Chapter 9
The Final Religion
In 1997, Deep Blue, a supercomputer developed by IBM, beat Garry
Kasparov, the world’s best chess player. It was a watershed moment in the
history of computing, a seismic event that shook many people’s understanding
of technology, intelligence, and humanity. But today, it is but a quaint
memory: of course a computer would beat the world champion at chess. Why
wouldn’t it?
Since the beginning of computing, chess has been a favorite means to test
artificial intelligence.^1 That’s because chess possesses a near-infinite number
of permutations: there are more possible chess games than there are atoms in
the observable universe. In any board position, if one looks only three or four
moves ahead, there are already hundreds of millions of variations.
For a computer to match a human player, not only must it be capable of
calculating an incredible number of possible outcomes, but it must also have
solid algorithms to help it decide what’s worth calculating. Put another way:
to beat a human player, a computer’s Thinking Brain, despite being vastly
superior to a human’s, must be programmed to evaluate more/less valuable
board positions—that is, the computer must have a modestly powerful
“Feeling Brain” programmed into it.^2
Since that day in 1997, computers have continued to improve at chess at a
staggering rate. Over the following fifteen years, the top human players
regularly got pummeled by chess software, sometimes by embarrassing
margins.^3 Today, it’s not even close. Kasparov himself recently joked that the
chess app that comes installed on most smartphones “is far more powerful
than Deep Blue was.”^4 These days, chess software developers hold
tournaments for their programs to see whose algorithms come out on top.
Humans are not only excluded from these tournaments, but they’d likely not
even place high enough for it to matter anyway.
The undisputed champion of the chess software world for the past few
years has been an open-source program called Stockfish. Stockfish has either
won or been the runner-up in almost every significant chess software
tournament since 2014. A collaboration between half a dozen lifelong chess