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The Man Vs. The Machine, directed by Frank Marshall, explores Garry Kasparov's historic match vs. the IBM computer Deep Blue. The short (17-minute) film debuted on FiveThirtyEight on Wednesday and is produced as part of Signals, a digitial short series from ESPN. It features GM Maurice Ashley and Bruce Pandolfini, as well as Nate Silver.
FiveThirtyEight, which takes its name from the number of electors in the United States electoral college, is a polling aggregation website with a blog created by analyst Nate Silver. In became a licensed feature of The New York Times online in 2010 and taken over by ESPN in March 2014. Since 2008 the site has published articles – typically creating or analyzing statistical information – on a wide variety of topics in current politics and political news. These included a monthly update on the prospects for turnover in the U.S. Senate; federal economic policies; congressional support for legislation; public support for health care reform, global warming legislation, gay rights; elections around the world; marijuana legalization; and numerous other topics. The site and its creator are best known for election forecasts, including the 2012 presidential election in which FiveThirtyEight correctly predicted the vote winner of all 50 states. – More at Wikipedia.
Nate Silver is clearly interested in chess and specifically in computer chess. We advise you to reserve
17 minutes and 17 seconds of your Sunday time to watch this documentary in full-screen mode.
The documentary concentrated on Garry Kasparov's ill-fated match against Deep Blue. Six minutes and 15 seconds into the video there is discussion – by Maurice Ashley, Bruce Pandolfini, Nate Silver, Joel Benjamin – on Deep Blue's 44th move, which according to Nate was "so bad that Kasparov thought it was good" (and implying that Deep Blue was looking much deeper into positions than any human being was capable of). Judge for yourself if this is the case or there is any justification in say that. We have dug out some analysis by John Nunn in 1997 and which is archived in Mega Database. This can help you reach your own conclusions.
At eight minutes 35 seconds we get to see the documentary take on the fateful game two, which Maurice calls an "absolute positional masterpiece", and the suspicions that arose in Kasparov's mind when Deep Blue made the "hand of god" 36th move. Again we provide John Nunn's 1997 Megabase analysis for you to take another look at the critical position.
If you get really interested in the narrative of the documentary and the subject itself you can read Nate's very profound chapter on computer chess in his book The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don't or look for "Nate Silver" in Youtube. The latter comes with a warning: you can easily spend the rest of the day listening to Nate. Or explore the news for his predictions of the US mid-term elections (it doesn't look great for Democrats).
Whatever you decide: have a good Sunday!
