Your Kingdom for my horse!

Location: New York City
Date: May 11th, 1997.

“Your Kingdom for my horse!” 

said the machine. As the King agreed, they had a deal.
Playing at Chess is one of the most ancient entertainments enjoyed by humans at every latitude; its
story is beyond our records, and it has been any age’s entertainment for most civilized nations. The
game of Chess, however, is not just a mere amusement. Several valuable qualities of the mind, such
as foresight and vigilance are to be acquired or reinforced, by playing Chess, so to become routine.
One of the founding fathers of US, Benjamin Franklin, wrote something about the so-called morals
of the Chess:

“We learn by Chess the habit of not being discouraged by present appearances in the state of our
affairs, the habit of hoping for a favorable change, and that of persevering in the search of
resources” (On the morals of Chess, B. Franklin, 1779)

Today, 11 th May 1997 two armies of sixteen b/w soldiers are going to beat the hell out of each other
in New York. The black army belongs to the world’s human champion, Garry Kasparov. The white
is under the spell of IBM’s “Deep Blue” Chess computer.
On the 30th move of the final game, Deep Blue started a new attack by sacrificing a white knight.
Although Kasparov’s concentration was intense, he failed to fathom the perfect storm that was
coming. In the next eleven moves, Deep Blue had built a rock solid advantage that Kasparov had no
choice but abdicating the throne. That’s it? Not at all! The baffled king reacted with a cry of foul
play, one of the loudest allegation of bluffing ever made in a tournament, which ignited an
international conspiracy theory with no signs of a breakthrough.

The truth is that Deep Blue was the first computer to beat a world champion in a six-game match,
played under standard time controls. Kasparov had won the first game, lost the second, and then
drawn the following three. As Deep Blue forced the Russian champion to quit in the final match,
Kasparov simply refused to believe it. He argued instead that the Chess-playing-robot had been
controlled by a flesh and bone rival that supervised his play. In a word, Kasparov supposed that
Deep Blue’s playing was too much human-like. On the other hand, to the many of us who were
convinced by the computer’s performance, it appeared that AI had reached a stage where it could
beat humans — even in a game that stood as a handy symbol for our intelligence.

The secret of Deep Blue’s victory lies in its firm, inhuman commitment to cold, hard logic so much
for Kasparov’s emotional behavior.
Deep Blue's powers are brute force computation and clever algorithms. It has more Chess
information to work with than most machines and all but a few Chess masters. It never forgets or
gets distracted, and it can even engage in a psychological warfare against its human opponent by
simulating weakness or uncertainty.

For example, Deep Blue sometimes decelerates its rhythm to feign uncertainty, although it has a
precise plan to get you on the ropes. But it can accelerate as well to simulate a reckless behavior.If Ebenezer Scrooge had to deal with three spirits, Kasparov faced the ghosts of all Chess masters of
the past, which were safely stored in the circuits of Deep Blue.
In spite of all conspiracy theories following the match, the possibility that a machine could defeat a
man in the context of reasoning (real or simulated) became a reality after that day.

Amazingly, when Deep Blue defeated Kasparov, AI was in a very early stage. If it were a season, it
would have been winter period. Now AI it is flowering. We hear of amazing AI accomplishments
on a daily basis. If in 1997 we viewed them as a shock, today we accept they are inevitable as death
and taxes.