The Bug Did It!

In May, 1997, the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeated then world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, and it made headlines everywhere. Maybe you are thinking: Ok, so computers got very smart or somebody wrote a great chess program, so what? It was bound to happen at some point. Big deal.

Except that’s not what had happened. Kasparov blamed the defeat on a single move by the computer. What was so special about that move? Yasser Seirawan described both the move and far more importantly, the impact it had on Kasparov:
“It was an incredibly refined move, of defending while ahead to cut out any hint of countermoves, and it sent Garry into a tizzy.”
In other words, that one move had messed with Kasparov’s mind.

Ironically, that move with such devastating consequence was “the result of a bug in Deep Blue’s software”! Even worse (at least from Kasparov’s perspective), one of the developers of the software said that “the machine was unable to select a move and simply picked one at random”! And yet more amazingly, the Deep Blue software team started updating the software between successive games to get rid of that bug from future games!

But the psychological damage had been done. As the programmer Murray Campbell said:
“Kasparov had concluded that the counterintuitive play must be a sign of superior intelligence. He had never considered that it was simply a bug.”
Nassim Taleb wrote in his book, Fooled by Randomness:
“You attribute your successes to skills, but your failures to randomness.”
Kasparov had flipped that line and attributed the computer’s success to its skills!

You could almost say that what Taleb says in another part of his book had come to pass:
“No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word.”

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarNovember 5, 2015 at 8:06 PM

    Very interesting and informative. I too had assumed that it was simply the fact that computer program for chess had got so good that through the built-in intelligence and a logical selection of the impending moves computer had beaten man. At that time the news came in the papers, there was an article saying that "How could it be correct to believe that computer has beaten to it? After all computer programs are only human intelligence translated into a program!"

    With your article I realize that a bug was responsible for selecting a strange move, which psychologically shook the human opponent. Chess is a matter as much of psychological outmaneuvering as of skillful play. In the famous Fisher versus Spasky match, Fishier demolished Spasky more through psychological overpowering than through superior chess. The first game was drawn; in the second game Fisher refused to play due to some idiosyncrasy of his and Spasky was awarded the win. The third game, if I remember right, Fisher lost. That kind of thing should have given Spasky tremendous advantage psychologically. But the onslaught started after that game. By the end, Fisher had won the tournament, with about 3 games or so not even played! What is more, it was said in the papers that Spasky was a psychological wreck and retired from chess. :-(

    I am wondering, while a bug did the psychological damage to Kasparov, one day they may write programs using not standard logic for deciding on a move but through fuzzy logic. The effect of that may be a psychological advantage for the machine, though the ideas looks silly! That would make the computer lose some games too due to bad moves, but then great grand masters too make errors. That kind of a thing may make the computers more human. But then fuzzy logic is not trusted for serious use as of now.

    As your article concludes randomness may have the last word certainly in a host of situations. In life "Providence" matters certainly, knowing this is the world sometimes used to refer to randomness that interferes with what is planned or executed. The word looks somewhat religious but is used as commercial terminology - "acts of providence" etc. where the implication is natural causes that create the difficulty.

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