Garry v The Machine: world premiere

Our tickets arrived today for the Manchester International Festival's world première of The Machine, a dramatisation of Garry Kasparov's 1997 rematch versus Deep Blue.

Game 6 was the pivotal point: it marked the first time that a machine had beaten a top GM. Since then, one or two, top GMs played further matches, the finale being the 2005 trouncing of England #1 Mickey Adams by Deep Hydra, by 5.5-0.5; since then, humanity has accepted that people can't play machines.

Deep Hydra was far stronger than Deep Blue, and now, in 2013, Houdini 3.0, Rybka, Hiarcs, and many more can beat Deep Hydra: my iPhone or iPad could beat Deep Blue. It is beyond me how programmers have achieved this.

Game 6 actually shows that Garry was mentally defeated before playing the first move. I can only scarcely imagine the sheer enormity of the mental pressure of playing the previous five games in the full stare of the world: the match was on mainstream news channels.

Early on, in a Caro-Kann, Garry permitted the machine to play a speculative sacrifice.

When I keyed in the game into Chessbase yesterday, and ran through it quickly with Houdini, my engine chose Ne4 rather than Ne6: evaluating both as virtually equal, with a slight preference to caution. I intend to give this position to Houdini again with a longer time control, to see if it ever prefers the sacrifice: though, if I were a computer chess expert, I could probably tune the settings to enable it to play more aggresively, in high case it would no doubt find Ne6.

In 1997, Garry contended that there could have been human interference in Deep Blue's decisions: he felt that one of the moves played in game 1, and Ne6 in the final game, and maybe others, showed intuition, a human characteristic, and couldn't be decided upon by machines. With hindsight, I suspect this was justthe revealing moment when computers could assess positions with some judgement: it is not winning after 1 Ne6, the game is just unbalanced, is highly tactical, and we now know that such positions are impossible to play against machines: Garry knew that back in 1997 too: what he didn't know was that machines would play unclear sacrifices.

I have lightly annotated game 6 below.

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