The Grandmaster

Back in 1997, I saw Garry Kasparov face off against an IBM computer. It was mostly very boring.

On the stage was a blue metal box – Deep Blue. Kasparov was upstairs, in seclusion, and the moves were shown on a big board hanging over the stage.

Eventually, there was some excitement. An hour or so into the game, Kasparov went into what chess players call a deep think, chewing up his clock. Emerging from it some time later, he moved his pieces with lightning speed, and promptly put Deep Blue in a corner.

It was Deep Blue’s turn to become alarmingly inactive. Then it made a few quick moves of its own and evened the position. Kasparov gave it some thought and took a draw.

He came downstairs in a rage. It was all he could do not to swear. Playing against a box is one thing, he declared bitterly, but playing against a team of international grandmasters who keep rejiggering the program throughout the game was quite another.

He eventually lost the match.

Fast forward 18 years. We are in a sold-out auditorium at New York’s Jewish Community Center for Randy Cohen’s “Person Place Thing” conversation series. The guest picks a person, a place and a thing he or she wants to talk about. Kasparov picks Alan Turing; his thing – you guessed it – is the computer; his place is Yalta.

Kasparov no longer fumes at computers. Now he likes them. They changed the opening theory of chess completely, as well as the way games are analyzed. He says that, when he was playing Karpov for the World Championship, he would do his homework and come to play feeling that he had a magic sword inside his head.

“Now I realize I had a broken knife,” he jokes.

People who know the game say that Kasparov is one of the most inventive and imaginative players in the history of the game. Yet he decided to leave competitive chess in 2005, at the height of his abilities, about the time when computers were beginning to ride roughshod over human players.

Kasparov is certainly no Luddite. If he can’t beat ‘em, he’s happy to join ‘em. He says there should be a partnership between computers and humans, combining the mammoth computing power of the machines with the intuition and creativity of individuals. After all, a computer is the beautiful product of a creative, imaginative human being and a sensitive soul – namely Alan Turing...

Yet such notions of partnership fly out the window when it comes to politics. Kasparov can’t beat Putin, either. But he has no wish to join him. Whatever it is, Putinism is not the beautiful creation of a highly sophisticated human brain and a sensitive, imaginative soul. It is instead the exact opposite. Computers represent progress and enlightenment. Putinism, Kasparov says, is dragging Russia and the Russians back to the Dark Ages.

Kasparov is speaking at JCC on February 4 – the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the 1945 Yalta Conference that divided up the post-war world. Kasparov suggests that, just as Yalta shaped the world in the second half of the twentieth century; Yalta, as part of Crimea, will shape the first half of the twenty-first.

Kasparov is very smart, articulate and affable, with a Mediterranean charm. But not when it comes to politics.

The live audience at JCC is about one-third American and two-thirds Russian-American. Among the latter are few Putin supporters. So when Kasparov lays into Putin, the audience cheers. When the host, Randy Cohen, makes light of Kasparov’s impassioned denunciations of the Russian president, the audience doesn’t laugh. When Cohen says that the separatist rebellion in Ukraine is a parochial conflict, the audience boos him.

It was, unfortunately, a familiar sight. When my family left the Soviet Union in the early 1970s, we too were passionate in our warnings to the West to heed the communist threat before it was too late. We also talked of Adolf Hitler, Neville Chamberlain and appeasement. Solzhenitsyn expressed what we all felt. I heard his commencement address at Harvard in 1978 and was shocked to hear him being booed when he spoke what I knew to be the self-evident truth, that the West had lost its “civil courage” in not standing up more to the Soviet Union.

In the ironic, slightly condescending manner of Randy Cohen, the Americans we tried to warn told us to cool it. Everything would be fine.

In fact, in due course everything did turn out to be fine. The Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its idiocy. Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia and even had sufficient time to become a Putin apologist before his death in 2008.

One day Putin, too, will vanish into thin air. (We all will, of course.) But for now, many like those at JCC are focused on a powerful, alternate reality populated by Putin (the Prince of Darkness), his Russian propagandists, and the Donbass orcs, as if there is nothing else in the world.

Meanwhile, the real world – and Garry Kasparov, who now lives on the Upper West Side – is doing a variety of exciting, productive, useful things. It is advancing science, developing new technologies, starting new companies, designing new drugs, finding alternative energy sources, exploring outer space.

I would like to think everything will turn out fine in the end. But I’m not always confident of this.