for which Kasparov was famous. His opponent was oblivious to Kasparov’s status and reputation for guile and audacity. Indeed, his opponent was not even in the room, but many miles away in a large, dimly lit building in Yorktown Heights, New York. His opponent was a computer. Its name was Deep Blue.
The media, rather predictably, hyped the match as an historic showdown between man and machine. ‘The future of humanity is on the line,’ declared one newscaster. ‘The match goes further than mere chess, presenting a challenge to mankind’s sovereignty,’ intoned USA Today. Even Kasparov seemed to be seduced by the apocalyptic tenor of the pre-match hype, saying, ‘This is a mission to defend human dignity... It is species-defining.’
Kasparov’s opening move, pawn to C5, was typed into a computer adjacent to the match table by Mr Hsu (the brains behind the development of Deep Blue, on behalf of electronics giant IBM) and then transmitted across to the IBM Center in New York by a relatively new technology called the Internet.
At this point Deep Blue sprang into action. Powered by 256 specially developed chess processors operating in parallel, 32 concentrated on each eight-square section of the board, it was able to compute more than 100 million positions per second. A few moments later, Deep Blue’s response came winging its way across the ether, and Mr Hsu dutifully executed the instruction: pawn to C3.
For six games over eight days, the thrust and counterthrust between man and machine was beamed to a captivated world. Kasparov, an eccentric and hot-tempered Azerbaijani, was famous for his histrionics, often growling and shaking his head vigorously. Many had criticized Kasparov’s antics, accusing him of deliberately trying to disturb adversaries. But Kasparov was no less animated against his machine opponent, often rising from his chair to pace the room.
Just before the fortieth move in the final game on 17 February, Kasparov took his watch from the table and put it on his wrist. This was a familiar sign that the world champion believed the match was nearing its conclusion. The audience in the lecture hall held its breath. Three moves later Dr Hsu rose slowly to his feet and offered his hand to his opponent. The audience burst into wild applause.
Kasparov had triumphed.
The question is: How? How could a man unable to search more than three moves per second (this represents the current limit of human capacity) defeat a machine whose computing speed was measured in the tens of millions? The answer, as we shall see, will help us to unlock some of the deepest mysteries of expert performance, both within sport and in the wider world.
In the 1990s Gary Klein, a New York psychologist, embarked on a major study funded by the US military to examine decision-making in the real world. He was looking to test the theory that expert decision-makers wield logical methods, examining the various alternatives before selecting the optimal choice. Klein’s problem was that the longer the study went on, the less the theory bore any relation to the way decisions are made in practice.
The curious thing was not that top decision-makers – medical professionals, firefighters, military commanders, and so on – were making choices based on unexpected factors; it was that they did not seem to be making choices at all. They were contemplating the situation for a few moments and then just deciding, without considering the alternatives. Some were unable even to explain how they happened upon the course of action they actually took.
Here is an example of a fire lieutenant making a life-saving decision, as recounted in Klein’s book Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions:
There is a simple house fire in a one-storey house in a residential neighbourhood. The fire is in the back, in the kitchen area. The lieutenant leads his hose crew into the building, to the back, to spray water on the fire, but the fire just roars back at them.
‘Odd,’ he thinks. The water should have more of an impact. They try dousing it again, and get the same results. They retreat a few steps to re-group.
Then the lieutenant starts to feel as if something is not right. He doesn’t have any clues; he just doesn’t feel right about being in that house, so he orders his men out of the building – a perfectly standard building with nothing out of the ordinary.
As soon as his men leave the building, the floor where they had been standing collapses. Had they still been inside, they would have plunged into the fire below.
Later, when Klein asked the commander how he knew something was about to go terribly wrong, the commander put it down to ‘extrasensory perception’. That was the only thing he could come up with to explain a life-saving decision, and others like it, that seemed to emerge from nowhere. Klein was too much of a rationalist to accept the idea of ESP, but by now he had begun to notice equally perplexing abilities among other expert decision-makers. They seemed to know what to do, often without knowing why.
One of Klein’s co-workers, who had spent many weeks studying the neonatal unit of a large hospital, had found that experienced nurses were able to diagnose an infection in babies even when, to outsiders, there seemed to be no visible clues. This was not merely remarkable, but often life-saving: infants at an early stage of life can quickly succumb to infections if they are not detected early.
Perhaps the most curious thing of all was that the hospital would perform tests to check the accuracy of the nurse’s diagnosis, and occasionally these would come back negative. But sure enough, by the next day, the tests would come back positive – the nurse had been right all along. To the researcher this seemed almost magical, and even the nurses were baffled by it, attributing it to ‘intuition’ or a ‘special sense’.
What was going on? Can the insights gleaned from sport help to unlock the mystery?
Think back to Desmond Douglas, the Speedy Gonzales of English table tennis, who could anticipate the movement of a table tennis ball by chunking the pattern of his opponent’s movement before the ball was even hit. Think, also, of how other top performers in sport seem to know what to do in advance of everyone else, creating the so-called time paradox where they are able to play in an unhurried way even under severe time constraints.
Klein came to realize that expert firefighters are relying on precisely the same mental processes. They are able to confront a burning building and almost instantly place it within the context of a rich, detailed, and elaborate conceptual scheme derived from years of experience. They can chunk the visual properties of the scene and comprehend its complex dynamics, often without understanding how. The fire commander called it ‘extrasensory perception’; Douglas, you will remember, cited his ‘sixth sense’.
We can get an idea of what is going on by digging down into the mind of the fire commander who pulled his men out moments before the floor caved in. He did not suspect that the seat of the fire was in the basement, because he did not even know the house had a basement. But he was already curious, based upon his extensive experience, as to why the fire was not reacting as expected. The living room was hotter than it should have been for such a small fire, and it was altogether too quiet. His expectations were breached, but in ways so subtle he was not consciously aware of why.
Only with hindsight – and after hours of conversation with Klein – was it possible to piece together the sequence of events. The reason the fire was not quenched by his crew’s attack was because its base was underneath them, and not in the kitchen; the reason it was hotter than expected was because it was rising from many feet below; the reason it was quiet is because the floor was muffling the noise. All this – and many more interconnecting variables of indescribable complexity – was responsible for the fire commander taking the life-saving decision to pull his men.
As Klein explains, ‘The commander’s experience had provided him with a firm set of patterns.
