Garry Kasparov is one of the world’s greatest ever chess grandmasters – reigning as World Champion for 15 years from 1985-2000, the longest such reign in chess history. Kasparov was a brilliant tactician, able to out-calculate his opponents and “see” many moves into the future.
In addition to his chess prowess, Kasparov is famous for the 1997 chess showdown, aptly billed as the final battle for supremacy between human and artificial intelligence. The IBM supercomputer, Deep Blue, defeated Kasparov in a 6 game match – the first time that a machine beat a reigning World Champion.
Of course chess is a natural game for the computational power of AI – Deep Blue reportedly being able to calculate over 200 million moves per second. Today, virtually all top chess programs that you and I can purchase are stronger than any human on earth.
The loss to Deep Blue intrigued Kasparov and made him think. He recalled Moravec’s paradox: machines and humans frequently have opposite strengths and weaknesses. There’s a saying that chess is “99 percent tactics” – that is, the short combinations of moves players use to get an advantage in position. Computers are tactically flawless compared to humans.
On the flip side, humans, especially chess Grandmasters were brilliant at recognizing strategic themes of positions and deeply grasping chess strategy.
What if, Kasparov wondered, if the computational tactical prowess were combined with the human big-picture, strategic thinking that top Grandmasters had honed after years of play and positional study?
In 1998 he helped organize the first “advanced chess” tournament in which each human player had a machine partner to help during each game. The results were incredible and the combination of human/machine teams regularly beat the strongest chess computers (all of which were stronger than Kasparov). According to Kasparov, “human creativity was more important under these conditions”.
By 2014, and to this day, there continue to be what is described as “freestyle” chess tournaments in which teams made up of humans and any combination of computers compete against each other, along with the strongest stand-alone machines. The human-machine combination wins most of the time.
In freestyle chess the “team” is led by human executives, who have a team of mega-grandmaster tactical advisers helping decide whose advice to probe in depth and ultimately the strategic direction to take the game in.
For us folks in supply chain, and especially in supply chain planning, there’s a lot to be learned from the surprisingly beneficial collaboration of chess grandmaster and supercomputer.
Humans excel at certain things. So do computers.
Combine them, effectively, like Kasparov inspired and you’ll undoubtedly get…
Grandmaster Collaboration.