The writer is founder of Sifted, an FT-backed site about European start-upsWhen IBM’s Deep Blue computer defeated the world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, some reckoned it was checkmate for humanity, as well as for the ancient sport itself. Newsweek magazine had billed the contest between the calculating machine and the then strongest player in human history as “The Brain’s Last Stand”. “Every human being who has worried about losing a job to a computer . . . is rooting for this compact, darkly handsome 34-year-old Russian to prevail,” wrote journalist Steven Levy.
In spite of his formidable talents, Kasparov suffered a narrow, crushing and heavily symbolic defeat. Later, he expressed dismay at losing to a programmable “$10mn alarm clock”. But he also admired the human ingenuity behind a computer that could systematically evaluate 200mn moves a second and win with “brute number-crunching force”. Such have been the advances in computing power since then that Deep Blue seems quaintly archaic. It could be beaten by most of the chess apps we carry on our smartphones today. In 2017, Google DeepMind announced that its AlphaZero machine learning system had taught itself to become the world’s strongest player in just nine hours.
Yet a funny thing has happened to chess in the quarter century since Deep Blue’s victory. Rather than killing off the sport, technology has helped it flourish, stimulating creativity and broadening accessibility. “Chess has never been more alive than now,” the Chess.com website concluded, following the latest gripping world championship match in which the Chinese grandmaster Ding Liren beat his Russian opponent Ian Nepomniachtchi on Sunday. The site, which streamed superb live commentary of the 18-game match, has grown to more than 100mn registered users over the past 15 years. Such has been Chess.com’s popularity that its database crashed this year when 10mn members logged on to play in a single day.