THE AFTERMATH
The naysayers were out in full force after the 1998 match between Garry
Kasparov and Deep Blue. After Kasparov's loss to Fritz in a 1994 blitz
tournament, their cant was, “Oh, but it was blitz. What about speed
games?” A few months later after he lost to Chess Genius at “game in
25”, the complaint went, “Oh, but that was a speed game. What about
longer time controls?” When Kasparov lost Game One of the 1997 Deep
Blue match, the naysayers crowed, “Oh, sure, a game. What about a
whole match?”
Within hours of Kasparov's loss of the 1998 match, it started again, with
online comments like, “Well, of course that was a six game match. What
about a traditional twenty-four games?” And so it goes – as soon as a
computer clears the bar, somebody else just raises the bar. Today no
one but a complete Luddite would doubt the power of chess computers,
to the point that many people don't find chess matches pitting human
champions against computes very interesting anymore. But I'm getting
ahead of the story...
Debate still rages today over what really happened in 1998. Despite the
accusations of cheating on IBM's part, voiced by a loud coterie of players
(Kasparov among them), no solid evidence of such such cheating has
ever found. IBM made the transcripts of Deep Blue's analysis available
for public inspection (I took a quick look at them myself, back in the day),
which doesn't prevent a few players even today from accusing IBM of
faking the transcripts. Of course, that's the beauty of conspiracy theories:
you can't prove a conspiracy didn't occur, because of the impossibility
of “proving a negative”.
What we do know is that after their machine's victory, IBM wasn't
interested in a rematch. The corporation sold the Deep Blue hardware to
an airline, which repurposed the machine to the complex task of juggling
of thousands of airline reservations. The Deep Blue research into parallel
processing, the idea of dividing complex computations among several
processors, paid off in a big way from which we're all reaping the benefits
today: even a modestly priced home computer utilizes parallel processing
these days.
Kasp arov was still game for more “human vs. computer” challenges. A
few of these were televised, such as his match against a multi-processor
version of the commercial program Fritz which was carried by ESPN in
2003. But each time the spectacle was repeated, fewer viewers tuned in.
When coupled with the “balkanization” of the world chess championships,
with multiple groups claiming to have the “official” chess champion (a la
professional boxing), the “chess fever” which had gripped the chess
48
chessking.com