Skip to main content

Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine

Garry Kasparov is arguably the greatest chess player who has ever lived. In 1997 he played a chess match against IBM’s computer Deep Blue. Kasparov lost the match. This film shows the match and the events surrounding it from Kasparov’s perspective. It delves into the psychological aspects of the game, paranoia surrounding it and suspicions that have arisen around IBM’s true tactics. It consists of interviews with Kasparov, his manager, chess experts, and members of the IBM Deep Blue team, as well as original footage of the match itself.
The good parts of the movie is that you have interviews with Kasparov and the IBM team. Kasparov is a charming guy. The IBM team are open and friendly. The movie shows both the bad and good sides of Kasparov, who displays dignity and his temper when he is being pushed around by IBM. The Deep Blue team are interesting, but the IBM company does not come off well. They milk the match for all advertising they could get. The movie keeps touting that it was a victory of machine intelligence over Man, but the point I get from it is, several computer geeks and chess grand masters after years of effort can put together a program that can barely beat a world champion, if they take every single psychological and technical advantage they can.



Labels

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

The Ringworm Children

Directed by David Belhassen and Asher Hemias. The documentary won the award for "Best Documentary" at the Haifa International Film Festival and was featured as a documentary at the Israel Film Festival in Los Angeles in 2007.
Watch now

Scientific Racism: The Eugenics of Social Darwinism

Scientific racism is the use of scientific techniques and hypotheses to sanction the belief in racial superiority, inferiority or racism. This is not the same as using scientific findings and the scientific method to investigate differences among the humans and argue that there are races. In biological classification differences between animal groups are investigated without necessarily claiming that one group is superior to others. Racism or racial supremacy is the additional claim that some races are superior to other races.
Watch now

In the Shadow of the Moon

Between 1968 and 1972, nine American spacecraft voyaged to the Moon, and 12 men walked upon its surface. They remain the only human beings to have stood on another world. In the Shadow of the Moon brings together for the first, and very possibly the last, time surviving crew members from every single Apollo mission which flew to the Moon, and allows them to tell their story in their own words. The definitive story of going to the moon, told by those who went. Between 1969 and 1972 an elite group of men achieved an incredible dream. They were, and remain, the only human beings to set foot on a planet other than our own. These personal testimonies are interwoven with digitally remastered footage from Nasa film archives, much of it previously unseen and all of it hauntingly evocative of a bygone era. The result is an intimate and epic film which vividly communicates the daring and the danger, the pride and the passion, of this band of special young men.
Watch now