The Ringer: All Posts by Kevin Lincoln2018-11-08T10:03:32-05:00https://www.theringer.com/authors/kevin-lincoln/rss2018-11-08T10:03:32-05:002018-11-08T10:03:32-05:00AI Taught Itself How to Be the Best Chess Player in the World—So, Uh, What’s Next?
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<p>In 1997, Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer, beat reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game series. Twenty years later, Google’s AlphaZero routed Stockfish, the world’s best chess engine, over the course of 100 matches. The difference between the two machines: AlphaZero taught itself how to play like a human. So, where do we go from here?</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="ajdvtX">Half a century ago, Stanley Kubrick’s transcendent <em>2001: A Space Odyssey </em>debuted in theaters. Looking back on the film, countless scenes and moments stand out for their prescience and beauty, but one in particular seems to most eerily encapsulate the oracular foresight of Kubrick and his cowriter, the sci-fi novelist Arthur C. Clarke. On the spaceship <em>Discovery One</em>, which is bound for Jupiter, Dr. Frank Poole plays chess against supercomputer HAL 9000, which is, it claims, “foolproof and incapable of error.” While that statement will be called into question later in the film, it holds true in their game: HAL beats Poole handily. (Kubrick based the game on <a href="https://www.chess.com/article/view/2001-a-chess-space-odyssey">a real one</a> played in Hamburg in 1910.) </p>
<p id="Ql9raK">The same year that <em>2001 </em>premiered, literary critic and polymath George Steiner <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1968/09/07/a-death-of-kings">published an essay</a> in <em>The</em> <em>New Yorker</em> called “A Death of Kings.” “The origins of chess are shrouded in mists of controversy, but unquestionably this very ancient, trivial pastime has seemed to many exceptionally intelligent human beings of all races and centuries to constitute a reality, a focus for the emotions, as substantial as, often more substantial than, reality itself,” he wrote. For Steiner, chess is as human as music and mathematics. As he points out, these three disciplines are the only ones in which prepubescents have made major accomplishments, from Mozart and Rossini to Gauss and Pascal to Morphy. Chess also seems to offer some strange key to the riddle of what makes us human to begin with. “To defeat another human being at chess,” Steiner wrote, “is to humble him at the very roots of his intelligence; to defeat him easily is to leave him strangely stripped.” </p>
<p id="adWmgS">In 1997, chess computer Deep Blue, created by IBM, beat the reigning world champion, Garry Kasparov, in a series of six games. Kubrick’s vision had come true: While Poole wasn’t the greatest chess player in the world, a computer had beaten a human being on one of the species’ greatest intellectual playing fields. The Deep Blue victory has since entered into the cultural lexicon as a major milestone in the advancement of AI, but the distance of time and the benefit of hindsight makes it easy to overlook the fact that, when Kasparov sat down to play, he firmly expected to win. “I don’t think it’s an appropriate thing to discuss the situation if I lose,” Kasparov <a href="https://www.wired.com/2017/05/what-deep-blue-tells-us-about-ai-in-2017/">said leading up to the match</a>. “I never lost in my life.” </p>
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<img alt="World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov (L) makes a move 07 May in New York during his fourth game against the IBM Deep Blue chess computer.&nbsp;" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/cIzwyXUJnGnsDU8wQBbrKxZ3wEI=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13409009/chess.jpg">
<cite>Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Garry Kasparov makes a move during his fourth game against the IBM Deep Blue chess computer.</figcaption>
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<p id="wG0ble">When Kasparov then lost, and lost in dispiriting fashion—in Game 2, he described the computer as playing “like a god for one moment”—he seemed to have been not only intellectually but spiritually defeated. From <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/12/nyregion/swift-and-slashing-computer-topples-kasparov.html"><em>The New York Times</em>’ coverage of the match</a>: “‘I was not in the mood of playing at all,’ he said, adding that after Game 5 on Saturday, he had become so dispirited that he felt the match was already over. Asked why, he said: ‘I’m a human being. When I see something that is well beyond my understanding, I’m afraid.’” <em>Newsweek </em>put the match on its cover under the headline, <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/man-vs-machine-173038">“The Brain’s Last Stand,”</a> but grandmasters continued to insist that the match was a one-off fluke, a result of Kasparov’s exasperation and shady tactics by IBM; put Deep Blue into regular competition against the best chess players, they said, and surely it would be put in its place. </p>
<p id="A0hwvi">Twenty years later, we know better. We can now carry chess computers better than Deep Blue in our pockets, on the same machines we use to send texts, check Facebook, and play games considerably <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/candy-crush-saga/id553834731?mt=8">less culturally and intellectually significant</a> than chess. Like so many other technological advances previously thought to be in the realm of science fiction, the superiority of chess AI has become banal.</p>
<p id="KOyzOO">While chess <a href="https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gvy8wq/the-race-to-solve-chess">has yet to be “solved,”</a> the nature of the game, which takes place within a bounded setting and offers a limited number of moves per position, makes it susceptible to what’s called a “brute force” approach, in which a computer uses its raw processing power to analyze a number of possible positions far beyond the capabilities of human beings. Deep Blue was able to look at 200 million positions per second; it’s been estimated that Kasparov could look at ... two. Augmented with human learning gathered over centuries of playing the game—for example, best practice, or “theory,” in certain openings, as well as knowledge of specific endgames—the computer’s physical advantage just isn’t fair, in the same way that it isn’t fair for a human to enter into a footrace against a car. </p>
<p id="lZ92TU">In that sense, Deep Blue was not analogous to HAL, who would ultimately decide of his own accord that the human astronauts would jeopardize his mission. The ability to think for itself separates HAL from any known computer, and certainly the kind of computer that addresses problems with brute force. But last year, chess once again served as the venue for a noteworthy closing of the gap between the human and AI minds. While we still have yet to realize HAL, these new developments challenge the notion that creativity is a uniquely human trait. And if it’s not, are there any domains of human achievement that will remain distinctly ours?</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="dAL6GE">On December 6 of last year, AlphaZero, an AI developed by Google’s DeepMind unit, embarrassed Stockfish, the world’s best chess engine, by a score of 28 wins, 72 draws, and zero losses. At first blush, this might seem trivial; we live in a technological culture marked by forward progress and planned obsolescence, in which new machines are constantly replacing old ones, for reasons both legitimate (innovation renders the old ones inferior) and capitalistic (your iPhone). But in this case, the difference between the two computers is hardly superficial. There’s no fundamental difference between the way that Stockfish, which is a free, open-source engine that routinely wins or places second in the world computer chess championships, plays chess and the way that Deep Blue did two decades ago: It attacks the game with brute force, analyzing 70 million moves per second.</p>
<p id="dPyjsW">AlphaZero doesn’t work like this. Unlike Stockfish, which does use learning derived from human experience, AlphaZero “taught” itself chess. After being given the rules, it played itself over and over, essentially reinventing the history of chess through millions of self-played games. Through what’s known as reinforcement learning, the machine took note of the behavior and patterns that led to a win, then incorporated that information into its blossoming style, over and over and over. AlphaZero also looks at a significantly smaller number of positions per move than Stockfish, just 80,000 or so. The 19-page paper <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01815.pdf">written by AlphaZero’s creators</a> goes deeper into the workings of the computer, but those are the key points: Taken in tandem, they mean that AlphaZero doesn’t just play differently than Stockfish does—it plays more like a human.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="Bq2AoZ"><q>“No computer would be able to invent Mozart or do anything creative, but when you look at AlphaZero, it’s bordering on creativity, it’s bordering on intuition.” —Sam Ginn, researcher at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab</q></aside></div>
<p id="jUrrXW">“Last decade, humans could always say, ‘Yeah, sure, computers are better than us, but that’s just because they think faster and have a lot more thinking capacity. It’s not because they’re innately smarter than us—they just have a lot more engineering power, and if my brain was as big as a computer, I would be able to beat the computer,’” said Sam Ginn, an AI researcher in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. “But now AlphaZero comes along, and one, its brain is much smaller [than those of other chess computers], it doesn’t require that much computational power, and two, it’s not searching, it’s not doing brute force. It is just learning in the exact same way that a human would learn to play chess. That’s what humans do to learn: You play chess, you play games against each other, and you learn over time. So it’s learning very analogously to how humans learn, and it’s able to do it much quicker and much better.”</p>
<p id="jIOKFG">In fact, AlphaZero is the second front in DeepMind’s attempt to outdo humanity. In October 2015, <a href="https://deepmind.com/research/alphago/">AlphaGo</a>, AlphaZero’s predecessor, won all five of the games it played against European champion Fan Hui, marking the first time an AI had defeated a professional player in Go—a milestone that experts believed at the time to still be<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nature16961"> a decade away</a>. Due to its larger game space than chess, Go, which involves placing stones on a board in the hopes of surrounding more territory than your opponent, allows for an enormous degree of variation. (If you want to feel your mind actually melt in your head, read some <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_and_mathematics">computational theory about Go</a>.) And so Go had proved a much more difficult task for computers than chess, which, while expansive, allows for far fewer possibilities per move. </p>
<p id="6SfvrS">“AlphaZero becomes philosophically interesting now, because the question is, where will this AI go?” Ginn said. “This is where AI is meeting creativity. Beforehand, it was just really, really fast at thinking. Now it’s able to be creative, it’s able to hit on things that humans used to think were intuition. That’s kind of like the humans’ last flagpole of hope, that computers can’t do intuitive things. No computer would be able to invent Mozart or do anything creative, but when you look at AlphaZero, it’s bordering on creativity, it’s bordering on intuition.”</p>
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<img alt="Professional ‘Go’ Player Lee Se-dol Plays Google’s AlphaGo - Last Day" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/mwKfPBqzQ5XDFnCZ9DZZUuPMBs4=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13409007/515688398.jpg.jpg">
<cite>Photo by Google via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Lee Sedol makes a move in a match against AlphaGo.</figcaption>
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<p id="URRTjM">As Steiner wrote: Chess and music share something in common, even if we don’t fully understand what that is. At the very least, we can recognize that there is a knack for patterns, an understanding of arrangement and progression, that unites human achievement in both disciplines, and that ability to recognize patterns—an inherently human trait—is what makes AlphaZero’s achievement so startling. What Steiner’s prepubescent virtuosos lack in intellectual and emotional maturity—the socialization and acculturation that we experience as we grow older—they made up for in this innate understanding of patterns. To an extent, the same could be said of AlphaGo and AlphaZero, which cannot do anything other than play either chess or Go but seem to exhibit genuine creativity and ingenuity within those realms. For example, during the second game of AlphaGo’s match against Go master Lee Sedol, the machine made a move so unprecedented and idiosyncratic that observers used a very un-mechanical word to describe it: <a href="https://www.wired.com/2016/03/two-moves-alphago-lee-sedol-redefined-future/">beautiful</a>. </p>
<p id="kUR3nf">Of course, what AIs still can’t do is first, of their own volition and according to their own values, <em>choose</em> to play chess or compose music; and second, do so in a way that lacks precedent. Instead, they must be told to do so by people, and once they’ve been told to do so, they will perform those tasks within a few unbreakable parameters. AlphaZero is incapable of making an illegal move, and while that doesn’t have much significance in a game of chess, which consists of only legal moves, it’s hugely important in music, where all sounds are fair game.</p>
<p id="l5uBaS">“One of the most limiting things about AI right now is you need to optimize something. AlphaZero was optimizing for the number of wins and the number of losses, and almost every single artificial intelligence algorithm right now is an optimization algorithm in some way,” Ginn said. “There would be no way to tell an AI, ‘Create me a brand-new song that you think is nice,’ because there’s no objective measurement of that.”</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="d87Q8G">What impact does the type of AI that has now conquered chess and Go have on the future? Optimized with information, whether it’s the rules of chess or the preexisting history of music, Ginn believes that its application is deceptively wide.</p>
<p id="IIfZWM">“What makes Mozart great is that humans like Mozart; an AI can optimize for human taste in music,” Ginn said. (One example is <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/23/14069382/ai-music-creativity-bach-deepbach-csl">DeepBach</a>, which produces work in the style of the great composer.) “They do this in art right now: <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2139184-artificially-intelligent-painters-invent-new-styles-of-art/">We have AI algorithms</a> that view a lot of different artists and all of their different paintings and all of their different work, and [those algorithms] can create and generate art from scratch. Some algorithms <a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1260739/?reload=true">do cubist</a>, some do abstract work, some can do more Van Gogh–style paintings. Everybody has different tastes, but when you tell the AI what taste you want, it can optimize for a beautiful painting from that. Now, that said, it has never, and there’s no AI algorithm right now that can, invent a new taste. So Mozart, arguably, when he created his music, he was inventing a new style of music. That is where AI right now is limited: AI cannot, at least yet, have the real creativity to invent something wholly new.”</p>
<p id="cmoalX">One of the logical next frontiers in the development of AI is video games, which, after all, have involved AI nearly since their inception. The rise of Twitch, the streaming platform that has turned gamers into celebrities on the level of athletes—and that is also coming to play an <a href="https://www.topic.com/i-want-my-chesstv">increasingly large role in the chess world</a>—presents an intriguing stage upon which the feats of AI could be exhibited. For the unfamiliar, competitive video gaming, or esports, brought in <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/ef8539b6-be2a-11e7-9836-b25f8adaa111">revenues of $693 million in 2017</a>, a figure that’s expected to grow to $1.5 billion by 2020; we’re on the verge of <a href="https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/19/startup-will-launch-nationwide-high-school-esports-league-this-f/">high school esports teams</a>, and we already have <a href="https://www.bdcnetwork.com/gamers-paradise-rise-esports-arenas">esports arenas</a>. Computer scientist and novelist Zachary Mason, whose recent novel <em>Void Star</em> imagines a future rich with highly complex AIs, believes that it isn’t long until just about all video games are dominated by artificial intelligence.</p>
<p id="R72zkM">“I’ve sometimes wondered if people will get around to designing games so that people will be good at them but machine learning will have a hard time,” Mason wrote in an email. Over the phone, he elaborated: “Games that require complex communication and language, games with an aspect of design, those will be human-dominated for the foreseeable future.”</p>
<p id="gVxAes">Much of Twitch’s appeal comes from watching your favorite gamer react, and often overreact, to gameplay, as well as commentators on their channel, donations, and a number of other features unique to Twitch. With an AI, that uniquely human element disappears, but maybe not as fully as we might imagine, particularly when it comes to such abstract concepts as personality.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="cYEPvm"><q>“I’ve always been a little mystified by the fact that people watch streaming <em>StarCraft</em>, or whatever. To what extent is watching competitive <em>StarCraft </em>interesting only because the players are, presumably, intensely committed to the outcome? Is watching AIs play as emotionally moving as watching a screensaver?” —Zachary Mason, computer scientist and novelist</q></aside></div>
<p id="SCxTPE">“It depends what you mean by personality,” Mason wrote. “Kasparov said he felt in Deep Blue an alien intelligence. If personality is just in style of play, and not in extra-game histrionics, AlphaZero and its ilk could easily develop different ones. [But] I’ve always been a little mystified by the fact that people watch streaming <em>StarCraft</em>, or whatever. To what extent is watching competitive <em>StarCraft </em>interesting only because the players are, presumably, intensely committed to the outcome? Is watching AIs play as emotionally moving as watching a screensaver?”</p>
<p id="v2Cu7v">We still have one distinct edge over AIs that isn’t going away any time soon: our bodies. The field of robotics has fallen well behind that of AI, and we’re miles away from anything approaching a robot athlete. It’s reasonable to think that the pattern-recognition abilities and immense computational and informational capacities of machine learning could help shine a light on sports with highly sophisticated and variable tactics and positions, like football, soccer, and basketball, building further on the insights brought about by <a href="http://grantland.com/features/the-toronto-raptors-sportvu-cameras-nba-analytical-revolution/">technologies like SportVU</a>. (One intriguing example is a <a href="https://www.sporttechie.com/meet-the-worlds-smartest-golf-caddie-powered-by-artificial-intelligence/">virtual caddy for golfers</a>.) But human coaches and players will still need to implement those insights, and that allows for human error. Since a successful sports team must operate on so many individual planes, from management to coaching to playing, and then coordinate all of these different elements, AI is unlikely to ever come close to solving sports; you might know that taking a lot of 3s is more efficient in basketball, but you still need players who can shoot. Until robot athletes take the field, human imperfection will remain a part of sports. </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="MLu18X">When AlphaZero beat Stockfish, the <a href="https://www.chess.com/news/view/alphazero-reactions-from-top-gms-stockfish-author">reaction from the chess world</a> had a different tenor than it did when Deep Blue defeated Kasparov. Grandmasters who have come to accept engines and computers as essential elements of their training and preparation seemed intrigued by what AlphaZero could do for chess theory and understanding of the game. That notion of the machine casting its shadow over the human appeared to weigh less on players’ minds—probably because, by now, it’s a familiar notion. While <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/d61a112a-524a-11e5-b029-b9d50a74fd14">chess is benefiting</a> from the explosion of esports and online play, it would be hard to argue that, to the public at large, it still holds the significance it did in the ’60s and ’70s, when Kubrick made HAL 9000, Steiner wrote his essay, and Bobby Fischer captivated the nation. In Mason’s eyes, the superiority of computers—and, just as much, their banality—has affected the reputation of the game.</p>
<p id="xzGJta">“It seems just a tiny bit disheartening when an app on an average smartphone can hand the human world-champion his head,” Mason wrote. “So people will still play chess and so on, but a frisson is gone—is it as compelling to put in the time to be a world-level player in these circumstances?”</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="RTRn30"><q>“We shouldn’t be worried that [AlphaZero] shows that AI is getting more human or something. What we should worry about are these other things: how do we regulate when AI is applied, and how do we protect our data?” —Joanna Bryson, University of Bath AI researcher and professor of computer science</q></aside></div>
<p id="BUwEBR">But beyond board games, video games, and certain other comparable problems—self-driving cars, military needs—Mason still thinks there’s a limit that will be reached fairly soon in this sphere of machine learning. </p>
<p id="MjbBju">“This particular kind of quote-unquote AI isn’t going to go much further than that,” he said. “It’s basically the wrong branch of technological development to give you an AI football player or an AI nanny or be able to read a newspaper or do all sorts of things that will still be the provenance of human beings. Basically, anything physical, linguistic, or design-related is still going to be the provenance of humanity for the foreseeable future.” There’s a concept called the <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=winograd+schema&oq=winograd+schema&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l4.1683j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8">Winograd Schema Challenge</a> that can demonstrate this shortcoming: An AI is given a sentence like “The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they [feared/advocated] violence” and asked to choose which of the words fits. While the answer would be obvious to any human, who would understand the difference in the meaning of the two words, that kind of comprehension and understanding is far beyond the current capabilities of artificial intelligence. </p>
<p id="HcaM8P">However, there’s another side to the impact of AI and machine learning, and that lies in the application rather than the progress of the technology. As Joanna Bryson, an AI researcher and professor of computer science at the University of Bath, reminded me, the notion of superhuman technology is nothing new: Buildings are superhuman, planes are superhuman—even books are superhuman in their capacity for remembering that outlasts and outperforms the brain.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="CXzUvr"><q>“The process of being told that we’re not unique, when we seek very hard to be unique—I do think there’s going to be a psychological consequence to that, and I do worry about there being some sort of a backlash, like there is against evolution.” —Bryson</q></aside></div>
<p id="ZQkfdc">Bryson said that the main concern with AI isn’t that it might one day overtake humans; it’s that people can use the understanding it provides to take advantage of other people. We spoke before the Cambridge Analytica revelations, which alleged that the company had illegally mined the personal data of 87 million Facebook users for a variety of nefarious purposes, including but not limited to helping get President Donald Trump elected; but that provides an excellent example of what she’s talking about. “That we have artificial intelligence isn’t the step change that some people think,” she said. “A lot of the confusion around AI comes from the fact that we identify it this way, and we shouldn’t be worried that [AlphaZero] shows that AI is getting more human or something. What we should worry about are these other things: How do we regulate when AI is applied, and how do we protect our data?”</p>
<p id="wEFhTr">The more concussive examples of how AI could affect our society, then, reside in its ability to algorithmically absorb and synthesize data and then produce the best next move—exactly like it does in chess, but on a far more consequential and widespread scale. We already see this happening all the time—the most mundane example would be your Amazon or Netflix recommendations—but its applications reach into far more important areas of existence; one particularly galling example is <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/deepfake-fake-videos-artificial-intelligence">the rise of Deepfake videos</a>, which use AI to create convincingly real footage of things that never actually happened. </p>
<p id="UNUr8I">“The process of being told that we’re not unique, when we seek very hard to be unique—I do think there’s going to be a psychological consequence to that, and I do worry about there being some sort of a backlash, like there is against evolution,” Bryson said. “People put the games in the media because you can see the rate of progress, but like I said, there’s a<a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/110/15/5802.full"> paper from the National Academy of Sciences</a> that shows that you can tell how someone’s going to vote from their Facebook likes—at least, you can predict how they’re going to vote better than their spouse can. And that’s not super-tricky AI, that’s not some super-fancy algorithm: That’s just normal machine learning across data people hadn’t thought about before. This is changing everything.”</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="VSzmA3">HAL endures for a reason. It’s hard to read that a computer taught itself chess and not wonder if it’ll soon <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9W5Am-a_xWw">refuse to open the pod bay doors</a>. The average person reads about the latest advance in machine intelligence and it reinforces their sense of the inevitable. In a culture bowled over by Ray Kurzweil’s notion of the singularity and countless science-fiction case-studies of machine eclipsing man, it often feels like just a matter of time until we’re rendered obsolete. However, not everyone agrees that this moment is only decades away, as<a href="https://futurism.com/kurzweil-claims-that-the-singularity-will-happen-by-2045/"> Kurzweil himself keeps suggesting</a>. Within the field of AI, it’s known as the “hard question.” Can an AI become conscious, in the way we know ourselves to be conscious? Can it become self-thinking and self-deciding? </p>
<p id="g3JbZY">According to Ginn, most computer scientists and physicists will say that, given enough power, machines can simulate any system defined by physics—an idea known as the Church-Turing thesis. “They’ll say that the brain is made out of atoms, is ruled by physical phenomenon, and therefore, theoretically we should be able to perfectly simulate it, and whatever that simulation produced would be as conscious as any other human,” Ginn said.</p>
<p id="UjnicE">But philosophers have a different perspective. Some agree that you could simulate the human brain, but argue that it would produce what they call a philosophical zombie, “something that lacks consciousness, pre-programmed to not have the agency that humans feel that they have.” Other philosophers, like David Chalmers, <a href="https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/david-chalmers-thinks-the-hard-problem-is-really-hard/">are even more skeptical</a>. “[Chalmers] thinks consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe just like matter or energy is, and so it can’t be replicated inside of a computer—computers will always be limited to what humans program into them,” Ginn said.</p>
<p id="UNO8yq">And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the range of hypotheses regarding the nature of consciousness: Physicist, mathematician, and philosopher Sir Roger Penrose, who <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/mar/14/stephen-hawking-obituary">collaborated extensively</a> with Stephen Hawking, thinks that consciousness is<a href="http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/roger-penrose-on-why-consciousness-does-not-compute"> dependent on quantum mechanics</a>, making it incredibly difficult to reproduce; philosopher Daniel Dennett, who was recently profiled by <em>The</em> <em>New Yorker</em>, thinks that <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennetts-science-of-the-soul">consciousness is an illusion</a>, making AI consciousness … also an illusion. Despite Kurzweil’s confidence, there’s no clear consensus on whether the singularity is even possible, much less how to go about achieving it.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="6ayiYK">In a strange way, that all makes AlphaZero teaching itself chess easier to comprehend. If we can separate the computer from ourselves, we can recognize its undeniable abilities while still acknowledging that, without us, it would have no canvas on which to make those abilities manifest—and that’s putting aside the obvious caveat that it also wouldn’t exist. What AlphaZero and its ilk reinforce is that the true virtue of humanity comes from its capacity for creating anew, for inventing the field of play. As AI approaches creativity, it may seem as if the gap between humans and machines is narrowing. But there’s another way to look at it: The more we have in common with our creations, the more valuable become the qualities that we alone possess.</p>
https://www.theringer.com/tech/2018/11/8/18069092/chess-alphazero-alphago-go-stockfish-artificial-intelligence-futureKevin Lincoln2018-07-03T08:06:14-04:002018-07-03T08:06:14-04:00How Did ‘Uncle Drew’ Get Made?
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<p>A movie with a cast of current and former professional basketball players covered in pounds of makeup and prosthetics shouldn’t work. It really shouldn’t even exist, either. But somehow it’s here, and its creators tell the inside story of how Kyrie Irving came to be a leading man.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="Bai03U">When Marty Bowen, the producer behind the <em>Twilight</em> franchise, <em>The Fault in Our Stars</em>, and a bunch of other movies and TV shows you’ve definitely heard of, called up Jay Longino and asked him what he thought about writing a film around Uncle Drew—the septuagenarian star of a few Pepsi ads, played by Celtics phenom Kyrie Irving under a horror flick’s worth of prosthetic makeup—his reaction was the same as the one you probably had when you heard that they were making an Uncle Drew movie: <em>Wait, what?</em> </p>
<p id="EebCKx">“[Bowen] calls me, and he’s like, ‘Have you seen these Uncle Drew shorts online?’ and I said, ‘Yeah,’ and he was like, ‘Well, what do you think about those being a feature?’ and I said, ‘I don’t think so,’” Longino told me over lunch in Studio City. “To me, [it sounded like] the <em>Saturday Night Live</em> skit turned into a movie that doesn’t work. That was my gut reaction. And he was like, ‘You’re a fucking idiot, you’re going to realize you’re an idiot, and you’re going to call me back within 24 to 36 hours and tell me you’re wrong and that you want to write this movie.’ And I was like, ‘No, I won’t.’ Sure enough, I woke up the next morning and I was like, <em>Am I turning down a job?</em> <em>And a job with basketball?</em>”</p>
<p id="3jAwfr">Longino played basketball at Colorado College, plus a couple of stints in Mexico and the now-defunct USBL; he got into screenwriting with ambitions of being the next Ron Shelton, the director of sports-cinema landmarks like <em>Bull Durham</em>, <em>White Men Can’t Jump</em>, and <em>Tin Cup</em> (he also wrote the William Friedkin–directed <em>Blue Chips</em>). Longino and Bowen had already sold a pitch about basketball in China to Fox 2000, and here was the opportunity to shore up his Ron Shelton credentials—even if it did require him to turn an ad campaign into a feature film.</p>
<p id="x6Otbh">This weekend, <em>Uncle Drew</em> opened to good reviews, strong word of mouth, and $15 million at the box office. It turns out Bowen was right. </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="lTRBAC">Uncle Drew was born when the people at Pepsi realized that the then-19-year-old rookie Kyrie Irving, who had recently been taken by the Cleveland Cavaliers with the first pick in the 2011 NBA Draft after playing only 11 games at Duke, might be able to sell more than just tickets and shoes. </p>
<p id="rlGYgr">“We worked with him on a broader spot that we put together back in the day, and he did a really, really great job,” said Aziel Rivers, a marketing director at Pepsi. “We said to him, ‘We have this crazy idea, and we’re looking to do something completely different and new. Is that something you’re up for?’ I don’t know if he knew what he was getting himself into.”</p>
<p id="VvkXeF">The campaign was born from the type of cringeworthy-but-effective brand messaging that often provides the kernel of successful advertising: PepsiCo considers Pepsi Max a zero-calorie cola in disguise, so why not disguise one of the most explosively dynamic and exciting young basketball players as a grumpy old dude who tucks his sweatpants into tube socks? But aside from the conspicuous shots of spectators holding Pepsis, the Uncle Drew shorts were surprisingly delightful, providing the odd joy of watching what <em>did</em> look like an old dude absolutely clown on guys in a pickup game. And it was immediately clear what Pepsi had seen in Irving, who trash-talked with convincing old-dudeness and held his own as an on-screen presence. The <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DnKOc6FISU">first chapter of “Uncle Drew”</a> has racked up a healthy 52 million views on YouTube to date; <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLyvkBifQ3w">three</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spDdO_ZB-lE">more</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY6GAOPGuPs">followed</a>, introducing similarly geriatric characters played by Kevin Love, Nate Robinson, Maya Moore, Baron Davis, Ray Allen, and J.B. Smoove. Altogether, the four shorts have been seen more than 100 million times.</p>
<div id="LJ2uBx"><div style="left: 0; width: 100%; height: 0; position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.2493%;"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8DnKOc6FISU?rel=0" style="border: 0; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute;" allowfullscreen="" scrolling="no"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="CbZXmM">However, for every <em>Space Jam</em>, there’s<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhFIijFD9kg"> a <em>Cavemen</em></a>, and the battlefield of film and television history is littered with the bodies of previously valuable IP. As Bowen predicted, Longino did reconsider, but that still meant he needed to figure out what the movie might look like. After going through a range of ideas—from a broad-comedy version in which Drew’s powers stem from black-market Viagra, to one in which Drew <em>is</em> a young dude dressed up as an old dude—he landed on an expanded version of the shorts, in which Drew travels the country gathering his old squad. In the shorts, the purpose of his efforts is basically to sell Pepsi; to give the plot an emotional and narrative backbone, Longino drew on his own connection the game, landing on, as he puts it, a “Blues Brothers put-the-band-back-together love letter to basketball.” The basketball part was key: If that element didn’t work, the rest of the movie would collapse around it. </p>
<p id="8lcuCW">Longino wrote the first draft on Pepsi’s dime, but after they successfully pitched the idea to Kyrie at the Cavs’ training camp in Santa Barbara, it didn’t take long for them to find a production partner. In fact, the timeline for the film is dizzying, particularly in an industry that often takes years to put projects together: Longino began writing in the last days of 2016 and turned in a draft at the end of January; they had a go from Lionsgate in April, and they began shooting in August.</p>
<p id="MHfW4D">In that time, they also found a director. If you pay attention to the shorts, you’ll notice that they end with the credits, “Written and directed by Kyrie Irving.” During the conception of the film, someone floated the idea of having Irving direct as well, but, as Longino tells it, Bowen quickly shot down what was, at best, a very optimistic thought—directing a feature, with all the casting, location scouting, and million other details that come with it, is a much different beast than making a short where you mostly just play ball.</p>
<p id="NR04zU">“Marty was like, ‘Are you fucking out of your mind?’” Longino said, laughing. “‘That’s a year of his life. Why would you tell me that Kyrie Irving should direct this movie?’”</p>
<p id="J2XObL">Instead, they signed on Charles Stone III, the director of <em>Drumline</em> and <em>Mr. 3000</em>. In addition to the concept of getting the band back together, Longino had also written in a protagonist named Dax, an orphan who falls in love with basketball and tries to put together a team to compete in the Rucker Classic. Dax also serves as an audience surrogate, able to express the elemental skepticism that surrounded the project without undermining the film. While Stone was intrigued by the generational conflict and old-school/new-school tension that the shorts hint at, the character of Dax—who would come to be played by Lil Rel Howery of <em>Get Out</em> fame—was a major draw.</p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="DFVJQa"><q>“Marty was like, ‘Are you fucking out of your mind? That’s a year of his life. Why would you tell me that Kyrie Irving should direct this movie?’” —Jay Longino</q></aside></div>
<p id="9G7Lfq">“This is a person who wanted a family, and this one thing was really holding him back, and that’s the fear to open up, or the fear to take a chance and connect with somebody, taking a chance and taking the shot—there’s a chance you’ll get rejected, or you’ll make it,” Stone says. “I was very much into that universal theme of taking the risk to realize your dreams.”</p>
<p id="UAcdGU">As soon as they had the team in place behind the camera, it was time to find the other actors who would complement Irving’s Drew. That was no small task, since they had to pull off two very different feats: first, be able to play basketball at an elite level while drowning in makeup, and second, make this feel like a real movie.</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="PEALl1">Shaquille O’Neal, with his acting past and his inherent Shaq-ness, was an obvious choice for the character of Big Fella, a martial arts master whose decades-old grudge against Uncle Drew provides much of the story’s emotional weight. Nate Robinson, who’d appeared in the shorts, felt natural as Boots, a character who spends much of the film using a wheelchair and not speaking—a nice inversion of Robinson’s brash NBA persona. Stone initially wanted Snoop Dogg to play the role of Lights, a rangy, smooth 3-point shooter, but the producers and Longino were insistent that they go with pro ballers for each part, and they landed Reggie Miller. And while he didn’t join until the day before shooting, Aaron Gordon is surprisingly good as the on-court villain, Casper, who’s meant to represent everything that’s wrong with young ballers.</p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="YTG8A5"><q>“I asked him to come in and read for me the next day, and that’s when I was like, ‘Oh <em>shit</em>.’” —Charles Stone III on Chris Webber</q></aside></div>
<p id="ysYFpJ">There was one role that proved more difficult to cast, though: Preacher, a gregarious, baby-dunking reverend who spends much of <em>Uncle Drew</em> fleeing from his wife, Betty Lou, played by Lisa Leslie. Stone first thought of Kevin Garnett, but when the 15-time All-Star couldn’t do it, the search went to the 11th hour. That’s when one of the producers suggested Chris Webber.</p>
<p id="MaBoe9">“I was like, ‘Really?’” Stone says. “I didn’t see it through Chris’s commentating. But I met him, and he grew up in the church, his father was a preacher, so he had all that going for him. I asked him to come in and read for me the next day, and that’s when I was like, ‘Oh <em>shit</em>.’ Who you saw on film is what he did for the audition: He came in with that voice and the mannerisms.” </p>
<p id="5xQHW9">Webber is easily the biggest revelation of <em>Uncle Drew</em>; he’s physically verstaile, emotionally expressive, and remarkably funny. And his presence allows the film to riff on one of the biggest blunders in basketball history: In a nod to Webber’s infamous mistake for Michigan against North Carolina in the 1993 NCAA championship, another player makes sure to point out to Preacher that their team doesn’t have any more timeouts. Figuring out how meta to make the film was a balance Longino and Stone consistently had to strike: For example, they included a line where Shaq’s character says to Uncle Drew, “Pass the ball, Kobe,” but other ideas, like getting Spike Lee to heckle Miller’s character, didn’t work out. When Webber said he would allow a timeout joke, though, Longino knew it was too good of an opportunity to pass up.</p>
<p id="cneYyX">“The script initially didn’t have the timeout joke in there, because I didn’t want to put it in if we’d never talked about. I was hoping we would get to a point over the course of the shoot where I would feel comfortable asking him, ‘Hey, can we make a joke about the timeout,’” Longino said. “But it was the second day, and we were talking [about something else], and I was walking away, and he goes, ‘Hey,’ and I turned around, and he says, ‘Come here a second,’ and I say, ‘What’s up?’ and he’s like, ‘I think it’s time,’ and I was like, ‘What?’ and he says, ‘It’s time to talk about the timeout.’ Inside, the fan in me was like, <em>Am I really having this conversation with Chris Webber right now, that he’s going to let me write a timeout joke?</em> I was like, ‘You sure?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it. Just make sure it’s funny.’”</p>
<p id="eqF8BX">That story also reinforces the fact that, no matter how good their acting was, the athletes were still recognizable athletes, and they often had to leave set for long stretches at a time: Irving was traded to the Celtics in the middle of shooting; Robinson got a tryout with the Timberwolves; Miller had to go to a Hall of Fame induction; Shaq had to go to China; and between Irving’s restrictions (which limited the amount of time he was allowed to play) and Webber’s knees, they could shoot the basketball scenes only on certain days and for a certain amount of time. All of these factors put even more pressure on the experienced actors to make the movie feel like a movie.</p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="dYzIJi"><q>“Inside, the fan in me was like, <em>Am I really having this conversation with Chris Webber right now, that he’s going to let me write a timeout joke?</em>” —Jay Longino</q></aside></div>
<p id="ugu9G5">Stone loved Lil Rel Howery, best known for his scene-stealing work in <em>Get Out</em>, because he was able to hit both the comedic and emotional beats of his character; he also happened to genuinely be little, contrasting nicely with the human giants who filled out the rest of the cast. As for Dax’s white-boy boogeyman Mookie, Longino had to do a little reconnaissance before he’d sign off on comedian Nick Kroll, who was up for the role.</p>
<p id="q59IL6">“When his name came up in casting—my thing was always, if I’m going to chime in about casting, it’s going to be basketball,” Longino says. “I knew that you don’t have to play a lot, but you need to look like you can play, or else it’s absurd. His name started getting thrown around and I was like, ‘Wait, guys, do we know anything about his ability to actually play? He’s in the game with a bunch of NBA legends.” </p>
<p id="pPTncN">Turns out, Kroll plays frequently; even if that didn’t prepare him for guarding Kyrie Irving, it was enough to make it work on camera. After he was cast, Longino got on with the phone with him, and Kroll picked apart his character’s motivations, asking why he was so obsessed with Dax. From that conversation came the idea that Mookie saw Dax as the Borg to his McEnroe, the Magic to his Bird, and Kroll continued to expand on his character during shooting. He and Howery improvised liberally, and one of the best comedic beats in <em>Uncle Drew</em> was a spontaneous riff that Stone and Kroll decided to run with: Mookie starts to mirror Dax’s movements and words in an attempt to get inside his head, and he commits to the bit so much that he returns to it throughout the rest of the movie. If <em>Uncle Drew</em> might not otherwise sound like a <em>Kroll Show</em> sketch, you might feel differently after seeing it. </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="gBUhRA">Once the cast was in place, it was time for shooting, which involved rounding up all the overscheduled athletes for 16-hour days in the Atlanta summer, including hours of makeup and prosthetic application. True to his point guard nature, Irving not only had his lines memorized word-perfectly, he knew everyone else’s. But as <a href="https://www.theringer.com/the-bill-simmons-podcast/2018/6/15/17469512/kyrie-irving-on-leaving-lebron-bostons-future-summer-rumors-and-empowered-players">he told Bill Simmons on a recent podcast</a>, capitalizing on a character’s popularity to star in a movie might look like the deliberate brand-management that today’s NBA players are so good at, but it always seemed kind of unreal. </p>
<p id="aG2iRA">“I didn’t really want to—it just happened,” Irving said when Simmons asked what made him want to be the star of a movie. “It was like, ‘Boom, you’re our lead.’ And I was just like, <em>OK! This is a real thing, this is a real thing.</em> It took me a while to really come to terms with, <em>I have a frickin’ movie coming out</em>.” </p>
<p id="4o28VU">Not only that, but he has a successful movie: <em>Uncle Drew</em>’s $15 million opening beat Lionsgate’s expectations, and an ‘A’ Cinemascore—a common measure of audience reaction—means that it could still have legs. Longino, it turns out, was also right. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="8vwOSM">As he told me before the film was released: “I think the expectation of, ‘Oh, it’s a commercial, how could you make it funny’—I think that expectation is going to work in our favor.”</p>
<p id="Xmk7Er"><a href="https://twitter.com/ktlincoln?lang=en"><em>Kevin Lincoln</em></a><em> is a writer in Los Angeles.</em></p>
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/7/3/17529374/uncle-drew-the-making-of-kyrie-irving-chris-webber-shaq-nick-krollKevin Lincoln