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 April 26-28, 2007
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April 26-28, 2007
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Chess and Technology John Hartmann
Southern Illinois University
John Hartmann is currently a doctoral student in philosophy at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He specializes in contemporary Continental philosophy and classical American pragmatism, with a particular focus on phenomenology and its limits. John also has an enduring interest in philosophy of science and technology, as well as process philosophy.
In his dissertation, John turns to the work of philosophers associated with the so-called ‘theological turn’ in French phenomenology, and shows that the ‘theological turn’ is neither theological nor a turn! (Discuss amongst yourselves.) Put differently, the work of Levinas, Marion, et al. is not a radical reinvention of phenomenology, but merely a powerful rearticulation of some of its core issues and methodological aporias. Gilles Deleuze’s ‘phenomenology of intensities’ is offered as an antidote to this ill-thought trend in contemporary phenomenology.
John earned his BA in philosophy from Alfred University in 1998, and his MA in philosophy from SUNY Stony Brook in 2000. He is a proud alumnus (1997, 1998) of the Oneonta Undergraduate Philosophy Conference.
-- Abstract -- Chess and Technology
With the possible exception of the 1972 Fischer-Spassky match, chess has never captured the public imagination as it did when Garry Kasparov took on Deep Blue in 1996 and 1997. The Kasparov-Deep Blue matches were portrayed in the mass media as the fundamental battle between human creativity and the cold powers of the calculating machine. When Kasparov defeated Deep Blue in 1996, the world celebrated with him. When Kasparov lost the 1997 match with his famous fingerfehler, it was headline news around the globe.
Unfortunately, much of the public discourse about the match with Deep Blue obscures the most interesting philosophical aspects of man’s encounter with technology. Hubert Dreyfus, who is one of the few philosophers to comment on Kasparov’s loss, believes that because the computer is not intelligent – because it is not an embodied being operating at an ‘expert’ level of intelligence – humans have nothing to fear.
In a sense, this objection is correct. If we hold up the human intellect as the gold standard for intelligence, Deep Blue cannot begin to match up. Deep Blue did not rejoice when it beat Kasparov. While Kasparov crumbled under the pressure of the final game, Deep Blue merely hummed along, evaluating positions according to its programmed heuristics. What Dreyfus and friends say is true – but some things are true in a rather uninteresting way. As Evan Selinger notes, Dreyfus casts technologies such as Deep Blue as autonomous entities, abstracting them from everything that went into their construction. Deep Blue did not spring full-grown from the head of Feng-hsiung Hsu, but required the contributions of computer scientists, hardware manufacturers, chess theoreticians, trans-national corporations, and numerous others. In reifying technologies such as Deep Blue, Dreyfus seems to be carving out a safe space for human ingenuity. In truth, however, he ignores all of the human (and non-human!) work that went into the creation of the machine.
If we are to use chess as a lens for understanding our relation to technology, the matches with Deep Blue may not be our best laboratory. After the victory over Kasparov, Deep Blue was dismantled. Only 14 games between Kasparov and the various iterations of Deep Blue exist, and the total number of game scores involving the computer probably number in the hundreds. In contrast, thousands of chess players around the world use computers every day to study the game and play against both humans and machines. PC based software such as ChessBase and Fritz have become essential to improving chessplayers, and have revolutionized the game at even the highest levels. Surely an investigation of this commonly used set of technologies would be more fruitful in our attempt to understand what technology is and how it affects our lives.
In this paper, we will examine man’s relation to technology by using our relation to chess software as a case study. As we will see, the question of technology has not escaped the attention of philosophers, and we can see many of their concerns and insights manifested in the way people use computers in their chess activities. Without giving the whole story away, what will become apparent is the manner in which technology must be seen as mediating our experience without determining it, such that our experience of the world and of ourselves is constructed in and through technical mediation.Notes:
- Dreyfus, Hubert. What Computers "Still" Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason. Revised edition. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992.
- Selinger, Evan. “Normative Phenomenology.” Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde. ed. E. Selinger. Albany: SUNY Press, 2006. 96f. See also Ihde, Don, and Evan Selinger, “Merleau-Ponty and Epistemology Machines.” Human Studies. 27:4, 2005. 371-2.
- In its early years, Deep Blue was tested against human opponents in tournaments and on Internet chess servers. The games are no longer accessible at chessclub.com, but all told, the various versions of Deep Blue played somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 games there.
Website constructed and maintained by Douglas Shrader / Department Chair Philosc@Oneonta.edu March 15, 2007
