Rick’s Picks: Man vs. Machine

Rick’s Picks: Man vs. Machine May 1, 2015

Rick’s Picks is a new series of posts highlighting the very best content online.

This piece from FiveThirtyEight explores a classic contest of man vs. machine, carried out on the battlefield of the chess board.

Seventeen years ago in New York City, brooding chess champion Garry Kasparov sat down to take on an opponent he had vanquished just a year earlier: the IBM computer, Deep Blue.

Like the earlier match, which Kasparov won four games to two, the rematch spoke to a fundamental question of the digital age: Who has primacy — a tangle of circuits and silicon, or a reasoning, feeling human being?

FiveThirtyEight and ESPN Films follow the drama of those nine days in a short documentary film, “The Man vs. The Machine,” directed by Frank Marshall. The story — part of FiveThirtyEight’s new digital short series, “Signals” — hinges on a single move, the 44th move of the second game.

The Man Vs. The Machine

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