The Ghost in the Game

Computer Chess and Learning to Love Mystery

About a third of the way through Computer Chess (2013), a chaotic and mysterious interloper interrogates an earnest British programmer about the ethics of developing technology. John (novelist Jim Lewis) hectors Les Carbray (real-life programmer James Curry) over the possibility that his work on autonomous chess software might be used in war. Or something. It gets hazy. A joint is being passed around, hard liquor has been consumed, and there are intimations of harder, weirder substances circulating.

The specifics of what gets said are less important than the distance between this scene and our expectations. In a more ordinary film, this might be the place to establish Politics. Or most commonly, to gesture at Politics. Computer Chess isn’t particularly interested in the ideological bluster of its characters. Andrew Bujalski’s film was shot in black-and-white on analogue Sony tube cameras. Its casting eschewed professional actors in favor of computer scientists, commercial programmers, a novelist, and even a film critic. It apparently didn’t have a traditional shooting script, often relying on improvisations by performers.

So when two characters try to have a conversation about whether it’s right to create something that could be used to kill, we feel the edges going blurry even as they try to hone sharp points. Computer Chess has compassion for its dorky characters, but it also makes them vulnerable, ultimately to the point of helplessness, before the very thing they’re dorky about: Technology.

Set in 1980, in the words of the movie’s own website, Computer Chess “transports viewers to a nostalgic moment when the contest between technology and the human spirit seemed a little more up for grabs.” This doesn’t seem quite right. Computer Chess is less about some eternal struggle between man and machine, and more about an interplay that never resolves into victory or defeat. Nothing important in this movie is as decisive as the result of a chess match.

In a pivotal scene, grad student Peter (Patrick Riester) wheels his CalTech team’s computer to the hotel room of female MIT competitor Shelly (Robin Schwartz). Peter wants to test his team’s inexplicably errant program against hers. The two are unable to make eye contact with one another. The scene’s intense eros is filtered through their respective machines, sighing and nuzzling replaced by clacking and whirring. A breakthrough comes when Peter asks Shelly to turn off her computer and make her own moves against his TSAR program. Suddenly TSAR, a former champion that has been bafflingly self-sabotaging in the early stages of the tournament, begins to play well.

When Peter tells his advisor, Dr. Schoesser (computer science professor Gordon Kindlmann) that TSAR appears to be responding to playing against a human in a way it refused to do against another machine, the professor summarily dismisses his student. There’s just no way. But then we go down a series of psychedelic rabbit holes. Are there cats wandering the hallways of this hotel, or are various characters just taking some interesting pills? Is this sex worker revealing herself to be a cyborg? Did TSAR try to talk to one of Peter’s colleagues late one night in the lab?

Everything is in play, as if the movie is working through the narrative equivalent of the sprawling decision trees built into the chess programs. Computer Chess loves ambiguity and weirdness. When the movie raises a serious question, which it does frequently, it doesn’t provide an answer. It simply makes us feel the inherent queasiness of compulsively trying to solve every single problem. It makes us wonder whether we can handle the delicate joys of mystery.

Computer Chess is ultimately a story about the ghosts in our machines. We’re all aware by now of the dark spirits lurking in what we’ve built, from surveillance to disinformation. How did they get there?

Initially I had a pat answer to this question, but I don’t think Computer Chess wants us to arrive there. I don’t think it’s a movie about how Facebook turned into a series of atrocity nodes. This is instead a movie about being smart and feeling ignorant. It’s about the nervous exhilaration of realizing you don’t understand what’s happening. There are ghosts in these machines, but they only ever peak around the corners. The ghosts in Computer Chess whisper to us, You just don’t know.

So maybe we’ve arrogantly answered as many questions as we could, but there are other questions we can’t even articulate. In that same early scene where the real-life novelist prods the real-life programmer, another character goes on a cogent rant about the limitations of formally representing knowledge and how hard it is to model “artificial intelligence” even in the abstract. He’s right—these may be unsolvable problems, even if few people at the tournament want to hear that. The reason these programmers honed in on chess was because it had neat rules. As we’ve all learned, once the rules stop being tidy and enforceable, things can get weird.

Calvin and Hobbes Corner

Sometimes it just doesn’t land:

I’ve been writing about Calvin and Hobbes for long enough that I can finally admit this: Not all of these strips are great. Watterson has as high a batting average as is possible for anyone putting out work Every Single Goddamn Day for a decade, but even a talent as untouchable as his has its off days. Maybe one day I’ll try to determine what the worst Calvin and Hobbes strip is. That would be a fun one to vote on.

This strip isn’t the worst one. It’s whatever. It would be better if Hobbes didn’t immediately point out that the telephone Calvin is holding is a toy. The word “toy” staggers the flow of the sentence—who says, “the toy telephone” as if there’s only one? More importantly, it disarms the potential whimsy of the scene. Wouldn’t it be more fun if we thought Calvin had potentially stolen an actual telephone from his parents?

And then we get to the punchline, or rather, the two punchlines. Calvin’s attempt doesn’t land, so he gets literally punched. Which, whatever—once again, the joke is on Calvin. But Hobbes is being a big ol’ bully. I said a few weeks ago that I learned way too much about friendship from Hobbes. Much as I love our dear jungle cat, I’m starting to think I’d have been nicer to my friends if I had taken fewer cues from Calvin’s frequent tormentor.

A poem

Kate Northrop goes to a film