Joe: In 1997, a machine beat the world's greatest chess champion. The world panicked. But what if the most important move in that game wasn't on the board at all? What if the machine's biggest weakness was revealed not by a checkmate, but by a bug? Lewis: That's the incredible story at the heart of Deep Thinking by the man himself, Garry Kasparov. And what's amazing is that Kasparov isn't just a chess genius; he's become a major voice on AI and human rights. He wrote this book 20 years after the match, not as a sore loser, but as a philosopher looking back at a moment that changed history. It’s received widespread acclaim for its balanced, optimistic take on AI, which is a refreshing change from the usual doom-and-gloom. Joe: Exactly. He frames it not as the end of human ingenuity, but the beginning of a new kind of partnership. And that story starts with a battle that felt like a sci-fi movie come to life. To understand that historic match, you have to understand the man. Kasparov wasn't just a player; he was a fighter who hated losing. Lewis: I can imagine. You don't get to be the world champion for 15 years by being a gracious loser. Joe: Not at all. He describes himself as a terrible loser. And this sets the stage perfectly for the drama. Let's go back to 1985. A 22-year-old Kasparov, on the verge of becoming world champion, plays a simultaneous exhibition in Hamburg against 32 of the best chess computers in the world. Lewis: Thirty-two at once? That’s just showing off. Joe: It was a spectacle. He walked from table to table for five hours. The organizers warned him, "Computers don't get tired. They don't get discouraged." And in one game, he realized he was in serious trouble. A loss, or even a draw, would be a PR disaster. Lewis: Oh, the pressure. What did he do? Joe: He did something very human. He found a way to bait the machine. He sacrificed a piece, a move so tempting the computer couldn't resist. It took the bait, and Kasparov turned the game around. He won all 32 games. 32-0. At that moment, the human mind was still king. Lewis: A complete shutout. So he was dominant then. What changed so fast that just 12 years later, a machine could beat him? Joe: Two letters: I-B-M. And a machine they called Deep Blue.

Joe: The 1997 rematch between Kasparov and Deep Blue wasn't like the first match a year earlier, which Kasparov won. IBM had doubled down. The atmosphere shifted from a friendly scientific experiment to all-out war. IBM was the organizer, the sponsor, and the opponent. They were playing on their home turf, and they were playing to win. Lewis: Wait, IBM had a team of Grandmasters working in secret to train the machine? That doesn't sound like a fair fight. It's like a boxer training for a fight, but the opponent's team gets to secretly watch all his sparring sessions. Joe: That's exactly how Kasparov felt. He learned that several top American Grandmasters, like Joel Benjamin, were secretly helping IBM calibrate Deep Blue, programming it with sophisticated chess knowledge. The machine he faced in '97 wasn't just a faster calculator; it was armed with the strategic wisdom of his peers. The psychological warfare had begun before the first piece was even moved. Lewis: That's intense. So how did the match play out? Joe: It was a psychological thriller. Kasparov won the first game, but the second game was the turning point. Kasparov, feeling the pressure, made a strategic error and got into a bad position. He was demoralized, exhausted, and he resigned. He walked out, leaving the IBM team to celebrate their victory. Lewis: A devastating loss. Joe: It gets worse. Later that night, his team analyzed the final position. And they discovered the truth: the position was a draw. Kasparov had resigned a game he could have saved. He said the realization was like a physical blow. His confidence was shattered. Lewis: Oh, that’s brutal. To lose is one thing, but to find out you gave up when you didn't have to... that's a whole other level of mental torture. So he suspected human intervention? I read he compared it to Maradona's 'Hand of God' goal, but with a supercomputer. Joe: He did. The secrecy from IBM was fueling his paranoia. In that second game, Deep Blue made a move that was so strange, so... un-computer-like, that Kasparov became convinced a human Grandmaster must have intervened. He demanded to see the computer's logs, to understand its "thought process." IBM refused. Lewis: They refused? That's incredibly suspicious. Why would they do that if they had nothing to hide? Joe: Their official reason was protecting proprietary technology. But for Kasparov, it confirmed his worst fears. He felt he wasn't just playing a machine; he was playing a faceless committee, a black box that could be manipulated behind the scenes. This all culminated in the final, decisive sixth game. Kasparov needed a win to tie the match. He played an opening he rarely used, the Caro-Kann Defense, trying to throw the machine off. Lewis: A surprise tactic. Did it work? Joe: It backfired spectacularly. On just the seventh move, Deep Blue made a stunning piece sacrifice. It was a move so aggressive and brilliant that it completely broke Kasparov. He said he couldn't believe what he was seeing. He crumbled under the pressure and lost the game, and the match, in just 19 moves. It was a swift, public execution. Lewis: Wow. And the controversy didn't end there, right? Years later, one of the IBM team members, Miguel Illescas, revealed something shocking about that final game. Joe: He did. Illescas admitted that on the morning of the game, the IBM team had specifically programmed Deep Blue to make that exact knight sacrifice if Kasparov played a certain move—a move he had never played before in that situation. They had anticipated his surprise tactic and laid a trap. Lewis: That's not a scientific experiment. That's a targeted assassination. It completely changes the narrative from "machine beats man" to "corporation with unlimited resources and a team of experts beats one man." Joe: Precisely. And it raises the fundamental question that Kasparov grapples with for the rest of the book. What exactly did he lose to? Was it true artificial intelligence, or something else entirely?

Lewis: Okay, so the machine won. But how? Was it actually 'thinking' or just... calculating on a level we can't comprehend? Joe: That is the billion-dollar question. And to answer it, Kasparov takes us back to the earliest days of AI research. The pioneers, like Claude Shannon, identified two main paths for a chess computer. Path A is "brute force"—the machine calculates every possible move, millions and millions of them, and picks the one with the best statistical outcome. Lewis: So it’s just guessing really, really fast? Joe: In a way, yes. It's pure computational power. Path B is what they called "intelligent search." This is more like a human. A human player doesn't see every possible move. We use intuition, pattern recognition, and strategic understanding to narrow it down to just a few good candidates, and then we analyze those deeply. For decades, researchers thought Path B was the key to AI. They were wrong. Lewis: Brute force won out? Joe: Overwhelmingly. As computers got faster, it turned out that calculating 200 million positions per second, which is what Deep Blue could do, was more effective than trying to program a machine with something as fuzzy as human intuition. This leads to a fascinating paradox. Lewis: I'm ready. Joe: It's called Moravec's Paradox. It states that for computers, the things humans find hard, like logic, math, and chess, are easy. But the things humans find easy, like walking, recognizing a face, or picking up a coffee cup, are incredibly difficult for a machine. Lewis: That's wild. So a computer can be a genius at chess but a toddler at walking? Why is that? Joe: Because walking and perception are skills we've been evolving for millions of years. They're hard-wired into our biology. High-level logic is a more recent development. For a machine starting from scratch, it's easier to learn the rules of logic than the subtle, context-rich rules of navigating the physical world. Kasparov uses a perfect analogy from the movie Starman. Lewis: The one with Jeff Bridges as the alien? Joe: That's the one. The alien learns to drive by watching humans. He observes that at a red light, you stop. At a green light, you go. And at a yellow light, you speed up. Lewis: (Laughs) I mean, he's not wrong, technically. Joe: Exactly! So he floors it through a yellow light and nearly causes a massive crash. He has the data, but zero context. He doesn't understand that the purpose of the yellow light is to warn you to slow down. That, Kasparov says, is Deep Blue. It knows the what—the rules of chess, the value of the pieces—but it has no concept of the why. It doesn't understand the purpose of a beautiful, strategic plan. It just calculates. Lewis: Right, so the machine knows the what but not the why. It can follow the rules of chess perfectly, but it doesn't understand the purpose of the game. It doesn't feel the thrill of a clever sacrifice or the fear of an attack. It's just running numbers. Joe: And this is where human creativity comes in. Kasparov tells this amazing story about another chess legend, Michail Tal, known as the "Magician of Riga." During a high-pressure game, Tal was contemplating a risky sacrifice. His mind, instead of calculating variations, got stuck on a children's poem about pulling a hippopotamus out of a swamp. Lewis: A hippopotamus? In the middle of a chess game? Joe: For minutes, his mind was completely consumed with the engineering problem of how to rescue this imaginary hippo. Cranes, levers, helicopters... he thought of everything. Then, he just gave up and decided to let the hippo drown. And in that instant, the hippo vanished from his mind, the chess position became crystal clear, and he realized the sacrifice was purely intuitive. He couldn't calculate it, he just had to feel it. He made the move and won brilliantly. Lewis: That is the most human thing I've ever heard. A machine would never get distracted by a metaphorical hippo. Joe: Never. A machine's mind is a pristine highway of logic. A human mind is a messy, chaotic, beautiful forest of hippos and memories and emotions. And that, Kasparov argues, is where our greatest strength lies. The machine may have won the battle, but it didn't understand the war.

Joe: Exactly. And that's the paradox Kasparov landed on. After being defeated, after all the paranoia and the psychological torment, he didn't call for a ban on AI. He didn't retreat in fear. He invented a new sport. Lewis: A new sport? What do you mean? Joe: In 1998, just a year after the loss, he introduced something he called "Advanced Chess," which later became known as "Centaur Chess." The rules are simple: it's a human playing chess, but they're allowed to use a computer as a tool. Human plus machine. Lewis: So it's like giving a carpenter a power saw instead of a handsaw. You're augmenting their skill. Joe: A perfect analogy. Kasparov believed that the combination of human strategic guidance and a machine's tactical calculation would create the highest level of chess ever played. And he was right. But the most shocking result came a few years later, in 2005, from a freestyle online tournament. Lewis: Let me guess, Kasparov won? Joe: Not even close. The tournament was open to anyone. Grandmasters with supercomputers entered. But the winners were a team of two amateur chess players from New Hampshire. Lewis: Hold on. Amateurs beat the pros? With all their fancy supercomputers? How is that even possible? Joe: They were using three normal, off-the-shelf PCs at the same time. But they had developed a superior process. They were better at coaching their machines. They knew when to trust the computer's suggestion, when to override it with human intuition, and how to manage the flow of information from multiple engines. Their collaboration was better. Lewis: That's incredible. So it wasn't about having the smartest human or the fastest computer. It was about having the best teamwork. Joe: That was Kasparov's mind-blowing conclusion. He summarized it in a formula: A weak human + a machine + a superior process is better than a strong human + a machine + an inferior process. The process, the collaboration, is the most important part. Lewis: That has huge implications for everything, not just chess. For medicine, for science, for business... It suggests our future isn't about being replaced by AI, but about becoming better managers of AI. Joe: It's a total re-framing. We stop asking, "What can computers do?" and start asking, "What can computers help us do?" Kasparov argues that technology has always done this. The Industrial Revolution took over manual labor, which allowed us to focus more on what makes us human: our minds. Now, AI is beginning to take over the repetitive, computational parts of mental labor. Lewis: Freeing us up for what? More hippo-in-the-swamp moments? Joe: (Laughs) Exactly! Freeing us up for creativity, curiosity, asking bigger questions, and dreaming up new challenges. The machine is the ultimate tool for answering questions. But it's still up to us, the humans, to ask the right ones.

Joe: So we go on this epic journey. We start with the terror of a man-vs-machine battle that feels like the end of the world. We see the psychological games, the corporate intrigue, the crushing defeat. Then we look under the hood and realize the machine's "intelligence" is alien to our own—it's calculation without comprehension. Lewis: It's the ultimate calculator, but it doesn't know why it's calculating. Joe: And that leads to the final, beautiful twist. The story isn't about competition at all. It's about collaboration. Kasparov's ultimate lesson, forged in the fire of his own defeat, is that we shouldn't be afraid of what our machines can do. We should be thrilled. They are the tools that will allow us to pursue bigger dreams. Lewis: It’s a profoundly optimistic message. He’s essentially saying that AI gives us a promotion. It takes over the grunt work of thinking, so we can be the creative directors, the strategists, the dreamers. Joe: That's it. The goal isn't to build a machine that can beat us. The goal is to build a machine that can help us beat our own limitations. It's not Man versus Machine. It's Man with Machine, reaching for something greater. Lewis: It makes you think... what are the 'brute force' tasks in our own lives that we could offload to technology, to free ourselves up for more creativity, more curiosity, more of what makes us human? Joe: That's a great question. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Find us on our socials and let us know. What's one thing you'd love to automate to free up your creative energy? Joe: This is Aibrary, signing off.