Geeks are not generally thought of as heroes, either in real life or in movies. But The Imitation Game, with Benedict Cumberbatch playing the part of the mathematician Alan Turing, might change all that.
In 1936, at the age of just 24, Turing published a paper, On Computable Numbers, that introduced the algorithm – the concept at the heart of all computer programs. The Imitation Game concentrates on how, during World War Two, Turing directed his remarkable mind to cracking the Nazis’ apparently unbreakable military codes at the secret Bletchley Park centre. What is less well-known is that he was accompanied in this task by all of Britain’s top chess-players of the time, notably Hugh Alexander, his boss at Bletchley and later head of crypto-analysis at GCHQ.
Turing was not a good chess player, but he regarded it as an ideal test for what became known as “artificial intelligence”. To that end, he developed the first chess program, which he called “Turochamp”. It took Turing half an hour to execute the instructions for each move and it was hopelessly weak – but the system worked.
That was back in 1952… and 45 years later, the human world chess champion, Gary Kasparov – to his evident astonishment – was defeated in a six-game match by Turochamp’s distant descendant, “Deep Blue”. I recently encountered the Canadian who designed the algorithms for that IBM program, Dr Murray Campbell, when he was one of my interviewees for the second series of Across the Board, in which the talk takes place over a chess game. Another of my opponents was Demis Hassabis, a London-born chess prodigy who went into the world of computer programming and who last year sold his artificial intelligence company DeepMind to Google for £400million.
I complained to both these brilliant men that in some ways chess – the game Goethe described as “the touchstone of the intellect” – had been ruined by the triumph of the algorithm. Now, when I see a game played by Grandmasters, I don’t rack my brains trying to work out why they played in a certain way: I input the moves into my chess computer program, which instantly spews out all the variations.
No effort, no mystery – and little thought on my part. It’s rather like schoolchildren using pocket calculators for what we used to call long division. It saves time and effort, but at what cost in genuine understanding and mental agility?
Naturally, both Campbell and Hassabis disagreed with me, the latter pointing out forcefully that the combination of the problem-solving abilities of carbon-based life forms and silicon could provide solutions to humanity’s greatest challenges – for example in the field of disease. I suppose the truth is that just as the greatest chess players will use programs as an aid to their own creative processes, rather than as a substitute, so there has been no obvious decline in the intellectual abilities of the best of our youth – those who are not so lazy that they become slaves to the computer, rather than its master.
And for those who do have chess-mad children, computer software provides something never available when I was young: a constantly switched-on opponent, available to play at any time of the day or night and which (suitably programmed) will explain why the moves you played were inferior and what you should have done instead. It is no wonder children are now attaining levels of ability at ages that would have seemed unimaginably young when Alan Turing designed the first chess program.
So if your son or daughter seems obsessed with chess, don’t worry – there are vital applications for the skills they are acquiring, and which may benefit (or even save) the nation. But there is no complete substitute for human-to-human education: so interested parents should contact the Chess in Schools and Communities charity, which operates in an increasing number of state schools. Geeks can go far. They can even become heroes.
Journalist and broadcaster Dominic Lawson is President of the English Chess Federation.
Across the Board is on Radio 4, Monday to Friday at 12.04pm
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