According to Garry Kasparov, the greatest chess player of all time, chess is “war in its purest form”. If he’s correct, then the grandmaster’s matches against IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in 1996 and 1997 were the first skirmishes in a war between humanity and artificial intelligence.
As AI’s influence on our lives and culture becomes ever more hotly debated, timely new six-part Disney+ series Rematch rewinds to the first time man’s supremacy over man-made machines was challenged. Leeds-born actor-writer-director Christian Cooke gets on board to play the Russian chess champ.
BIG ISSUE: This one took a little while to get to our screens.
CHRISTIAN COOKE: It won an award at Series Mania then went out in France and Germany last year. We were supposed to be on Disney+ last November but they apparently liked it and didn’t want it to get crowded out by Christmas shows. Sometimes good things don’t get the exposure they deserve and it’s the ones you do that aren’t so good that everyone sees.
Interesting timing for a show about, effectively, the dawn of the age of AI.
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We are at the stage now where we should have a choice, if we were cognisant enough collectively, about how we want AI to be part of our lives for the positive but not take over every aspect of our lives. Maybe capitalism has taken the decision out of people’s hands. But being at that crossroads like we are now, it’s interesting to look back at where that might have all started and what attitudes were to technology.
What impressed you most learning about chess?
There are more variations of chess positions in a game than there are atoms in the universe. Isn’t that incredible? It blew my mind. There are 20 first moves in chess and it expands exponentially after that.
Garry Kasparov, on the left, contemplating his next move against Deep Blue, 1997. (AP Photo/Adam Nadel)
What’s your opening gambit to get inside the mind of Garry Kasparov?
Maths and logic are not my strong point – I’m more an English language and literary person – so coming from a novice position, that aspect of chess was so alien to me. But I could relate to his obsessiveness. Garry Kasparov is a really progressive-minded person and was supportive of computers and developing technology. A lot of chess grandmasters are similar – they have amazing logic brains but are also incredible at studying and analysing and memorising thousands of different plays. So it makes sense he wanted to see what he was capable of doing against a computer.
By 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue computer could evaluate 200 million positions per second.
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And it still could barely beat a human. They had all these people programming one computer to respond just to him. So it certainly speaks to how bright and unique he is, and humanity is, I guess. Because he was representing humanity in that moment.
There’s a lot of talk about the government potentially selling out artists and their work by allowing AI to mine the data from creative works. How do you feel about that?
It’s scary. But I don’t know the full implications. I have a general aversion to it because once you take the human element out, things will become homogenised. I remember Sam Rockwell saying that he was watching a Laurence Olivier stage performance and when you thought he should have cried in this scene, he laughed. Sam said, “I just stole that straight away.” But he made the point that when the idea is put through a different vessel, a different person, it’s going to come out in a completely different way. People talk about every story having already been told – but when a person puts their own experience and virtues and vices into it, that’s when it becomes original. If technology takes out that human touch, we all lose out.
You caught the acting bug early.
My mum was a single mother with two young boys aged nine and 12. We were coming to that age where she was like, we have to occupy them and keep them out of trouble and give them an interest. So we went to this performing arts school, Stage 84, just outside Bradford. And it really was transformational for me and my brother. We just loved it. I was a very shy kid and I met all these kids with all this confidence, dancing, singing and improvising. And it changed my life.
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Who were the big influences on you?
I was obsessed with Robert Carlyle as a really young kid. When I was 12, my mum got me all of Robert Carlyle’s filmography on VHS for Christmas – which is so weird when I think back on it. So there was Hamish Macbeth, Trainspotting, the Antonia Bird films Priest and Ravenous, the Michael Winterbottom stuff [Go Now] and Riff-Raff by Ken Loach. I watched all his films. I don’t know what sparked that interest – I think I saw his episode of Cracker when I was really young and was like, fuck, who’s that guy? And because I knew acting was what I wanted to do, I just recognised, even at that age, what good acting looked like.
So who is the grandmaster of acting?
My personal grandmaster has always been Philip Seymour Hoffman. I’ve been obsessed with him for years. I was lucky enough to meet him through a friend of mine, Yul Vazquez, who was like a surrogate brother-father figure I worked with on Magic City and was very close to Phil. The integrity and quality of everything he did and the diversity of the work was extraordinary. I cried for days when he died.
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