Arise, Sir Demis | TheArticle

In my column of April 18, I speculated on the possibility of a committee of chess grandmasters coming together to help save the nation in times of adversity. I also drew attention to the

fact that the awesome collective brainpower of chess experts, such as Conel Hugh O’Donel Alexander, Harry Golombek and Sir Stuart Milner-Barry, had been harnessed once before to assist Alan

Turing and the illustrious Nazi code breaking corps at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. With VE Day being celebrated yesterday, _dulce et decorum est_ to recall their monumental

achievements in shortening the war by up to two years and thus saving an estimated fourteen million lives. Little did I know, when writing for my column of April 18, that history had already

repeated itself. On March 18 2020, one full month beforehand, Dr. Demis Hassabis FRS CBE, (pictured above) described by the_ Times_ as “probably the smartest brain in Britain”, and

originator of AlphaZero, the strongest chess playing computer program ever developed, had been invited by Government Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, to attend SAGE, the

government committee (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) designed to combat Covid-19. At the time of my writing about the codebreakers, the composition of SAGE had been a closely

guarded state secret, but in the last few days the rules on confidentiality have been relaxed in the interests of transparency, and it has been revealed that Demis had been enlisted to serve

in the national interest. Before delving further into this matter, let me first digress onto a subject I mentioned in my column of February 15th. In 1482, when Leonardo da Vinci was thirty

years old, he wrote his famous employment application letter to Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. In it he set out his full and impressive CV, cataloguing his numerous qualifications for the

post._ _ I am grateful to Michael Gelb, author of _How to think like Leonardo da Vinci_ for his succinct description of Leonardo’s Letter containing his qualifications, which I have

summarised: “In his CV Leonardo asserted his unique expertise as an anatomist, botanist, City Planner, Designer, Engineer, Geologist, Musician, Painter, Sculptor, not to mention military

strategist and inventor of the tank and the parachute, even though humans had not yet mastered the art of flight. In fact, Leonardo’s dimensions and vertical / horizontal ratios for

constructing a successful parachute would have been accurate, even though no planes existed during the Renaissance from which the hypothetical parachutists might jump.” Now, just imagine,

having got wind of Leonardo’s appointment by the Duke, that the equally hypothetical mainstream media of the day, say ‘_La Posta Quotidiana_’ and ‘_Il Guardiano_’, were outraged by the ducal

promotion of a mere artist and fulminated mightily against Leonardo’s presence on Ludovico’s staff. But an outburst of rancorous moral indignation, based on Demis’s ties to Google, is

exactly what happened when Demis tried to help the government and the nation. One of Demis’s multifarious qualifications is as an AI data specialist, and his skills must have been considered

 of significant importance in combatting Covid-19. Elaine Colliar, five times World Champion in Tony Buzan’s technique of Mind Mapping remarked to me, that with Demis on board, at least the

anti-Coronavirus measures will now work. _Mirabile dictu_, or perhaps not, instead of being grateful that a genuine British genius was prepared to volunteer for SAGE to save British lives,

the_ Daily Mail_ and_ Guardian_ resorted to morally outraged, screaming headlines, such as the_ Guardian’s_ of April 30th: “Attendance of Demis Hassabis raises further questions about

secretive group…”, or the_ Mail_’s of the same date: “Anger as Google artificial intelligence expert is invited to secretive SAGE meeting…” followed by miniatory utterances, such as:

“outcry, concerned, scrutiny.” Now is the time to cite some words of wisdom from a Central European thinker who escaped the clutches of the Nazis in good time: “There is perhaps no

phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as ‘moral indignation,’ which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.” Erich Fromm, German Jewish Philosopher

1900-1980. I first encountered Demis when he was eight years old and I was giving a chess simultaneous display against fifty-or-so Streatham school children, playing all games at once. All

but one of my opponents succumbed without a fight, but one little dark-haired boy put up such a huge fight that I began to doubt I could win. “Grandmaster fails to defeat eight year old” was

a headline I wished to avoid, so I summoned up all my experience against my last opponent standing and after a lengthy struggle I eventually won. It was though, absolutely obvious that this

young kid already possessed formidable mental powers. Later, Demis, as a student at Christ’s College, was to represent Cambridge University in the annual Varsity Chess match against Oxford,

win Gold Medal in Pentamind, the multi-game discipline of the Mind Sports Olympiad, and in his own words, become world chess champion “by proxy.” The justification for this claim was that,

with his company, Deep Mind, Demis became the _spiritus rector_ of the computer program which defeated the human World Champion in the fiendishly difficult oriental game of Wei Chi (or as it

is more commonly known: Go), a feat previously considered impossible. Subsequently, his spectacular exploit has been to create AlphaZero, the most powerful chess program the world has ever

seen, or is ever likely to see. Hence the chess championship by proxy quip. Indeed, Demis would have been equally justified in claiming the proxy championship of the world of Wei Chi.

AlphaZero has developed strategies which confound the traditional ways of human thinking about chess. It sacrifices material for virtually invisible long-term prospects, it concentrates its

forces and attacks, not by standard centralisation, but by retreating its most powerful pieces to squares at the rear and perimeter of the board, and it has no fear of simplification, even

when suffering from significant material deficit. There is no doubt that the current and future generations of chess Grandmasters are busy learning from AlphaZero and adapting to its

strategies, many of which are explained in the ground-breaking book _Game Changer_ by the Grandmaster team of Matthew Sadler and Natasha Regan (in my opinion one of the most important texts

on chess ever written.) This week’s game is a stunningly paradoxical victory by AlphaZero against a rival computer program, Stockfish, itself considered invincible when facing human

opposition. A grateful Monarch and nation have already rewarded Demis with the CBE. As coronavirus is gradually pushed back, I predict that Demis will be able to add a flesh and blood

knighthood to the wooden knights he manoeuvres so deftly on his chessboard. I leave the final word to Demis himself — as he told the _Times_: “There are so many problems out there from

Alzheimer’s disease to climate change… where we seem to be making almost no progress. I’d be much more pessimistic about the way the world is going to go if I didn’t know there was something

as game-changing as AI on the way.”