There's a photo of a despondent Gary Kasparov with his face buried in his hands on the front page of yesterday’s NY Times. He has just conceded the final game in his match with IBM’s Deep Blue, a specially configured RS/6000 SP computer like the one that I work with on a daily basis at Columbia University. His defeat stirs up a number of associations for me, both political and professional. Kasparov is an easy person to root against. He has unlimited arrogance. Not since the heyday of nutcase fascist Bobby Fischer's has there been a chess champion with so many character flaws. In an afterword to the final game, a humbled Kasparov explained why he had lost his fighting spirit. "I'm a human being. When I see something that is well beyond my understanding, I'm afraid." Kasparov was a key figure in the undoing of the Soviet Union. This was no champion of worker's democracy. The unabashed Yeltsinite’s cause was money and power in the world of professional chess. In his matches with Karpov, the bourgeois press depicted the board game as a metaphor for the struggle between "democracy" and communism. Karpov's defeat occurred just around the time that Reagan was escalating low-intensity warfare against Nicaragua and Angola while pushing for adoption of Star Wars, meant more to bankrupt the USSR than prevent missile attacks. Kasparov was a willing accomplice of imperialism's counterreolutionary drive and made frequent public appearances at the side of Reagan or Thatcher. The RS/6000 SP's role in the defeat of Kasparov will be used by IBM as a marketing wedge against Microsoft. IBM has been trying to position itself as a leading-edge corporation and it has been an uphill battle until recently. After laying off tens of thousands of workers in the 1980s, they began to climb back slowly. Ironically it has been continuing strength in the leasing of "dinosaur" mainframes that has helped IBM stage a comeback. More significantly, it has been exploding sales of the RS/6000 series has been fueling the recent recovery of IBM. This machine is a so-called RISC type computer that runs the UNIX operating system. IBM's main competition is Sun and Hewlett-Packard. These machines are used not only to provide the technical infrastructure for the Internet, they are also used for "client-server" applications such as the type I am working on right now at Columbia. In fact the only difference between the SP2 that I work on and the one that defeated Kasparov is that mine has 8 processors while Deep Blue has 516 processors working in parallel. The bourgeois press depicts the battle between IBM and Microsoft as one taking place on the field of capitalist entrepreneuralism. Nothing can be further from the truth. Microsoft's emergence as a successful corporation is a study in the benefits of privatizing technology created in the public sphere. Gates developed a proprietary operating system that was modeled in the final analysis on the publicly available Unix for use on IBM personal computers. After his initial success, he parlayed operating system ownership into a virtual monopoly on applications software. Company after company was driven out of business because Microsoft sabotaged their ability to gain timely access to new Microsoft operating system protocols and standards. This became true especially with the introduction of Windows, a rip-off of Apple's Macintosh OS. Meanwhile IBM is a classic study of how to get ahead in the capitalist world by avoiding competition. Thomas Watson went to prison in the early years of IBM because of price-fixing and industrial sabotage. In one case, he sold malfunctioning tabulating machines with his main competition's brand-name tagged on and put it out of business when angry customers decided to go elsewhere. Years later he depended on the largesse of tax-payers to fund the development of the first mainframe computers under the auspices of the Defense Department. After the initial investment was recovered, IBM's products began to become profitable. This has nothing to do with the glories of the "free market". If anything, it is testimony to the advantages of economic planning. The computer system that I am trying to implement on the RS6000/SP2 at Columbia University was developed by a consulting company called American Management Systems based in Arlington, Virginia. The company's top executives were systems analysts in McNamara's Pentagon during the Vietnam War. After their tenure in government ended, they began a software consulting company that relied on Pentagon contracts for their initial success. Does this have anything to do with old boys ties to the Pentagon? I will let others draw their own conclusion. Finally, on the question of artificial intelligence. It is finally being recognized that this is *not* what Deep Blue is doing. The NY Times describes what was happening in much more honest terms: "But on the inside were 516 chess processors capable of examining 50 billion positions every three minutes, and it used its enormous calculating ability to find its way through the maze of chess games. It was not able to 'think' in the way humans do, with flashes of insight, and had a limited capacity to focus on only the few promising lines of play, as the best human players do." What computers like the RS6000/SP can do best is assist human beings make *intelligent* decisions. The spread of this type of technology in capitalist society has been mostly to keep track of financial transactions. In a socialist society, they could be used to monitor resource allocation worldwide. Banks of RS6000s in a global network could surely be used to calculate the impact of the substitution of railways for automobiles. Or the cost of replacing inorganic fertilizers with natural ones, etc. Louis Proyect
