Game Over - Kasparov and the Machine |  | Director: Vikram Jayanti
Actors: Marc Ghannoum, Joel Benjamin, Michael Greengard, Anatoli Karpov, Garry Kasparov
Studio: Velocity / Thinkfilm
List Price: $7.99
Buy Used: $1.90
as of 11/23/2009 16:59 CST details
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Seller: vtcollectibles
Rating:  34 reviews
Sales Rank: 66075
Format: Color, Dolby, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
Language: English (Original Language)
Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Region: 1
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
Number Of Items: 1
Running Time: 90 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 5.4 x 0.6
MPN: DTF53725D
UPC: 821575537254
EAN: 0821575537254
ASIN: B0007VY5K8
Theatrical Release Date: 2003
Release Date: May 31, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
In may 1997 gary kasparov widely regarded as the greatest chess player the world has ever seen played deep blue - a hulking 1.5 ton ibm supercomputer. As it played out in the media this was a chess tournament & scientific experiment that would our dominance as the most intelligent entity on the planet Studio: Image Entertainment Release Date: 10/23/2007 Run time: 84 minutes Rating: Pg
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 34
 Short story - movie too long September 14, 2009
Dottie A. Randazzo (Pennsylvania, USA)
Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/RJ4FX3QU8YDTQ
Not too much May 10, 2009
Ali H. Alsaleh
A lot of information , however most are not that important..
Kasparov Vs Karpov scene was the best part , I wanted more scenes like this one..
Great score
Not for buying .. just rent
Superficial, amateurish, unsatisfying documentary December 17, 2008
J. Doe
The subject is an interesting one, but this documentary is sorely deficient.
The biggest problem is that the film-makers never address the central issue of whether IBM actually cheated or not. The film is full of accusations and innuendos, but there is essentially no analysis. I was left confused and frustrated at the end.
The sound quality is terrible. I kept having to adjust the volume up and down, up and down. The music is often much too loud and drowns-out the speech. In general, the background music is too melodramatic and intrusive.
The director used too many "artsy" flourishes, like repeatedly -- repeatedly! -- cutting to clips of an old movie about a chess-playing automaton.
There is almost no useful information in the movie about chess or computers. It's like the film-makers were aiming the movie at the least common denominator.
The movie starts with a story about a "mechanical Turk" that defeated Napoleon in chess, but the film-makers never explicitly state that the Turk was a big hoax -- a human was hidden inside the contraption. Sure, they hint at it, but a resolution to the story would have been a nice way to end the movie.
The film-makers had the opportunity to ask really interesting, probing questions of both Kasparov and the IBM team -- but they dropped the ball. The interviews are shallow and uninteresting.
Skip this documentary. There are books written on this subject, and although I haven't read them, I imagine that they're much better than this movie.
Enjoyable but shallow September 23, 2008
Zachary Young (New York, NY)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine examines the infamous 1997 rematch between then world-champion Gary Kasparov and IBM's chess supercomputer, Deep Blue. Kasparov had defeated an earlier incarnation of Deep Blue the previous year, but in 1997 the new and improved computer defeated him in a six-game match: two wins to one with three draws.
Speculation was rampant that IBM had rigged the match by allowing a human player to override the computer on certain key moves. As evidence, conspiracy theorists pointed to moves wherein Kasparov offered the sacrifice of a pawn, and the computer turned it down. Pawn sacrifices, which strong players often use to garner positional advantages or to gain initiative, were long considered too abstract for a computer to understand. A machine, many argued, could not possibly see far enough ahead to truly appreciate the subtle positional edge that a good sacrifice can provide. Therefore, a human must have been helping the computer out. Who could expect a human player, even one as brilliant as Kasparov, to defeat the combination of human and computer?
The film makes frequent reference to "The Turk", a chess-playing automaton that was famous in the 18th century. Travelling around Europe, it impressed monarchs and noblemen with its astonishing ability. The Turk was a hoax; a human player, concealed beneath the machine, operated the arms and made the moves himself. Dramatizations of the historical episode, borrowed from black and white films, appear frequently throughout Game Over (in fact they constitute something of a thematic refrain). The analogy is obvious, and certainly compelling. Could Deep Blue have been a modern day Turk, an elaborate fraud perpetrated by IBM to garner publicity? It's hard not to be intrigued by the question, but unfortunately, the intrigue ends there. "Game Over" does not present a single shred of evidence to support its hypothesis. Instead, it relies esclusively (and I do mean exclusively) on innuendo.
Over and over, a shaky camera presents us with blurred visuals while a hushed voice wonders aloud about the supposedly "un-computer-like" moves that Deep Blue made during the match. One interviewee after another questions the machine's strangely profound understanding of the game. The film ends with a gradual interior tracking shot of the warehouse in which the de-commisioned supercomputer now resides (it's hard not think of the final shot from Raiders of the Lost Ark), while the narrator laments that the truth may never be known. All this is very mysterious, yes, but it's also utterly unconvincing.
It wasn't so long ago that otherwise rational people proclaimed with certainty that no computer would ever beat a human world champion. Chess, they said, is too full of pattern-recognition, of strategy and subtlety, for a computer to grasp in full. How could any person with even a basic knowledge of chess and computer science have legitimately believed this? While the number of possible positions in chess is astronomical, it is still finite, and a sufficiently powerful computer should, in theory, be able to "solve" the game (that is, determine the ideal move for every position). Even today, no computer is capable of this. But as processors grew more and more powerful, it was inevitable that they would come close enough to their lofty goal that they would surpass the limits of human chess ability. From then on, the world champion would never again be a human.
Should it really surprise us that an exceptionally powerful computer (which, at the time, Deep Blue was) would be able to look far enough ahead to see that a small material gain now would cost it dearly later on? "Game Over" sustains itself on nothing more than baseless insinuations about the IBM programming team. What is most offensive about this is the way that the programmers are demonized for crushing humanity's hopes of perpetual chess supremacy. Should it not be viewed as an equally great triumph of human ingenuity that a team of computer scientists was able to create a machine more skilled even than Kasparov, a genius who had devoted his life to the study of chess?
Compounding the absurdity is the fact that a year before this film was released, world champion Vladimir Kramnik drew an eight-game match against the chess program Fritz, which can be purchased for a small sum at your local Best Buy and installed on your home computer. One wonders if the producers of Game Over were aware of this.
 Not for Chess Players June 24, 2008
Frankie (penetanguishene)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
A driveling film that should've had 2/3rds of it edited out.
The usual moronic style: Shaky cameras, five second soundbites from a whirlwind of talking heads, "spooky" music, anti-corporatist agitprop, conspiracy theorizing...
Hey, here's a conspiracy theory: Some fool we're supposed to take seriously states that IBM made "billions" out of the match. Maybe they gave the neurotic Kasparov a few million to lose?
Hey, players: read Pandolfini's book on the match. I'm not a great fan of Mr. P, but it's a move-by-move Chernev-style annotation of the six games. Quite interesting and taught me, at least, a bit more about the game.
Anyway, K lost the match, and serve him right. Deep Blue didn't win it.
Karpov would've crushed DB: Play the board, not the man/machine!
Showing reviews 1-5 of 34
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