Garry Kasparov’s View of Chess Computers

Of all the top grandmasters who could give their views of chess-playing computers, Garry Kasparov is probably the best qualified. He has played several matches against computers at a time when programmers were trying with all their might to make a computer that would defeat a world champion.

In his review of Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind, Kasparov makes several interesting observations about the affect computers have had on humans who play chess.

Kasparov recently wrote a review of Chess Metaphors for the New York Review of Books (see link below), and in it he says some interesting things about his view of computers conquering chess.

The Chess Master and the Computer – The New York Review of Books

The number of legal chess positions is 1040, the number of different possible games, 10120. Authors have attempted various ways to convey this immensity, usually based on one of the few fields to regularly employ such exponents, astronomy. In his book Chess Metaphors, Diego Rasskin-Gutman points out that a player looking eight moves ahead is already presented with as many possible games as there are stars in the galaxy. Another staple, a variation of which is also used by Rasskin-Gutman, is to say there are more possible chess games than the number of atoms in the universe. All of these comparisons impress upon the casual observer why brute-force computer calculation can’t solve this ancient board game. They are also handy, and I am not above doing this myself, for impressing people with how complicated chess is, if only in a largely irrelevant mathematical way.

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There have been many unintended consequences, both positive and negative, of the rapid proliferation of powerful chess software. Kids love computers and take to them naturally, so it’s no surprise that the same is true of the combination of chess and computers. With the introduction of super-powerful software it became possible for a youngster to have a top- level opponent at home instead of needing a professional trainer from an early age. Countries with little by way of chess tradition and few available coaches can now produce prodigies. I am in fact coaching one of them this year, nineteen-year-old Magnus Carlsen, from Norway, where relatively little chess is played.

If you’re interested in the entire review, click the link above.

If you’re interested in the book Kasparov reviewed, you can get it from my Chess Store here.