Kasparov on sports: 'Human
actions in extreme conditions' at Stanford
BY DIANE MANUEL
A funny thing happened on
his way to Stanford last Thursday night, Garry Kasparov
told the overflow audience at the SEQ Teaching Center
that had gathered to hear him speak about the
"Limits of Performance."
He was late for the talk,
he said apologetically, because he'd had to wait in the
lobby of his hotel for 30 minutes while an
"antiquated machine" printed out the 11 pages
of his speech.
"Can you believe that
a hotel in Silicon Valley does not have a laser
printer?" he asked, grinning, enjoying the moment
immensely. "Not even a chess player can predict some
of the obstacles that happen, but it seems I was kept
away from you by the limits of the performance of the
hotel."
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Information:
World chess champion since
1985 and, some have argued, the best professional chess
player ever, Kasparov carries himself with well-earned
confidence. But there is also a streak of the rebel and a
hint of the prankster in the Azerbaijani native.
As flash bulbs exploded in
the auditorium, Kasparov surveyed the audience
thoughtfully. Fastening on several different youngsters
in the crowd, he welcomed them with private winks.
His affinity with children
became clear partway through the evening when Kasparov
predicted that he would continue to play chess
professionally for another four or five years.
"I want to keep
playing until my son can recognize who his father
is," he said about his 4-year-old.
The audience laughed often
and clapped loudly as Kasparov spoke about some of the
particularly dramatic moments of his chess career. His
talk for the second of the spring-quarter Presidential
Lectures and Symposia in the Humanities and Arts was less
a play-by-play reenactment of key games and more a
reflection on the qualities of players and the pressures
of championship chess.
"Sports give us a
unique opportunity to study human actions in extreme
conditions," he said. "By studying world
records in many different sports we can get very useful
information about the ability of the human organism and
nervous system to adjust to very difficult
conditions."
Kasparov argued that chess
should be considered a professional sport because it
requires considerable endurance and strength.
"Chess seems to be a
very passive and quiet game where people are sitting for
hours, just moving pieces across a board, and nothing is
happening," he said, pausing, as laughter began to
ripple through the audience.
"And yes, the board
is very small," he added, to appreciative applause.
"But if we evaluate
the pressure a chess player suffers during world events,
we see that it's at least as difficult to cope [in chess]
as in any other professional, physical sport,"
Kasparov said, noting that matches can last for weeks at
a time.
While many sports require
bursts of energy for one event, Kasparov argued that the
pressures experienced by chess players rarely dissipate.
"Your mind is
constantly preoccupied, not only at a game but also
during preparation for the game," he said. "I
think from my own experience that psychological stress is
far more dangerous than physiological stress, because
psychological stress can happen on its own and always
leads to physical weakness."
Kasparov said he has
experienced fevers, allergic reactions and even
"dental problems" while playing long matches.
By working out in the gym,
swimming and rowing, Kasparov said, he tries to keep
himself in peak shape.
Although he said he feels
"like a dinosaur" at most of the tournaments he
plays today, Kasparov added, "I am sure that my
recent successes against much younger players partly
depend on my physical superiority."
Every match has a
definitive moment, Kasparov said, and the outcome often
depends on the players' moods. Noting that "first
you lose psychologically, and then you lose on the
board," Kasparov said that during one match with
Anatoly Karpov, "I looked at his eyes and realized
that he did not believe he could save the game."
At the start of another
recent world-class tournament in Wijk aan Zee, the
Netherlands, Kasparov said, "something told me I was
about to play a real great game."
Chess commentators later
confirmed that "it was probably the best game ever
played in the history of chess," he added.
Why?
"It was an amazing
combination of human intuition, determination and
calculation that helped me to create a really beautiful
game," Kasparov said.
What also helped in that
game, he said, was practicing with a computer and
learning to "think geometrically."
"I could see the
geometry of the board, and could see very clearly 15
moves ahead," Kasparov added. "I felt very
comfortable not as comfortable as a computer, but much
more comfortable than my opponents."
Kasparov also spoke at
length about his loss in 1997 to the 1.4-ton IBM
supercomputer named Deep Blue that reportedly could
analyze 200 million moves per second.
Noting that it was 200
processing chips, rather than the host machine, that
generated the calculating speed, Kasparov suggested:
"It's as though a Honda Civic with two Pratt and
Whitney jet engines broke the world land-speed record on
Salt Lake Flats, and then the manufacturer claimed that
Honda makes the fastest car in the world."
Although he did not have
prior access to Deep Blue's programming, Kasparov said,
"the machine could use my mistakes [in previous
matches]," and won because of that advantage.
He also said he felt there
had been human intervention in game two of the match,
when the computer had two options and chose the
"human" move, a play that "normally would
be rejected by a computer."
When IBM dismantled the
computer and declined to provide printouts of the
calculations involved in the match, Kasparov said he
thought it was an "extremely unfair" decision.
"I believed Deep Blue
could give us valuable information and show at what
point, at what depth of calculation, a machine
decision-making process could produce the same result as
human creativity and intuition.
"What we were
witnessing was some sort of artificial
intelligence," he added. "And I think that's
what chess could contribute to the computer science
field, because only in chess do you have this very thin
and subtle balance between creativity and
calculation."
After his talk, Kasparov
responded to questions about the limits of performance
posed by six panelists: Oksana Bulgakowa, visiting
professor of Slavic languages; Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht,
professor of French and Italian and of comparative
literature and director of the Presidential Lectures;
Brian Hoffman, professor of internal medicine at the
School of Medicine; Adrian Keatinge-Clay, a member of the
Stanford chess team; football coach Tyrone Willingham;
and Terry Winograd, professor of computer science.
The exchanges between
Kasparov and Willingham were particularly lively. After
agreeing with Gumbrecht that a chess team could be housed
within the athletics department, Willingham wanted to
know if Kasparov's skills as a chess player could be
taught.
"You need intuition
first," the champion said. "You need something
inside that rings the bell, so that you can see the whole
picture [of a match].
"It is just there,
and if you are not born with it, no training could build
it." SR
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