Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins,
by Garry Kasparov,
Published by PublicAffairs (2017)
Rating: ***
This book was recommended to me at University by a guest lecturer who was taking sessions for us in Information Technology Law. I’ve been playing chess against the computer every day since the start of the year (my record is dismal, and improvements, if any, are not noticeable yet), so this book caught my fancy instantly. Deep Blue, in general, is well-documented, but I hadn’t read Kasparov’s thoughts on the game, or on machines generally. Plus, having read Andrew Yang’s bleak painting of what technology was doing to us, I figured it was time for a bit of a more uplifting take on things. One that inspired, and catered to the boundless possibilities that advancements in technology unlocked.
Kasparov takes a fundamentally simple approach the book. He traces through the history of artificial intelligence and machine learning, particularly in the context of chess, and paints how his matchup with Deep Blue came to be – and where the algorithms will take us next, with AlphaGo and everything.
This was a useful exposition of that history. However, my issue with the book is that the blurb made is sound like it would discuss the interaction between humans and artificial intelligence. I was curious, in particular, about Kasparov’s own work with artificial intelligence, and the manner in which he has contributed to chess algorithms and chess database systems, or studied them. That constituted less than one-third of the book, which is the reason for my rating.
Tejas Rao 