Jonah Bleicher’s 2012 Sloan Production Award-winning short film The
King’s Pawn presents a fictionalized version of a similar matchup.
A former chess master, Martin, who has been “training” a computer
for years, comes up against his old nemesis in a televised competition.
The King's
Pawn one-minute teaser, from Jonah
Bleicher on Vimeo.
The whole film, 17 minutes long, is embedded further below.
National Chess Day was declared by President Ford in 1976. It
is usually celebrated on the second Saturday in October – full information
can be found in this
2010 USCF article. In honor of the 2015 National Chess Day the produces
decided to "democratically release The King's Pawn online
to all audiences for free." They are currently in the process of planning
an international film festival debut, and if a distributor was interested,
they would be happy to put the film in theaters. But here without further
ado is the full film.
To follow the film as it spreads online, visit
the KingsPawnFilm Facebook
page.
Some stills from the movie
The film is a fictional re-envisioning of IBM
Deep Blue's historic victory over Garry Kasparov in 1997.
The inspiration for the story came from the conspiracy theories surrounding
the shocking outcome of the match.
With so much media attention and such high
stakes surrounding the match,
is it possible that someone from the computer's side might have interfered
with its outcome?
The film gets inside of the head of a computer engineer in such a situation.
A King's Pawn concept sketch
Screen display of Galatea V2.04 at work
A final encounter of the former child chess
adversaries
Interview with the producer
Jonah Bleicher (bio at the bottom of the page) is the co-writer and director
of the film. Here are edited excerpts from Sloan Science and Film’s
conversation with Mr. Bleicher.
SF: How did you first become interested in computers
competing with humans on the chessboard?
JB: I remember the original events of Kasparov versus Deep Blue; I was
in high school when it happened. It occurred to me that it’s as exciting
as a boxing match between two opponents, except it’s a game of minds.
It’s more exciting to have a machine show intelligence instead of
brawn in a duel with a human.
SF: Thanks to Martin, your protagonist, who is entering
the computer’s moves, you have a situation in the film where two humans
are competing as well.
JB: When I first decided to take a stab at this, the obvious choice was
to have the human chess master be the protagonist, as is usually the case
in stories like this. In science fiction movies when people are battling
machines, you’re siding with the humans who are trying to survive.
But I thought that was sort of an obvious approach.
I started reading about the team that developed the computer and realized
these are humans just as much as the people on the other side. They’re
exceptional in other ways and are sort of unsung heroes. I found that story
to be a lot more interesting than just a computer battling a human. Reading
more about these people, I realized there’s a lot of drama there.
So I wanted to focus on the guy behind the computer, since the computer
itself doesn’t really have a personality.
SF: Can you talk a little about the research you
did to prepare for the film?
JB: I read Behind Deep Blue, by the main guy who designed Deep
Blue, Feng-hsiung Hsu. There’s a big conspiracy theory where Kasparov
claimed that the humans [behind Deep Blue] might have cheated. That led
me to read this guy’s work. Obviously he had a very defensive agenda
because a lot of people believed that IBM cheated, and there’s an
arrogance to him. Hsu’s more represented in the film by Martin’s
boss because he was purely an engineer and for him there was no art to it.
But when I started reading about the process, they had former champions
training the computer in chess. And I thought, that’s interesting:
what if this former prodigy that didn’t end up quite making it gets
another chance at that title through the computer? So Martin is based on
a few people in real life.
Our science advisor, Eli Vovsha, was both a computer scientist—a
Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University—and a chess master and former
chess champion. The kind of thinking that leads to excellence in chess I
think also often leads to excellence in the computer sciences. So it made
perfect sense that that would be the path of a guy like Martin. He’s
forty now, he thought he would be a champion but was overshadowed his whole
life, and this is his last chance at glory.
SF: Martin isn’t totally sympathetic at first,
but watching him interact with the computer brings out a very sympathetic
aspect in him.
JB: It was a challenge to make him sympathetic because he’s passive
and he cheats!
SF: It’s an interesting twist that he cheats,
because the human and the computer are sort of a team at that point.
JB: Weirdly enough, one of my early inspirations was actually Iron
Man. In a world where there are super heroes, there’s this unfair
advantage: You’re either born that way or thrown into a nuclear facility
and suddenly you’re superhuman. To compete in that arena this normal
guy builds a special suit. In a way, Martin is like Iron Man. He’s
trying to build that computer to allow him to compete in world-level chess.
In terms of the cheating, mostly what’s remembered about the real
match in 1997 are those allegations. And of course, today it’s no
longer relevant whatsoever because even if there was some foul play, within
a few years a computer would have won anyway.
What Kasparov was arguing was that playing a computer took a very different
strategy. You’re not playing the same way as if you were playing a
human. It’s a very psychological game. There’s a lot of poker
to it where you’re trying to read your opponent, and when you’re
playing a computer you can’t use that. The computer’s completely
unaffected by psychological warfare. So people talk about how they had to
learn how a computer plays chess.
Specifically, that one move where [Martin] cheats in the movie, there was
a similar thing in the original matchup. Kasparov said, “I refuse
to believe that a computer came up with that move because this is not the
way a computer thinks.”
SF: How much would Kasparov have understood that
distinction?
JB: Well, it wasn’t his first time. First of all, he won the year
before; it was a rematch. And he’d been playing computers for ten,
fifteen years. And just like any other sport where people are watching videos
of their opponents and training, that’s true for chess as well. He
prepared for that match a lot.
SF: As you said before, in science fiction, you often
end up rooting against the technology. It’s interesting because I
think a lot of science fiction writers are inspired by a love of technology,
but when it comes down to actually writing the story, they end up arguing
against it.
JB: Right, there’s a human fear of the unknown. Whatever is beyond
our grasp is threatening to us. I came of age in the nineties and I remember
paranoia from tech was so heightened during that time from Y2K and all of
that stuff. It seems sort of silly in hindsight but it was such a real thing
at the time. I wanted to satirize it a little bit.
SF: Now there’s that computer that they’re
saying passed the Turing test.
JB: I think the debate still is very much ongoing. They keep talking about
artificial intelligence, robots are coming back into the conversation more
and more today. There are robots in combat, drones and those things. I think
there’s still an innate fear and it’s not completely unwarranted,
you know? It all comes down to Frankenstein, or even before, the Tower of
Babel—cautionary tales about humans overreaching.
There is something to be said about humans having this capacity to create
tools that are much greater than themselves or their understanding and therefore
competing with whatever’s out there. Some people call it God or the
forces of physics, but whatever it is there does seem to be a weird competition
between it and our species.
SF: Did your research change your ideas about artificial
intelligence?
JB: Not really. It was almost disappointing to learn that Deep Blue was
actually a pretty simple mechanism. It employed what they call brute force
processing, which is more speed, more speed, more crunching of numbers.
So really what I learned in terms of the computer wasn’t all that
impressive. It was sort of like, oh, it’s just a really advanced calculator.
SF: Why do you think people are so specifically interested
in computers competing with people at chess? It really seems to get under
people’s skin.
JB: Chess is such an ancient game. It has such a reputation as being a
one-to-one representation of human intelligence. I think there’s no
game that’s more iconic when describing what human excellence is.
That’s the last thing humans had over machines, in a way. Obviously
machines are stronger and faster—you can’t run faster than a
car or a jet or something. Intelligence was sort of the last frontier, and
I think that’s why it captured the imagination so much.
SF: You have the chess master in the film make those
arguments—but then he loses.
JB: As a viewer of films, I’m very against having just one point
of view from the filmmaker. I feel it’s very preachy. So what I try
to do is present the different arguments around an issue and let people
wrestle with the question rather than provide an answer.
SF: There are still computer scientists trying to
beat humans at Go, the last game humans still win on a regular basis when
facing machines.
JB: I feel like that debate is over. Deep Blue, the computer itself, was
such a force to reckon with. And I read somewhere
that any iPhone in our pockets today is more powerful than Deep Blue. Technology
advances so quickly, there’s something really tragic about it. I think
that Deep Blue is now sitting in a museum in D.C. It so quickly went from
being this fearsome, nightmarish thing to becoming a relic of the past.
This is a historical movie, but it takes place only a few years ago.
SF: The computer has a very physical presence in
your film.
JB: Computers then weren’t how we think of them today. There were
whole rooms full of servers. I wanted the challenge of Martin being so stuck
and detached—not even being able to face his opponent. Early on with
the script, people tried to convince me to have him sit across from the
world champion, but I wanted him to be a prisoner, out in that world of
computers that at some points seems like it might be his savior—his
Iron Man suit—but then becomes his prison.
SF: Yes, at one point Martin refers to himself as
the computer’s intern, but at other times they seem to be working
together. He shifts back and forth between resenting and appreciating its
presence. It’s the same with so much of technology.
JB: Yes, on the one hand, I’m so grateful for technology
as an artist, as a filmmaker. I used to be an animator and a painter. I
say that once I discovered Photoshop, I never touched oil paints again.
It’s so much better on the one hand, but on the other hand, I find
that I’m often becoming a slave to technology, with social media,
with endless options. Sometimes it does make you nostalgic. When you have
so many tools and the tools are so powerful it can be overwhelming, and
also it can overshadow human excellence. In photography, for example, you
look at Instagram and every Joe Schmoe is an incredible photographer. It’s
always a double-edged sword, I think. It’s a good thing, we shouldn’t
shy away from the unknown, and those tools are going to lead to greatness.
But it’s not without frustration and fear. It almost feels quaint,
though, that the Kasparov match was such a big deal. That everyone now has
a more powerful processor in their pocket than Deep Blue does make it feel
kind of ridiculous.
Source: Sloan
Science & Film
|
|
Jonah Bleicher, Co-Writer/Director, grew up in Jerusalem,
Israel. After three years of service in the Israeli Army, he headed
to the US to pursue a career in the arts and attended the Rhode Island
School of Design. His mixed-media, animated thesis film, Homing,
about the last minutes in the life of a suicide bomber, went on to play
in many festivals internationally. He received his BFA from RISD in
2004 where he also minored in creative writing. Prior to enrolling in
Columbia University’s MFA Film Directing program in 2013, he worked
as a freelance graphic artist and video editor in Northern California
and New York. His films are characterized by their bold and distinct
visual style, a heritage of his fine arts background. He is the founder
of ZeneyRjoneS Films and has directed many shorts, music videos, and
commercials. His previous short film, siren, based on a story
by Israeli writer Etgar Keret, is in the midst of a successful run on
the international festival circuit. |
|
Producer Rob Cristiano, a 2013 Columbia MFA Producing
graduate, is a Brooklyn-born independent filmmaker. His credits include
the upcoming indie features BOB AND THE TREES (Line Producer) and THE
MEND (Prod. Coordinator), as well as the Broadway-themed web series
UNDERSTUDIES (Producer). Cristiano has produced eleven short films that
have screened in more than seventy film festivals in twenty different
countries. They include PENNY DREADFUL (Audience Prize, Clermont-Ferrand
Int’l Short Film Fest), THE PAINTER AND THE WIFE (Best Comedy
Short, Bare Bones Film Festival), THE GLITCH (Milwaukee Film Festival),
and MELON HEAD (Atlanta Film Festival). In 2013, Cristiano was selected
to participate in the Making Waves producer’s workshop at the
Berlinale. Later that year, the Producer’s Guild of America presented
him with the prestigious Debra Hill Fellowship for Emerging Producers.
Cristiano is currently developing several feature film and scripted
television projects under his Inside Voices production banner. |
|
Co-Writer Darren Anderson’s path to becoming
a filmmaker is wide and varied. Beginning in the New York Theater, where
he wrote, directed, and produced several original theatrical works such
as Rain Tree Crow and Danger Man (Or A More Beautiful Heaven)
- a theatrical tribute to the films of Seijun Sezuki. He directed original
plays by other authors, including “The Sacrificial King,”
a play for John Lennon by Margaret McCarthy, and is also developing
and performing in many experimental theater pieces. Darren is also a
fine artist and painter, whose work has been included in exhibitions
at Thread-waxing Space, Limner Gallery, and the Warde/Nasse Gallery
in Soho. His short films, including A Coney Island Of The Mind,
Home, and Same Ghost Every Night were all developed in
the MFA film program at Columbia University School of the Arts. My
Name Is Your First Love, which he wrote and produced, has screened
in many film festivals – including Austin IF and Telluride –
winning best narrative short in the San Francisco Indie, Napa Valley,
and 2013 Florida Film Festivals. In 2011, Darren directed a holographic
video installation, featuring Daphne Guinness, which screened in the
Special Exhibitions gallery of the Fashion Institute of Technology in
New York. He currently lives in Brooklyn and works as a screenwriter,
developing two original feature films, Marion Clay and QUEST. |
Source: Columbia
University Film Festival page
