The tiny little coastal town of Cadaqués (pron. "Kaa-daa-'kess")
lies in the northeast of Spain. Many famous painters lived here, for instance
Picasso, Miro, Duchamp, Cage and Dalí. There they practiced all forms
of arts and they invented new ones. And during all this time, in the cafes next
to the sea, they played chess.
Today Cadaqués is an exclusive (and expensive) seaside resort, and it
is the home of Prof. Enrique Irazoqui, who is occupied by a completely different
pastime. Enrique is not just anybody. An economist and a professor of literature,
he is also an expert in information technology and artificial intelligence.
For many years he edited a magazine on computer chess – in the end in electronic
form. He always loved chess and has played against Marcel Duchamp, who was a
master class chess player.
But apart from all of this there is another unusual chapter in the life of
Enrique Irazoqui. In 1964 he played the lead in Pier Paolo Pasolini's highly
acclaimed film The Gospel According To St. Matthew – and you know
who that film was all about!
However, if you enter the names Cadaqués and Irazoqui in an Internet
search engine today the top entries are not famous painters or bible films.
It is the computer chess tournaments run by Enrique and published all over the
world. These tournaments are traditionally conducted once a year in Cadaqués
and overshadow all previous achievements of the town or its multi-talented inhabitants.
Interview with Enrique Irazoqui
By Mariano Sigman
Organizing and being referee of computer chess tournaments is a strange
job. How did you get there?
It all started in 1979. I was living in the East Coast of the United States
where the winters were horrendous. I bought the two computers that where available
at that time to play chess, but it turned out that they played so badly that
it was more fun to see them play against each other. That's how I became a spectator
of computer chess. Today, programs running on home computers can play hard against
the best grand masters.
Enrique Irazoqui was the arbiter in the match Kramnik
vs Deep Fritz in Bahrain
Do the new programs today play better than supercomputers like Deep Blue?
Actually, why did Deep Blue stop playing after the successful match with Kasparov?
Deep Blue was dismantled one day after having defeated Kasparov, and it is
then hard to know whether the new programs on smaller computers could defeat
Deep Blue. After the match IBM had all to lose and nothing to win. It had already
won. It had beaten Kasparov. And the day after, their stocks hit the roof and
there was no reason to risk that at all.
Kasparov played surprisingly bad in his match with Deep Blue, maybe even
suspiciously bad.
Suspiciously bad, definitively not. Kasparov wants to win everything and against
everyone: man or machine. Each time he sits in front of a chessboard he has
to prove he is the king. And indeed, this may not be the best strategy to play
a machine that calculates millions and millions of positions. It may be healthier
to play solid, conducting the game on positional and strategic grounds, where
one can win slowly. Kramnik's style is more suited for computer chess.
Is there really a uniform way to play computers? Is it the same to play
Fritz than to play Junior? It is said that Junior plays with some form of intuition,
as it could even pass the Turing test and give the impression that there is
a human under the box.
Computer programs do not have intuition. The Junior programmers implemented
an interesting function in their program by making it speculate. Junior can
give one or two pawns for the initiative, without calculating all the variations
that lead to a straight win. This leads to the illusion that it plays human-like.
This strategy worked really well in the first part of the match against Fritz
in Cadaqués (to decide who would play Kramnik) but not as well in the
second half.
Isn't such a big difference in performance between two halves of a tournament
strange when the players are computers, which do not get tired, or depressed...
No, actually it happens frequently, because randomness plays a more important
role in computer than in human chess. That's why we play long tournaments to
decide the champion and even then, in the end, it turns out to be always a somehow
arbitrary decision. We don't have enough time, even with computers that can
play day and night to make them play for sufficient time to decide which program
is definitively the best. The role of the referee is then impossible. A few
days before the match between Junior and Fritz ended, people all around thought
that Junior was going to win.
Do programs have fans?
Yes, they do. It is less natural to identify with a program than with a player,
but they still do. The speculative style of Junior builds up the illusion that
it is more human, and thus it has many supporters.
How much, or which aspects of human intelligence is captured by computer
chess programs?
In my opinion none. But then we get into a very arduous discussion and on to
a problem of definitions. Chess is presumed to be intelligent and thus machines
that play chess are thought to be intelligent. But also calculation is a form
of intelligence, and no one would think that a pocket calculator is intelligent.
A chess program is a sophisticated calculator.
Cadaqués, which Dalí called "the most beautiful village
in the world"
And we are not?
That I do not know. But at least, an important difference is that we can learn
and computers do not. They can repeat over and over the same mistakes.
Is there anything we have learned by watching computers play chess, or by
programming them. Is chess programming also a journey to understand intelligence?
Probably not much, mainly because chess programs have an important reason to
be there, they have to win. They are not designed to test different aspects
of reasoning but to win tournaments, and so far it has been more economic to
do so with brute force. That's partly why no one is writing programs that learn.
So far it is easier, takes less time and less money to teach them everything.
But in addition I think that there is a more fundamental problem, which is that
today we only have a very vague idea of what intelligence is. Reading the definition
in the Encyclopedia Britannica gives a good idea of our state of knowledge:
it is chaos. Very descriptive but not explicative.
It is not intelligible.
It is intelligible but in a poetic sense. I still have a program that someone
gave me in 1987 that writes haikus, a highly structured form of Japanese poetry.
I have given haiku readers poems written by my program, and they where not able
to find anything that suggested them that they had been written by a machine.
Poetry is at the same time the most intellectual and exact form of literature.
And in some sense it is said, that to write poetry, as to play chess, intelligence
is required. However, this program, just using a database of nouns and verbs
and a precise rule to combine them, not very intelligent, produces, as a final
result, a haiku.
Isn't human intelligence on a way like Junior, the illusion of playing with
uncertainty?
Maybe, but in chess at least, our way to approach and play the game is completely
different than that of a machine, even Junior. A program calculates millions
of positions per second and a grandmaster one or two. And they do not need to
calculate many more. We can recognize patterns, we can learn and we are much
slower than machines.
This is where you will always find Enrique, in his favourite Café
in Cadaqués
Your interest on chess programs is not a way to understand intelligence,
is it only about the passion for chess?
Partly it is passion for chess and in part it is a window to perfection. I
have spoken to many friends also involved in literature to try to understand
why chess programs fascinate us. Part of it is that we are chess amateurs, we
like the game but not enough to become professionals. But mainly, while watching
the programs playing and improving one has the impression that we are approaching
the moment of perfection (which actually I don't think that either you or me
will ever see) where chess will have been solved – where for example Black will
resign before White has made the first move, because he knows that it will be
check mated in 349 moves. This is at the same time fascinating and horrendous.
I can show you a position which indeed is mate in 128 moves, and the program
will find it in a blink. The spontaneous reaction is of course to unplug the
computer, but passed this moment of fear, it becomes a captivating mystery.
It is on a way paradoxical that the computer chess championship is played
in Cadaqués, a village so…
So enchanting and so delightful. It was played here actually for a fairly simple
reason: this is where I live. But Cadaqués has a strong chess tradition.
In this same Café we used to play chess every afternoon with Marcel Duchamp,
his wife Teeny, John Cage and many others.
Marcel Duchamp, the chess lover
How was it to play with Duchamp?
For me it was a pleasure but I am not sure it did him very well. He usually
finished being very upset. Teeny, his wife, asked me not to play him any more
because he would not sleep after that. It was tender, on a way, very fragile.
After that I mainly played with Teeny.
Marcel Duchamp and Eve Babitz playing chess at Pasadena Art Museum (1963)
And John Cage?
He used to ask Raymond Keene to teach him how to defeat Duchamp, but he never
made it. I remember one day we were playing as usual, in the Café, and
he placed a pentagram of thin translucent paper on the windows. He drew one
note on top of each star and composed a melody of the night. Fortunately I never
heard it, but this gives you an idea of how were these people and these days.
John Cage
What is left of this tradition?
There is not even a chessboard in the bar we used to play. I do not know if
it is a symbol of these days but the most interesting form of chess today here
in Cadaqués is the computer tournament.
How come chess in general can proliferate so profoundly in Spain?
I don't live in Spain; I live in Cadaqués. And I don't mean this as
an issue of nationalism; it is just that Cadaqués is an island. You get
out of it through the sea, not through the mountain. But I think that the big
wave of chess started with a (very successful) attempt by Luis Rentero to promote
tourism in Linares. Not to many years after that Linares became, together with
Madrid and Barcelona, one of the three most popular Spanish towns in the Soviet
Union.
While you are not organizing computer chess tournaments you teach literature…
I studied economy. In my first job, right after graduation, I was in charge
of human resources and it frightened me. That wasn't what I was. I had spent
my career reading Marx and the Marxists, and I learned nothing about accountings.
It lasted five months, until I quit, and since then I have been involved in
literature.
From heading a company you went straight to Pasolini?
No,
actually Pasolini was before that, in 1964, during the Franco regime. I was
the only one from the clandestine union that spoke Italian, and so I was sent
to Italy to a mission to contact people that could help us fight against fascism.
I was 19. The last day, in Rome I was taken to the house of a poet. There, in
his living room, I delivered the same speech, which by then I knew by heart.
Contrary to what everybody else did, which was to interrupt, to ask, to converse,
this man heard me in complete silence until I finished my speech, and only then
he stood up and started circling me without saying a word. He told me he would
go to Spain, and he would help us, but that at the same time I could do him
a favor. For two years he had been preparing a film about Christ, following
literally the Gospel according to St Mathew. But he could not find the actor
to be Christ. He wanted me to do it. In about five seconds and four words I
told him he was nuts, and I told him I had more important things to do: establishing
human fraternity.
It was not revolutionary to act the Gospel at that time
The gospel was a symbol of the very oppressive church of Spain at that time.
On top of that it was a Hollywood theme, and I wasn't interested at all. In
the end Elsa Morante convinced me of the relevance of the project. She was a
good friend of Pasolini, and she ended up being the best friend I have had in
my life.
It was probably very intense to be Jesus at 19
Actually not. The most intense experience was, from one day to the other, to
switch from being a son of a Barcelona bourgeois family to being part of the
Rome of Pasolini, Moravia and all this people who were inventing a new life.
Being Jesus or starring in a Western would have been about the same.
Borges refers frequently to the player and the observer of a chess game
is an iconic image of god. Is there any relationship between the two characters:
the chess player and observer, and Christ?
Depending on how you play chess you are more likely to feel miserable than
a god.
Well, there are good and bad gods.
Gods, in chess, remains for Kasparov or Kramnik. But you don't even feel Christ
during filming. You spend your time speaking with friends, playing football,
and suddenly there is a combination of lights that makes the scene, and you
are asked to be immediately ready, and you film for two minutes, and that's
it. You don't get to relate very much with the character, not in the way Pasolini
worked. However, the film was shot in Calabria, and at that time this region
was even more south than the south of Spain. And there were lines of people
with their black suits asking me to accomplish a miracle, and they were not
willing to accept that I was not Christ. They would even be offended when I
smoked, because Christ didn't smoke.
What's your reading of the Gospel today?
It is a wonderful story of which I actually do not know very much. I have always
been agnostic and, until I was 19, even with a strong allergy towards the Franquist
Church. I never read the Gospel again, and my relation with this story is through
the people that ask me about it. It is a cyclic story, a Borges-like story.
I have been sitting at this table many times, and the years pass and I lose
my teeth, and I lose my hair, and people keep asking me about that story.
So what happened when you returned form Italy?
When I came back to Spain the police took my passport away for having worked
in a Marxist film. It was funny, the film was "The Gospel According
to Saint Mathew" which had won two international catholic prices and
hade been shown in the Vatican Council.
Original
Spanish version of the interview