Deep Thinking by Garry Kasparov: A Book Review and My Learnings
Picking up this book was a random decision I took while at Blossoms, the famed bookstore in Bengaluru. Being a technology aficionado, the title on the cover page that read “Deep Thinking: Where artificial intelligence ends and human creativity begins”, attracted my attention. I had recently started reading about AI and was looking for insights on how AI is shaping our traditional activities. This book introduced me to the earliest developments in AI and its prominent effect on a popular sport like chess. It provides an autobiographical account of how progress in AI improved our understanding of human thinking — both its limitations and powers. Using detailed accounts of his matches with chess engines, Kasparov intricately explores the capabilities of AI-powered machines and reflects upon where are we heading as a human race.
For me, chess was limited to a board game you play during the summer break to keep yourself occupied. It was only after reading Deep Thinking did I realise that there is so much to know about the game. The book narrates a thrilling story of the popular Kasparov v/s Deep Blue match through the perspective of Kasparov. The match has been endlessly discussed by chess aficionados in books and articles, but Deep Thinking gives the inside story of what happened truly.
At a personal level, what struck me the most was reading about how a world chess champion dealt with a powerful corporation whose sole aim was to scoop the PR Jackpot from the event. The infamous 1997 match was actually a re-match that IBM decided to organize after a 4–2 defeat in Philadelphia. The publicity surrounding the match had taken IBM, an ailing company then, completely by surprise. Deep Blue’s sudden rise to popularity had boosted the company’s share price, a pointer that is never overlooked in the corporate world.
Till the date of the re-match, the IT company pumped resources with an effort to ensure that Kasparov would be crushed. Since IBM was sponsoring the event this time, its staff had the freedom to tweak the subtleties in their favour For example, unlike standard chess practice, Kasparov was denied a “team room” to discuss his strategy with his team. Also, IBM stonewalled against his requests for printouts of the machine’s logs of completed games. Some of these had the effect of discomfiting Kasparov. With anger and frustration building up inside him, it all came down to the final match which Kasparov lost. And being a sore loser, as he honestly asserts in the first line of Chapter 7, did not do him any favours while dealing with the media coverage after the match.
It is heartwarming to read Kasparov's reflections upon his mindset during the game and how he finds humour in what he calls, the stupidest defeat of his life. With the passage of time, his anger has been mellowed by his learnings on AI during his encounters with chess machines. As the book progresses, you can see a sore loser in anguish melt into an enlightened soul with a more elaborate perspective on Artificial Intelligence than most people in the tech industry, who are obsessed with machines that will replace people.
Kasparov was one of the first people who supported chess-playing computers. He believed that such technology can enable children to start early in the sport, irrespective of their geography. Ironically, the technology he inspired defeated him. But the message that he bears is that being defeated by our own creations should make us feel proud. And the intelligent approach is not to fight back with intelligent machines, but to celebrate their capability to augment human creativity.
As a person with only a passing interest in chess, I can assert that this book offers everything from important life lessons to the history of AI in the form of a thrilling page-turner.
Do let me know if I missed something important from this book. Also, I would love to hear about your experience in reading it.
