"When I met Deep Blue in early February 1996, I had been a world champion for more than 10 years, playing hundreds of matches against the top players, and I was able to judge from the body language of my opponents their emotional state and how their next move would go.
But as I sat across from The Deep Blue, I immediately had a new, unsettling feeling. As you do when you first sit in a driverless car, or when the "computer boss" gives you an order to work, I can't predict exactly what it can do.
I ended up losing the game. I can't help but wonder: Is this the end of my beloved chess? It was man-made doubts and fears, and the only thing I could be sure of was that my opponent Deep Blue didn't have those worries. ”
—Kasparov, Ted Talk, 2017
The youngest chess champion
Gary Kasparov was born in 1963 in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, when it was a territory of the former Soviet Union. He has shown an amazing talent from an early age, he can read at the age of 3, he can study geography and history on his own at the age of 5, and one morning at the age of 6, Kasparov, who has never studied chess, said to his parents: "Yesterday's game of chess should go like this..." His parents were very surprised and decided to send their son to learn chess.
At that time, the training system of the former Soviet Union as a chess kingdom was very perfect, and Kasparov soon showed amazing talent. At the age of 10, he reached the final of the National Youth Championship and remained unbeaten. His coach introduced him to the former world champion, a generation of Grandmasters of the Soviet chess world, Bautvnik.
He became a master at the age of 13, competed in the 17-year-old age group at the age of 14, and won the third place, began to participate in international competitions at the age of 15, and won the Chess Olympiad and the European Championship at the age of 16 and 17. In him, people vaguely saw the shadows of the genius chess players in history- Cappa Blanca and Fischer.
Geniuses often come with fatal weaknesses, Capablanca is too arrogant, fischer acts weirdly, and these limit their later development. But Kasparov didn't have these problems, he went to university after a busy game, and was very accomplished in literature and mathematics.
In the years that followed, his chess skills continued to improve by leaps and bounds, and at a young age he defeated many of the world's strongest players. In 1984, at the age of 22, Kasparov became the youngest world championship challenger in the history of chess, standing in front of the chess king Karpov.
The world-renowned match was played in Moscow, with new rules, with no scores in the draw, and the winner who won 6 sets first won. At the beginning of the game, the experienced Karpov had a clear advantage, leading 4-0 at the end of the 9 rounds. Next, both sides went down and down 17 innings in a row. In the 27th round, Karpov won again, having already touched the skirt of the goddess of victory.
But the young Kasparov showed amazing explosiveness and strong psychological endurance, coupled with Karpov's old age and physical exhaustion, Kasparov won 3 sets in the next 21 games, and the score became 5-3. It was at this time that the FIDE announced the termination of the 153-day, 48-game battle for the chess throne in history.
The following year, the rules of the game were changed and the game was restarted, and Kasparov won 13-11 to become the 13th world champion of chess, and at the age of 22, he was also the youngest chess champion in history. In the years that followed, Kasparov defeated Karpov three times and successfully defended his title.
Chess giants
After more than 100 years of development, with the maturity of the study of object chess theory and the increasing opportunities for chess players from all over the world to fight, the style of chess players is no longer as distinct as in the past. Just like football, now that you change your clothes, you can't tell which ones are European and which are South American players.
Kasparov's style of chess is to advocate offense in this balance, domineering and exposed, but reasonable, and never adventurous. Like his personality, he gives his opponent a powerful oppressive force. Moreover, his innovation in the opening theory, coupled with the assistance of computers, brought the concept of chess to a new level. His mentor Botvinnik commented: "Kasparov's talent lies in the combination of two, a keen insight into the chess game and the search for new ideas through analysis; and thus constitutes his extraordinary practical strength.".
If you take the analogy of the martial arts world, Fischer is like the East undefeated, the strongest, but the playing time is too short; Bautvnik is Zhang Sanfeng, highly respected, and has many disciples; and Kasparov is a veritable lone wolf, the most powerful chess player in history, the giant of the chess world.
He set a series of records:
l 22-year-old youngest world chess champion
He maintained the title of chess king for 21 years
l Occupy the first place in the world ranking for 20 years until retirement
In 2000, his rank score reached 2851, the first in history, until last year when he was briefly surpassed by his apprentice Carlson
In addition, Kasparov has an IQ of 190, is one of the smartest people in the world today, he can speak for 15 Chinese, and he is a mathematician and computer expert. He continually dabbled his talents into new areas.
He is a contributing writer for Wall Street magazine and has written numerous books, the most famous of which is the semi-autobiography Chess and Life. In the book, he spread the theory of chess into many fields such as politics, economy, history, culture, and art, and the book was translated and published in China by Xie Jun, a Chinese chess queen.
In 1993, dissatisfied with fide's many practices, Kasparov announced his withdrawal from FIDE's self-reliance and the establishment of the World Professional Chess Federation, which competed with FIDE.
In 1999, MSN hosted a web contest by Kasparov against more than 50,000 enthusiasts from 75 countries around the world. After four months of tug-of-war, the World team voted to abstain, and Kasparov won.
After retiring from the military, Kasparov was keen on politics and was Putin's main opponent, even announcing his candidacy for Russian president in 2007. However, he withdrew shortly after, and he himself admitted that playing chess is much simpler than politics.
But energetically, he never interrupted his contribution to chess, and the current chess king, the Norwegian prodigy Carlson, was Kasparov's disciple.
Love disciple Carlson
In so many dazzling experiences, the most far-reaching impact on future generations is the two man-machine wars with "Deep Blue" more than 20 years ago.
Facing deep blue, the last line of defense of human intelligence
Former Soviet and Russian chess players, who ruled the chess field for nearly 70 years, no one can shake it except for the brief glory of the American geek Fischer. Americans may know in their hearts that they can't do Russia in chess, so they sacrifice IBM's "deep blue".
Kasparov against Deep Blue
The media called it "the last line of defense of human intelligence," and although this claim was later said to be rotten in the human-machine wars such as Go and StarCraft, the game caused a sensation around the world at that time. In 1996, the two sides played each other for the first time, and Kasparov won 2:0. In 1997, "Deeper Blue" was born, and Kasparov lost 1-3 and 2. In particular, in the final set of the match after the two sides drew 2.5 to 2.5, the physically and mentally exhausted Kasparov collapsed after 19 rounds.
Humans in the field of chess have been conquered by artificial intelligence, and the process of the game has many details, and readers can make up their own brains from the Internet without repeating it. Let me give you a few pieces of information:
This is not the first man-machine showdown, in the years before 1996, there have been many competitions, human chess players win more than lose, and all IT companies have taken the victory over Kasparov as a strategic goal;
The deep blue is a behemoth weighing 1.4 tons, and its principle is "violent exhaustion" - calculating all the possibilities, the calculation amount is 200 million moves a second, according to this calculation, it takes 5 minutes, and only the probability after 5 or 6 rounds can be calculated;
Such computing power, now download an app on the Internet, chess skills are more than the deep blue of the year, Kasparov later organized the team to develop a chess software, named after himself;
A year after the game, IBM rejected Kasparov's proposed return competition, and announced the "retirement" of Deep Blue, and in the next ten years, companies around the world continued to introduce new systems and engage in man-machine confrontation with top masters, more prominent is The German Fritz and the American rebel, although there are wins and losses, but the human winning rate is getting lower and lower.
l The violent exhaustive method is used in The impossible way of Go, purely depending on the amount of calculation, 361 intersections of Go, several orders of magnitude higher than 64 squares. 361 to the power of 361, this number exceeds the total number of all atoms in the universe, ;
Therefore, the deep learning technology used by Alphago relies on the judgment of the chess type, rather than the simple computing power, this breakthrough marks the expansion of artificial intelligence from narrow applications to generalized applications, and only later StarCraft, Texas Hold'em and other human-machine wars have been born;
Therefore, the progress of artificial intelligence in the past 20 years is a qualitative change. For reflections on this issue, see the article "How to "Calculate" Others Like Artificial Intelligence"
Impressively, Kasparov, who had an arrogant and arrogant personality, showed great demeanor after the defeat, believing that this competition gave him a new experience and allowed him to understand the sport of chess from a deeper level (many Go masters later had similar statements about alphago's chess game).
Later, Kasparov put his energy into the research of artificial intelligence, and made outstanding contributions to the development of artificial intelligence with his cross-disciplinary talents. Such a temperament is worthy of his position at the peak of human wisdom.
Last year, the hard-working Kasparov published his new book, "Deep Thinking", which details the human-machine war 20 years ago and his own thinking on the future of artificial intelligence. In 2017, Kasparov gave a speech on ted titled "If You Can't Beat Them, Join Them", in which he said:
"Machines have superior computing power, but we have the ability to understand. Machines can only operate according to procedures, but we have the will. Machines have objectivity, but we have a passionate passion.
We shouldn't worry about what our machines can do today. Instead, we should worry more about what they can't do yet, because we'll need the help of new intelligent machines to turn our greatest dreams into reality.
If we fail, it is not because the machine is too smart or not smart enough, but because we are satisfied with the status quo and thus limit our ambitions. Human nature is not defined by skills we learn, such as swinging a hammer or playing chess. ”
It can be seen that the attitude of the chess king who has gone through vicissitudes is positive, powerful and inclusive. I have seen countless discussions about artificial intelligence, but the following sentence of chess king is the most philosophical summary I have ever heard:
"Machine intelligence ends here, and human creativity begins here."
TED Talk "The Relationship between Man and Computer"
Several articles tell the stories of several chess world champions, all of which I saw when I was learning chess. Now 20 years later, a long time has not seriously played a game with people, and the wooden chess pieces of that year have become my daughter's toys, but these stories are still vaguely stored in memory.
Whenever I think of these stories and imagine that era, the masters are like a galaxy, constantly transcending the limits of human wisdom and leaving countless classics. However, from deep blue to alphago, the fortress of human intelligence has been conquered again and again, and logical thinking can no longer match the ability of machines.
But on the other hand, the contribution of science and technology to chess is also enormous. I think back then, I wanted to run to Shanghai Book City once a month to find the latest chess book, but now I can search for a large amount of chess information from the Internet. Today's chess players have long learned to live in harmony with artificial intelligence, from the beginning of enlightenment learning, to long-term training, chess analysis are heavily dependent on machines.
An interesting question is: How do we define our time? We always think of ourselves as modern people, defining many years ago as "classical era". But in the face of artificial intelligence, we are about to become the species of history, so will the history of chess be rewritten, defining deep blue and alphago as the watershed between classical and modern?
Indisputablely, we will eventually be ancient. Many people worry that the future of humanity is threatened, but I think that since God sent alphago to teach humanity to play chess, it must also teach people the way to survive.
Even if you can't beat the heavens and half the son, what's the harm, life and death evolution, it is the heavenly situation.