enough to beat the best human.
Still, losing to Deep Blue gave him an idea. In playing computers, Kasparov recognized what artificial intelligence scholars call Moravec’s paradox: machines and humans frequently have opposite strengths and weaknesses.
There is a saying that “chess is 99 percent tactics.” Tactics are short combinations of moves that players use to get an immediate advantage on the board. When players study all those patterns, they are mastering tactics.
Bigger-picture planning in chess—how to manage the little battles to win the war—is called strategy. As Susan Polgar has written, “you can get a lot further by being very good in tactics”—that is, knowing a lot of patterns —“and have only a basic understanding of strategy.”
A few years later, the first “freestyle chess” tournament was held. Teams could be made up of multiple humans and computers. The lifetime-of- specialized-practice advantage that had been diluted in advanced chess was obliterated in freestyle.
A duo of amateur players with three normal computers not only destroyed Hydra, the best chess supercomputer, they also crushed teams of grandmasters using computers.
Kasparov concluded that the humans on the winning team were the best at “coaching” multiple computers on what to examine, and then synthesizing that information for an overall strategy.
Human/Computer combo teams—known as “centaurs”—were playing the highest level of chess ever seen.
It’s like an executive with a team of mega-grandmaster tactical advisers, deciding whose advice to probe more deeply and ultimately whose to heed.
In the end, Kasparov did figure out a way to beat the computer: by outsourcing tactics, the part of human expertise that is most easily replaced, the part that he and the Polgar prodigies spent years honing.
- from the book 'Range' by David Epstein
