My observations on Kasparov vs Deep Blue rematch

[bob]

My observations on Kasparov vs Deep Blue rematch:

1) Kasparov is an adult, is well experienced, and had already played in one match with Deep Blue. And he had access to advisers, although it's not known if he took any advice. Anyway, he knew the conditions of the rematch and had little right to complain as the Deep Blue team followed the rules.

Rules? Adult behavior? You must have missed my fundamental critic. In such a show the organiser is the one who must supervise the science and good manners aspect of universal fairness, in short, the ethical rules of a civilised society. If say in the 100 meter hurdles final one party were allowed to construct deeper watered holes after every two hurdles and the opposing runner as a favorite for the win accidentaly falls into such a hole you wont accuse him of not having ordered in the contracts that such holes would be forbidden. Hyatt doesnt become tired to claim that in fact a runner must do that too. Ridiculous and odd.

You have raised that tired old argument many times. This was a match arranged between IBM and Kasparov. IBM offered money, Kasparov offered the "name" (current world champion) and they agreed on a set of conditions to play the match. Both sides signed off on them. So it is beyond past time to stop trying to resurrect something that both interested parties agreed to unconditionally and both signed on the dotted line. If you sign something without reading, that is stupidity. If you agree to something without thinking about the consequences, that is stupidity. If you agree to something due to lack of experience, that is carelessness in not getting good advice beforehand. So either he was stupid or careless. neither of which was brought on by IBM. He was so anxious to sign up for the grand prize (one million bucks had he won) that he exercised what we now know was poor judgement. But nobody _made_ him do so. The onus for making good decisions was on him. IBM was looking out for IBM.

2) The Deep Blue team was rather unsportsmanlike to the extent that it refused to make any of the games available that were played by the new version of the hardware. This aspect of the match, far more than any other, compromised both Kasparov's chances and also the overall quality of the event. It any other high level match, each opponent has access to hundreds, sometimes thousands, of game scores played by the other party. Deep Blue certainly had all of Kasparov's prior game scores; Kasparov was foolish to accept the match conditions that kept Deep Blue's games secret. Furthermore, IBM did much in its marketing scheme to present the match as a symmetric competition, and this was unnecessarily misleading to the public because there was non-symmetric secrecy involved.

To this argument Hyatt had also said earlier: does the team know what Kasparov had recently changed in his preparation? No, but the overall play of him is known. Also his particular belief into the magic of mysteries and superstition. The finding of my analyses of the video from 2005 was that someone like Campbell is even now completely unable to realise what the point is for a human chessplayer. Because he argued that Kasparov with his play record was uninteresting because they had created a machine that played just chess and not chess against Kasparov. Now let's assume this isnt a lie, then we come closer to the evaluation of such a match setting. Has a player any chances to understand the chess of a machine in just three games with every color? If he hasnt seen anything else of the newly made robot? Unlikely. So what is the point?
The whole event degenerates to a psycho show because the human in his desperate tries to decrypt a personality walks right into superstition when something happens like the personality switch between round 1 and 2. If he then asks for details and gets impolite responses the whole mindframe is shaken because suddenly people like him, from mankind, are against him, when formerly it was always a sort of collegial togetherness bnetween the team and him as the genial chessplayer. For such a psycho war Kasparov is the worst example among the top players. Because of his weakness, superstition. Especially for a guy like him with his preparations, here without a clue, or worse, without correct clues, the main strength of him was neutralized.

So, why bother at all? What is the point here?

The point is still that such a match setting should have possibly peoven what a machine in chess could do against the best human player and his chess. His chess but not his superstition or psychological weaknesses. So here the organizers allowed to create psychological obstacles in favor of the machine who allegedly just wanted to play chess, not even chess against Kasparov. Ridiculous. It was a psycho war to get to the Prize money. The famous playing dirty of the American sport. That is not British fairness what the Brits had invented as a basis for any sport.

IBM didn't get any "prize money". They _provided_ the prize money in order to get Kasparov to play the match.

3) Kasparov's baseless innuendo and outright charges of cheating were behavior unacceptable by any standard. In a way, this was even worse than some of Fischer's tirades about Soviet cheating as at least he was correct a few times.

4) The log files produced by the Deep Blue team were poorly formatted and could have been far more informative. I was surprised at how sloppy some of them were, like the entire logging process was a design afterthought. Well formatted and informative logs made available in real time to observers would have properly eliminated much of the controversy. Also, such logs would have been a good contribution to the historical record for other computer chess researchers. Again, we see the unfounded desire for secrecy on the part of the Deep Blue team.

5) The event did more to kill funding and support for computer chess research than any other. The prize money disbursed could have paid for years of projects with chances of good results that would have helped everyone in the field. But instead we have little more than a bunch of old circuit boards in the Smithsonian.

If necessary more about the other points, later.

[bob]

My observations on Kasparov vs Deep Blue rematch:

1) Kasparov is an adult, is well experienced, and had already played in one match with Deep Blue. And he had access to advisers, although it's not known if he took any advice. Anyway, he knew the conditions of the rematch and had little right to complain as the Deep Blue team followed the rules.

Rules? Adult behavior? You must have missed my fundamental critic. In such a show the organiser is the one who must supervise the science and good manners aspect of universal fairness, in short, the ethical rules of a civilised society. If say in the 100 meter hurdles final one party were allowed to construct deeper watered holes after every two hurdles and the opposing runner as a favorite for the win accidentaly falls into such a hole you wont accuse him of not having ordered in the contracts that such holes would be forbidden. Hyatt doesnt become tired to claim that in fact a runner must do that too. Ridiculous and odd.

That's ridiculous. If you sign a contract that gives your opponent the right to change the course, then if they do so, it is not _their_ fault, it is _yours_. The match conditions for 1997 were exactly the same as they were for 1996. Kasparov signed on the dotted line for both. It is somewhat like signing a mortgage to buy a house, and then a year later you finally figure out you just can't pay that much per month and are going to default on the loan and lose the house, and then you blame the bank for letting you buy a house you could not afford. You have to accept responsibility for your own actions. Kasparov didn't.

Please Bob, try to be a reasonable scientist for a moment and not just a businessman who has this dollar note blinking in his eyes. Suddenly what seemed to be ridiculous becomes reasonable again. It's all on videotape, no need to change the topic. Campbell screw it.

It is all moot. Someone buys a house they can't afford and end up losing the house, their car, their credit rating, etc. I feel sympathetic toward them, yes. But I am not going to blame the bank. If they had a time-travel machine, no doubt they would go back in time and tell themselves "Do not sign, you are going to lose everything..." But then hindsight is like that. The old quote "good decisions come from experience, experience comes from bad decisions" was never more appropriate. I notice in his later matches he asked for more favorable conditions and got them. He could have gotten _exactly_ the same from IBM except for direct access to practice against DB since it was not ready until just before the event, and I would _never_ agree to let an opponent practice against what he is going to play, that makes no sense at all...

[sje]

He could have gotten _exactly_ the same from IBM except for direct access to practice against DB since it was not ready until just before the event, and I would _never_ agree to let an opponent practice against what he is going to play, that makes no sense at all...

Could it be that, no matter when the event was scheduled, DB would still be not ready until the eve of the match? Would it not be the case that the Deep Blue team would still be adding revisions and corrections until the last minute, whenever that minute might be?

Had IBM allowed a few pre-match practice games between Kasparov and DB, it would have showed some corporate courage that is too rare nowadays. And that would have made sense.

[BubbaTough]

Could it be that, no matter when the event was scheduled, DB would still be not ready until the eve of the match? Would it not be the case that the Deep Blue team would still be adding revisions and corrections until the last minute, whenever that minute might be?

Yes it could be. I know if I was involved I would have been tweaking things until the last second...some people are never done. It has nothing to do with sportsmanship. As to pre-game matches, or giving copies of games, or whatever....it all sounds like lame excuses to me. Sometimes you play people you are not well prepared for, particularly upcoming youth, and you have to deal with it.

In my opinion, Deep Blue was not really in Kasparov's league, but he got shaken in a short match and did not adjust. It happens in human vs. human, and this time it happened in human vs. computer. No biggie. In my opinion Kasparov was a better player and just happened to lose in a short match. It is too bad; if he won, we might have seen more matches. He probably would have won a world-championship like match in terms of number of games, time controls, rest days, prize fund, title on the line, etc. (as would have Karpov, which might have been a more interesting match) but we will never know for sure.

The level of "shenanigans" in this match actually seems a little low for a world-championship match...so maybe it would have fit in better there. I would have loved to see Deep-blue try to make it through qualifiers, the candidate matches, etc. (including adjournments and such) that would have given us an excellent feel for how it stacked up, and how prepared humans ready to fight for the title would compete against it. I have a feeling Deep-blue would not have made it that deep in that candidates, but again, one never knows.

Today's Rybka on today's hardware on the otherhand...that would be another story.

-Sam

[Rolf]

He could have gotten _exactly_ the same from IBM except for direct access to practice against DB since it was not ready until just before the event, and I would _never_ agree to let an opponent practice against what he is going to play, that makes no sense at all...

Could it be that, no matter when the event was scheduled, DB would still be not ready until the eve of the match? Would it not be the case that the Deep Blue team would still be adding revisions and corrections until the last minute, whenever that minute might be?

Had IBM allowed a few pre-match practice games between Kasparov and DB, it would have showed some corporate courage that is too rare nowadays. And that would have made sense.

Another aspect IMO: What Bob spoke out means that in computerchess it's integral content to cheat your opponent and to never ever let him take a look at your preparations. Comes from the computational science heritage of secret services. Ed taught me several lessons about the genuine superstition, suspicion, now Bob adds paranoid secretness. What comes next? Has it anything to do with gentleman's sport and fairness? Dont think so.

[bob]

He could have gotten _exactly_ the same from IBM except for direct access to practice against DB since it was not ready until just before the event, and I would _never_ agree to let an opponent practice against what he is going to play, that makes no sense at all...

Could it be that, no matter when the event was scheduled, DB would still be not ready until the eve of the match? Would it not be the case that the Deep Blue team would still be adding revisions and corrections until the last minute, whenever that minute might be?

Had IBM allowed a few pre-match practice games between Kasparov and DB, it would have showed some corporate courage that is too rare nowadays. And that would have made sense.

That I can't answer. But for the case I quoted, the chips were not ready until the last minute. Hsu's book gives lots of surprising information about this. They got bad chips, had to redo things at times, the final versions came in (they were fabbed at MOSIS out in California) at the very last minute...

As far as the match goes, I would not have played practice games. A good human can learn a _lot_ by playing games that do not count, so that you can get an idea of what it handles well and what it handles poorly, which would be an advantage in the real match.

[bob]

He could have gotten _exactly_ the same from IBM except for direct access to practice against DB since it was not ready until just before the event, and I would _never_ agree to let an opponent practice against what he is going to play, that makes no sense at all...

Could it be that, no matter when the event was scheduled, DB would still be not ready until the eve of the match? Would it not be the case that the Deep Blue team would still be adding revisions and corrections until the last minute, whenever that minute might be?

Had IBM allowed a few pre-match practice games between Kasparov and DB, it would have showed some corporate courage that is too rare nowadays. And that would have made sense.

Another aspect IMO: What Bob spoke out means that in computerchess it's integral content to cheat your opponent and to never ever let him take a look at your preparations. Comes from the computational science heritage of secret services. Ed taught me several lessons about the genuine superstition, suspicion, now Bob adds paranoid secretness. What comes next? Has it anything to do with gentleman's sport and fairness? Dont think so.

Before you continue, why don't you look up the word "cheat" so that the conversation can proceed with a common definition. The definition you are using is dead wrong, which makes your entire premise invalid.

[Rolf]

He could have gotten _exactly_ the same from IBM except for direct access to practice against DB since it was not ready until just before the event, and I would _never_ agree to let an opponent practice against what he is going to play, that makes no sense at all...

Could it be that, no matter when the event was scheduled, DB would still be not ready until the eve of the match? Would it not be the case that the Deep Blue team would still be adding revisions and corrections until the last minute, whenever that minute might be?

Had IBM allowed a few pre-match practice games between Kasparov and DB, it would have showed some corporate courage that is too rare nowadays. And that would have made sense.

Another aspect IMO: What Bob spoke out means that in computerchess it's integral content to cheat your opponent and to never ever let him take a look at your preparations. Comes from the computational science heritage of secret services. Ed taught me several lessons about the genuine superstition, suspicion, now Bob adds paranoid secretness. What comes next? Has it anything to do with gentleman's sport and fairness? Dont think so.

Before you continue, why don't you look up the word "cheat" so that the conversation can proceed with a common definition. The definition you are using is dead wrong, which makes your entire premise invalid.

Bob, it has no criminal content or background, it's used referential by me. Look what I get in German when I enter to cheat, some are legally important others are just exactly what I mean when I use it, so how should I faire? It means several things altogether:

to cheat

prellen - not meant, meaning you dont pay in a restaurant, illegal, harmful
betrügen - also this is calling justice on the site, betraying sort of
täuschen - this gives partially what I mean, pretending other than meaning
schummeln - cheat, fudge, chisel, diddle - in that sense and not fraud
irreführen - misleading, also that partially, but not legally relevant
schwindeln - see all the meanings in ***a below
überlisten - this is neither justice relevant see ***b below
beschummeln - means to cheat, in German harmless, otherwise betrügen!
hintergehen - very dirty and also criminally relevant see ***c below
beschwindeln - swindle more harmless than harmful
hinwegtäuschen - also in German more the harmful version of cheat
mogeln [ugs.] - these last four are all lower practice
bemogeln [ugs.]
bescheißen [vulg.] - see ***d below
Schmu machen [ugs.]



___________________________
***a

schwindeln

to fib
to sham
to cheat
to boodle
to diddle
to fiddle
to humbug
to wangle
to swindle
to shuffle
to gyp [coll.]
to con [coll.]
to spoof [coll.]
to flimflam [coll.]

For me swindle, spoof is much weaker and less crass than cheat, make your choice.

***b

überlisten

to dupe
to cheat
to outwit
to outfox
to trepan
to outsmart
to circumvent
to out-manoeuvre
to finesse sb.

Again you might agree that there are weaker idioms without directly allegating fraud or such some. And in such a milder sense I mean it when I use cheat as a foreigner. No need to become upset, Bob. BTW did you know all these idioms for a single verb to cheat???

***c

hintergehen

to avoid
to cheat
to delude
to beguile
to deceive
to defraud
to hoodwink

You see here the difference in the meaning. This is also in German always evil. But I dont mean it this way when I use to cheat. 100% not! And you cant do here as if I must have meant it this way. See in how many variations I could mean it. So, basically it's something that affords education and experience before you come to the singular and evil meaning of a word reproaching this to a foreigner. I think I could show you more than a dozen harmless interpretations of to cheat, ok?

***d

jdn. bescheißen [vulg.]

to do a number on sb.
to rip sb. off [coll.]
to screw sb. over [Am.] [sl.]

My goodness now I see what screw means and very dirty. I use it too. Wont happen again.


Bob, I summarize, you cant accuse a foreigner that to cheat always and only means fraud. I think I gave you in sum 60 meanings! I beg you!

[bob]

The classic definition is this: From my Webster's dictionary:

cheat: (verb) to violate rules dishonestly

For the life of me I can't see where that applies. If you want to say IBM "outwitted" Kasparov, or "put one over on him" or whatever, that's a different topic.

My personal goal has always been to win, period. Not by trickery, or by sleight-of-hand, or anything else, but to win and only to win. Many asked me on ICC "Why don't you just +noplay "Mercilous" (the human that was wrecking every program on ICC with the Trojan Horse attack)?" or "why don't you just +noplay captainbluebear" (who could almost draw at will with any program on ICC with his anti-computer strategy)?" Or "why don't you just noplay SKIPPER (who used premove and smashed everybody by playing 300 moves in a 3 0 game and running the programs out of time)?" I chose to address each issue, one at a time, and try to render them unworkable. And I eventually did. And they quit playing my program, rather than me choosing to quit playing them...

Hsu and company had a similar way of thinking, based on knowing them for years. But IBM was a different animal, and with that much money coming out of IBM's pocket, higher-ups dictated things. And that was all there was to it. Kasparov could have named any condition he wanted, because IBM wanted Kasparov. They wanted to beat the best. If he was snookered into accepting sub-optimal conditions, well, he was just snookered. And is probably wiser because of it. But there was nothing dishonest whatsoever with either the contract, the conditions, nor the actual playing of the games.

[Rolf]

I insist, that special Prize Money, Bob, wasnt for snookered, but for a sort of science achievement and hence these guys had to pay respect for their human chess dedicated, without snookering him. They didnt primarily cheat him but their own basics. In that sense I use cheat and Steven gave some aspects that elaborate what I mean. It was kind of gamble for them. Evil scientists.

Bob, you always excuse them with IBM and its money. Because IBM wanted Kasparov so much he could have done this or that. But without the people around Hsu IBM wouldnt have had a machine at all that could play chess. So why didnt these scientists argue with IBM that Kasparov must be treated fairly??????? You see?