|
|
|
|
So what's a meta-phor? By Sean Gonsalves Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind, MIT Press 2009, by Diego Rasskin-Gutman, translated by Deborah Klosky, 205pp. $24.95 (ChessCafe Price: $19.95) I'm going to step out on a limb here and assume you've already come across Garry Kasparov's fascinating review published recently in The New York Review of Books, even if you haven't read Chess Metaphors. And depending on how interested you are in an overview of cognitive and computer science, you might get more from Kasparov's review than Rasskin-Gutman's challenging meditation. That's not to say CM isn't worth the read, especially if you're a recreational wood pusher like me, and a Johnny-come-lately to boot; to say nothing of the fact that Kasparov didn't tell us much about the book itself. Getting through it is a chess match against a superior mind. Plod carefully through an academic opening, peppered with intriguing questions; mash into the meat of the middlegame, before tasting the exhilaration of the endgame (assuming you make it that far). Mixed metaphors aside, I'll be as blunt as Rasskin-Gutman shows himself to be. The book is more a history of science than a compendium of chess, which the author alerts the reader to right from the start. In the preface, he cautions that "the first two chapters are the most biological ones and therefore the hardest for the non-specialized reader…some sections of the book are necessarily technical, and readers should feel free to flip through parts that seem too technical, with the idea that reading should be a pleasure rather than a guilty obligation." But for any book reviewer worth their salt, to merely "flip through parts that seem too technical" just isn't right, even with the author's permission. Guilty obligation (or is it the urge to live up to an ideal?) compels a responsible reviewer to trudge through the technical stuff too. Unshackled from such obligations, however, you'd do well to take Rasskin-Gutman's advice, literally - unless, of course, you get a real kick out of contemplating the "filamentous structure" of microtubules, nueromodulation and special membrane channels with names like "N-methyl-D-aspartate." I suppose you don't have to have a mind for science to gain a dim appreciation for the "first metaphor of the book - the brain as an organ whose structure allows it to construct a model of the surrounding reality." But I'll admit, I found myself thinking: if that's a metaphor, maybe I don‘t know what a metaphor really is. So I consulted the work of the prominent linguist, Steven Pinker. In his book The Stuff of Thought, Pinker explains how metaphors work, noting that "the basic idea is that there are overarching laws of complex systems that govern diverse phenomena in the natural world…To the extent these laws exist, scientists can discover their properties as they study the systems that are governed by them. And they are entitled to use a metaphor both as a label for that kind of system and as a means of generalizing from a well-understood exemplar to a less-well-understood one." Well, I guess it's settled then. Rasskin-Gutman is entitled to his metaphors. Before each of the five chapters in CM, there are brief memoir-like introductions that serve as appetizers for the theme Rasskin-Gutman intends to cover in the chapter ahead. The italicized prelude to Chapter 2 is a fascinating analysis of the mental machinations that pulsed through the neural networks in Bobby Fischer's brain during his 1972 world championship match against Boris Spassky. And here's where things start to pick up a bit. It's off on a cognitive science history tour, spanning the bridge of mind-brain duality - from Descartes, the philosopher "credited with the idea that living organisms are like machines" to Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon, who set up the first theoretical models on expert behavior in chess. Along the way, our guide stops to make several interesting observations about the game itself, even if they are familiar sights. "When the mind sails past the complications of a chess position, it invents variations that exist only in the form of synaptic connections within our storehouse of immediate memory, the hippocampus. Expert players remember those variations as if they were seeing them - as if they were altered forms of the patterns that are stored in long-term memory throughout their professional experience and distributed in the cerebral cortex. Non-expert players, on the contrary, see different variations as ephemeral - as disappearing when the game is over or even in the very moment the player is thinking about what move to make. Sometimes short-term memory plays tricks on us during a chess game, with the player confusing one variation for another and the result ending in disaster." Or, as Kasparov notes in his review, Malcolm Gladwell's theory of "10,000 hours to become an expert" as expounded on in his recent book, Outliers. As someone who plays a fair amount of chess on the computer, I got excited when Rasskin-Gutman observed that "nowadays, thanks to computer chess programs and real-time Internet game software, more and more players are learning to perceive the board and pieces in two dimensions, drastically changing the type of visual experience that is involved and the quality of the cognitive processes that are activated when playing….The chess scene is radically changing." A declaration of that magnitude, as intuitively right as it feels, still begs the question(s): how so? And, are these drastic changes a good or bad thing for chess? Though I don't fault him for it (he is a scientist after all), I was disappointed no answer was given, not even a scientifically-educated guess. "It would be of great interest to evaluate these Internet-based differences in a controlled context" is what the reader must settle for. Chapter 3 is an eclectic mix of Artificial Intelligence, silicon, myth-making, "a proto-history of automatic chess," and a section on why elephants don't play the game, which leads to perhaps the most interesting question raised in the book: "what is so special about our intelligence that a bunch of symbol-processing algorithms cannot mimic?" Alas, the reader is left hanging again, with no immediate answer (or conjecture), before being dropped on the doorstep of the next chapter. Ah, Chapter 4. Finally, we arrive at the "total metaphor" of chess, which Rasskin-Gutman defines as "an activity that provides a space that is rich in possibilities for research in neuroscience and artificial intelligence" - "an ideal laboratory for investigation into the workings of the mind." Indeed. Here's where the reader is taken through "a brief history of chess" - from its remote origins as "part of an ancient tradition of communication with the gods" up to the current postmodern masters, acknowledging "Garry Kasparov as the undoubted head of that group." It's a quick trip, though. Only a half-dozen pages! David Shenk's historical overview The Immortal Game covers much the same ground but spreads it out over 240 pages. For those who like to revel in the grand and sweeping history of chess, Shenk's account is a more accessible and enjoyable experience for the layman. Still, there are diamonds in the rough. One precious stone is found under a section headed "Who Plays Chess?" This question Rasskin-Gutman answers and does so perceptively. He sees two general types of chess players, both very different from each other. "The first type of player - the appraiser - maintains the tradition of chess as an intellectual pursuit." The type who is consumed in thought and is "always running out of his clock time." "The second type of player - the entrepreneur (or even the gambler) - is attracted by the strong emotions that the game provokes by its aggressive possibilities….a grand master‘s mind clearly encompasses both appraiser and entrepreneur, perhaps in parallel columns that cross in the infinity of the subconscious, where contemplation of beauty becomes aggressive and the competitive instinct generates ideas of unexpected beauty." Chapter 4 is also where we find Rasskin-Gutman's most interesting chess analysis. He dissects the sacrificing of pieces, an act he describes as "an aesthetic or even ethical proposal in the moral framework of the board, where hypocrisy does not long survive." First by making a distinction between a temporary sacrifice and a "real" one, CM manages to convey the spine-tingling excitement of a "real" sacrifice, as witnessed in the 1963 game between Fischer and Robert Byrne, chess notation included. "Fischer sacrificed a knight in move 15 without recovering material right away, leaving everyone else, including Byrne, unable to grasp the idea behind his move. Seven moves later, Byrne surrendered." But not many pages pass before the reader must again surrender again to AI and computer chess programs in the fifth and final chapter, though not without first being treated to an insightful discussion of Adrian de Groot's Thought and Choice in Chess and how it relates to "chunking theory" - the notion that experts in any given field compare chunks of information stored in long-term memory to a perceived pattern with which they are confronted. And that brings me back to Kasparov's review once more. "I am much more interested in using the chess laboratory to illuminate the workings of the human mind, not the artificial mind," he laments, articulating my main beef with CM. Maybe it was an unfair expectation, but I kept waiting for Rasskin-Gutman to shine a scientific light on something James McCune Smith noted in his 1859 essay on chess, published in The National Era: "The highest eminence in chess is attained before the age of full intellectual development….The best chess-players on record, in like manner, had attained their eminence while under thirty years of age; while the human intellect is not at its full development until between the thirty-fifth and forty-fifth year of the individual. And if chess-playing maximum occurs before the intellectual maximum, it follows that chess is not a purely intellectual exercise." That Rasskin-Gutman didn't address Smith's observation was disappointing, even though I don't hold it against him. After all, he did acknowledge in the preface that he intended to write a book he wished he could have bought twenty years ago. Fair enough. My questions are not necessarily inquiries of interest for everyone else. Ultimately, what Rasskin-Gutman leaves us with is a highly technical, precision-guided mind-bomb, launched from a metaphorical chess board. The patient and perceptive reader will come away from it with a general understanding of how chess can help scientists understand the nature of thinking. If nothing else, CM convinced me to step up my metaphorical game. I wouldn't call it a classic, but consider it a good reference book to have on the shelves of my home library. And if you're like me, you'll add it to your collection simply because, as Dr. Mardy Grothe might say, I never metaphor I didn't like.
Order Chess Metaphors ChessCafe.com customers who order Chess Metaphors can receive an extra 10% off our already low price. Just add the item to your cart and enter the coupon code "metaphor10" (without the quotes) at checkout. This offer is valid until March 16, 2010. |
Purchases from our shop help keep ChessCafe.com freely accessible:
|
|
|
|
[ChessCafe
Home Page] [Book Review]
[Columnists] © 2010 BrainGamz, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
|
|
