By NIGEL WILLIS, ROB HOFMEYR
Deep Thinking by Garry Kasparov
Breaking News, An Autobiography by Jeremy Thompson
1983: The World at the Brink by Taylor Downing
The Senior Adviser by Edmund-George King
Garry Kasparov, world chess champion several times over, has the ‘distinction’ of being the first grand master to have been defeated by a computer. It happened in 1997. The computer had the nickname ‘Deep Blue’. Kasparov’s book, Deep Thinking, published 20 years after the event, deals with this experience and its implications. It was inevitable that it would happen, eventually, that programmed artificial intelligence (AI) would enable a computer to beat even a chess grand master. Complex though chess is, there are a limited number of squares on a chessboard as, too, there are pieces and potential moves. Moreover, chess is highly compatible with mathematical binary code – the foundation block of all computing. There are only two players and two different colours for the pieces and the squares on the board. Additionally, chess is played in only two dimensions. The third dimension, height, is irrelevant to the game except for the physical ability to lift pieces across a board – a feature that can be mimicked in two dimensions by a computer programme. The fact that sport is played in three dimensions explains why it is too complex for computer programmes – at this stage at least – to beat our tennis and soccer champions, for example. Mock games in these sports mimic reality but in two dimensions only. Kasparov deals compellingly with the kind of intelligence that is required of a chess champion. Intelligence is obviously a factor in chess-playing but it is not absolutely coextensive with success. By way of illustration, a world champion chess-player is not necessarily more intelligent than a professor of mathematics. It is not yet been determined what it is precisely in the functioning of the brain that distinguishes a chess champion from other mortals. Chess-playing seems, however, to involve visuo-spatial brain activity more than it does mathematical calculation – moves and positions are ‘visualised’ but not pictorially but in some kind of ‘pattern’. The better the player, the better the pattern recognition and recall. Kasparov recognises that once computers were able to beat the best chess players in the world, much of the prestige attached to being a chess champion began to wane. We seemed to say to ourselves: ‘If machines can play the game better than human champions, what is the “big deal”?’ Computers do indeed change the world in ways that none of us may have expected. In this regard Kasparov deals insightfully with how we no longer remember telephone number or keep ‘maps’ in our brain to give us directions to reach destinations – we have handed over those functions to little machines that we carry about in our pockets. Nevertheless, Kasparov is far from gloomy. He reasons that technology frees us to be more creative – one of the most human of our attributes. It sets us free to dream, which computers cannot do. He summarises by concluding that computers have instructions, while human beings have purpose. Deep Thinking compels us to think about thinking. It rewards reading. – NW
When asked what he thought of television, Harold Macmillan, the British prime minister at the time, replied: ‘My dear boy, I don’t watch television, I merely appear on it!’ The world may broadly be divided into those who make news, those who watch it and those who report on it. It leaps from every page of Jeremy Thompson’s autobiography that he relishes being among the few who get to report on the news. It seems he has seldom been happier than when he was standing in front on television cameras with bombs and bullets whizzing above his head. Thompson’s career as a news reporter spans more than 50 years. One does not survive for so long in such a competitive enterprise as his unless one is very good at it. South Africans who watch Sky News will be familiar with Thompson as a news anchor there. He has, however, been stationed in our country several times, most notably during the period of our negotiated transition from apartheid to democracy. He clearly loves South Africa. Against this background, his memoirs are of particular interest to us. Although at times his commentaries seem glib and superficial, his assessments of Nelson Mandela and FW De Klerk – the best I have encountered – are so perceptive that they give credence to his observations of other well known personalities with whom one may be less familiar. Mandela was a bundle of contradictions, the combination of which was hugely charismatic. A shrewd politician and a showman, he had genuine love and compassion for his fellow human beings. Kind and gentle , he was steely too; witty and light-hearted in his sense of humour, he could be solemnly severe; majestic in his bearing, he had the common touch. De Klerk is a professional politician, likable in many ways and capable of great charm but his great quality, for which South Africa will be forever in his debt is that, without being an opportunist, he is no slave to ideology. Breaking News provides a valuable record of a hugely important fact: De Klerk admitted to him that the fall of the Berlin wall changed the game in South Africa. For obvious reasons, both those who supported apartheid and those who lead the liberation therefrom have tended to downplay, if not deny, the global significance of ‘the fall of the wall’. Thompson explains the popularity of persons like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as vesting in their love of life and their fellow human beings. He argues that Donald Trump did not so much win the US presidential election as Hillary Clinton lost it, because so many people could not relate to her – they did not find her to be a warm and likable person. Thompson’s assessment of the significance of Trump is that it will probably lie in his all-out assault on the media. In the event that Trump succeeds in this endeavour, the implications will be immense. Thompson admires Francois Pienaar, our World Cup-winning rugby captain, as much more than a great sportsman. Thompson ends the book by remarking: ‘I’ve been to most corners of the world and reported on many of the great events of my time. I’ve met remarkable people and seen incredible things.’ This is true and it makes the book a compelling read. There is a certain ‘political correctness’ to Thompson. As a general rule it is, of course, better to be politically ‘correct’ than ‘incorrect’, but so pervasive is this ‘PC’ tendency that it made me doubt his sincerity at times. Great literature this autobiography may not be. Nevertheless, it rewards one’s attention. – NW
South Africans, who had reached adulthood by 1983, will remember the year as one of PW Botha and the tricameral parliament, the white referendum and the formation of the United Democratic Front (UDF). Faintly detectable, the first whiffs of the inevitability of the negotiations between the Nationalist government and the African National Congress (ANC) were in the air. For the world, it was a time when the world came perilously close to a nuclear Armageddon. The world dramas of 1983 lead to the fall of the Berlin wall, fundamentally changing international power relations, thereby precipitating sooner than most had expected, the end of apartheid. Taylor Downing, a Cambridge-educated historian, is a prolific and talented writer on global politics. Relying on information declassified by America’s President Bill Clinton shortly before he left office, Downing has written a gripping account of the tensions in global politics in 1983. Dealing with real spy stories, it is more thrilling than any James Bond novel, precisely because of its ‘reality’. In 1981, Ronald Reagan became president of the United States. He was a much more complex, clever and decent person than the caricature of him as an affable, dimwitted old cowboy. A bundle of contradictions, he was a politician who genuinely detested government. His dislike of government was the main driver of his anti-communism. The caricature had a kernel of truth: Reagan indeed clung to the schoolboy romance of the cowboy, living an exciting life, free from rules and regulations. Until Reagan became president, both American and Soviet policy on nuclear armaments since the end of the Second World War had been predicated on the reality of mutually assured destruction (MAD): the peace would be kept because both sides knew that any attack by the one would lead to the total destruction of the other. In 1979, while considering whether to run for president, Reagan visited the North American Air Defence Command (NORAD). There, he was persuaded that, rather than rely on MAD, it would be much more sensible for America to develop the technology to intercept nuclear missiles from outer space before they even arrived at the United States. When he became president, Reagan committed himself to this programme, popularly known as ‘Star Wars’, which involved huge increases in military expenditure. Reagan had described the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire’. The leadership of that country did not believe in Reagan’s good intentions. They seriously believed that the American plan was to attack the Soviet Union and then rely on Star War technology to prevent any retaliation. There was a further problem: the Soviet economy was experiencing such serious problems that it could not possibly devote the money necessary to develop similar technology. The Kremlin became paranoid and almost hysterically nervous. On 1 September 1983, a South Korean Boeing 747 passenger aeroplane, flying from Anchorage in Alaska to Seoul, had flown some 300 miles off course, flying over Soviet territory. It remains a mystery why this should have happened but it was most probably the result of human error when logging information into the computers before the flight took off. The Soviet Air Defence Command thought it was a spyplane and shot it down. The international consequences were seismic. Then, in November 1983, NATO undertook highly realistic military manoeuvres (or simulated ‘war games’) in Europe. The exercises, code-named Able Archer 83, were so realistic that the Kremlin thought they were about to be attacked and nearly launched nuclear warheads into Europe. Chillingly, Downing details a number of instances in the past where either human error or defective technology brought about a misreading of a situation, bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Remarkably, both sides were well-informed about the others technical capacities, installations, military operations and so on. This where the espionage came in. Particular reliance was placed on double agents. It is riveting stuff. One cannot avoid a sense of moral ambiguity about it all. On the one hand, particularly despicable is the CIA agent, Aldrich Ames, who sold secrets to the KGB for no other reason than that he wanted the money to impress his girlfriend, who had expensive and extravagant tastes. In doing so, he exposed several Russian double agents, who were executed as a result. On the other was Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB officer, who became a double agent as a result of intellectual and moral conviction. He may indeed have averted the catastrophe of a nuclear war. He did two things that may account for this. First, he doggedly assured his paranoid masters that NATO had no intention of launching an attack on the Soviet Union. Secondly, he advised the Western leaders, in particular Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, that they should tone down their rhetoric so as not to escalate the tensions that were nerve-wracking in the extreme. Privately, Reagan often told his friends and security advisers that there was only one sensible solution to the prospect of nuclear war: complete nuclear disarmament. During a meeting with the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, he said so. Gorbachev agreed. They came within a caliper measurement of issuing a joint statement to this effect. The problem was – as it still remains – how does one do it? It does not merely require the most sophisticated of technology to monitor the process but a huge degree of trust. And what about those countries that will not play ball? Margaret Thatcher thought it was a daft idea. Reagan and she did not always agree. The potency of Downing’s writing lies not only in his even-handedness but also in letting the facts speak for themselves. It becomes unarguable that complete nuclear disarmament has to be the goal of us all. Star Wars had originally unintended consequences. The financial implications of trying to compete put severe financial strain on the Soviet Union. Its leaders lost confidence. In the result, the Union crumbled, there was rebellion throughout Eastern Europe and the Berlin Wall fell. The fall of the wall brought forward the end of apartheid by at least a decade. The book is not without its lighter moments. For example, the account of Thatcher’s husband, Denis, trying to entertain Gobachev’s wife, Raisa, at 10 Downing Street, while their spouses were locked in conversations that changed the world is a gem. Hugely informative, this book is highly readable. – NW
The Senior Adviser is a rather too long tale of a secret agency, the ‘International Consultancy’. Captain Fletcher of the Royal Navy is commissioned by the British Government to join a luxury yacht, carrying a group of private individuals, with a purported mission to discover pirate wrecks off the Caribbean coast. His brief is to ensure the safety of the craft and its passengers. The group includes a high-ranking British politician, members of London society, a German noble, and several family members. What seems an innocent outing is anything but, given the personalities involved and their true identities, as we discover. Involved also are sinister extremist groups and a South African scientist-cum-bureaucrat. We begin in the Scottish highlands, listen to consultations in Whitehall, sail to the islands off the Americas thence to the waters of Mozambique. There should never be a dull moment, given the inventiveness of the writer and the scope of the plot. And there are moments of excitement and suspense, with some exciting revelations as to who is actually who. But the book could have been edited down to two-thirds of its present volume. There are endless discussions and conversations, with more formality in titles than credible; more explanations than are acceptable in a novel; a huge amount of repetition; and often clumsy English. The book needed real pruning. Let’s have another novel: given the hugeness of the storyline and the array of interesting characters in this book, the author has several more novels to write. Please have them edited by someone hard-nosed, though, someone who complement this author’s creativity. – RH
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