Rematch (miniseries)

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Rematch
Rematch (miniseries) poster.jpg
Created by Yan England
Bruno Nahon
André Gulluni
Screenplay byYan England
André Gulluni
Directed byYan England
Starring
Theme music composerGrégoire Auger
Country of originFrance, Hungary
Original languageEnglish
No. of series1
No. of episodes6
Production
Executive producerOliver Glaas
ProducerBruno Nahon
CinematographyJéròme Sabourin
Xavier Sirven
EditorJean-Baptiste-Beaudoin
Running time52 min
Production companies
Original release
NetworkArte (France, Germany), Unité (France)
Disney+ (UK)
Release9 September (2024-09-09) 
23 September 2024 (2024-09-23)

Rematch is a 2024 English-language French-Hungarian television miniseries starring Christian Cooke as the world chess champion Garry Kasparov, depicting his 1997 match against the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue.

Contents

Premise

The series is described as a historical psychological thriller, and details Kasparov taking on Deep Blue in 1997, the first time a world champion lost a chess match to a computer. [1]

Cast

Development and production

The six-part series was directed by Yan England and co-created with Bruno Nahon and André Gulluni. It was in development for seven years prior to being commissioned by French-German channel Arte in 2022. It was produced by ARTE France and Unité, alongside Federation Studios. [2] The cast has Christian Cooke as Garry Kasparov and also includes Sarah Bolger, Trine Dyrholm, Aidan Quinn, Tom Austen, Luke Pasqualino and Orion Lee. Filming took place in Montreal and Budapest. [3] The International Master, Malcolm Pein has said he worked as chess consultant on the project. [4]

The co-creator and screenwriter, André Gulluni, originally from Quebec just like director Yan England, told the French newspaper Les Echos that it took seven years in total for the project to become reality: "It took a long time and on more than one occasion I thought we could never finish it. That was actually a real boon because we could take the time to write, sometimes putting the project aside then coming back to it. I kept thinking that Arte would call us and ask us to stop everything, but they gave us enough time to let it grow. That is very different from the way things go in America where everything must happen very fast [...] Moreover, it was a really complicated story that required a lot of research [...] I had the luxury of being able to polish it and of having a brilliant script doctor who spotted all the mistakes and flaws that could take us too far away from the topic. For sure, we had to master a lot of technical aspects, be it on the chess front or on the computer front. But I love technology in general, which made my job easier. And I relied on experts to make sure that what I was telling made sense, that it was plausible even if it wasn't necessarily true." [5]

When Les Echos asked him if they had tried to reach Kasparov, Gulluni said "To do so towards the 'hero' of the story could have limited us for the plot. He is a very proud man, he may have tried to only shown us his qualities and not his flaws and life complications, for instance his difficult relationship with his ex-wife and children. This could have limited us. But we did talk to several people close to him like his ex-agent and a close friend of his, whom by the way lives in France. We also tried to reach the real 'PC', creator of Deep Blue, in reality nicknamed 'CB', but he never answered. We also tried in vain to talk to Joel Benjamin, whom we named Paul Nelson in the series, the grandmaster who trained Deep Blue at the time. I even had the cheek to try to reach his life companion to no end either. I talked to the Chess Federation he presides, of which he's a member, without success. There really seem to be quite a mystery about this rematch." [5]

Gulluni concluded by saying: "Something happened during this rematch because of some added code lines by one of IBM programmers to make think Deep Blue was hesitating, which had a huge impact on destabilising Kasparov. Thus, the series voluntarily puts a doubt in PC's mind and the spectators' too about a potential cheat [from IBM]. We currently don't know what fully happened, but this symbolises that the computer [Deep Blue] isn't just a calculating machine anymore, as Paul says to 'PC' that the code didn't tell it when to hesitate. This is an AI milestone, this technology definitely marking the 21st century." [5]

Broadcast

The series first aired on RTS 1 channel in Switzerland then aired on French-German Arte channel and is now available on Disney+ and HBO Europe. [6]

Reception

Charles Martin in Première praised Cooke's performance as Kasparov. [7]

The series won the "Grand Prix de la compétition internationale" prize at Series Mania at Lille in France in March 2024. [8] [9]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Garry Kasparov</span> Russian chess grandmaster

Garry Kimovich Kasparov is a Russian chess grandmaster, former World Chess Champion (1985–2000), political activist and writer. His peak FIDE chess rating of 2851, achieved in 1999, was the highest recorded until being surpassed by Magnus Carlsen in 2013. From 1984 until his retirement from regular competitive chess in 2005, Kasparov was ranked world no. 1 for a record 255 months overall. Kasparov also holds records for the most consecutive professional tournament victories (15) and Chess Oscars (11).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deep Blue (chess computer)</span> Chess-playing computer made by IBM

Deep Blue was a chess-playing expert system run on a unique purpose-built IBM supercomputer. It was the first computer to win a game, and the first to win a match, against a reigning world champion under regular time controls. Development began in 1985 at Carnegie Mellon University under the name ChipTest. It then moved to IBM, where it was first renamed Deep Thought, then again in 1989 to Deep Blue. It first played world champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match in 1996, where it lost four games to two. It was upgraded in 1997 and in a six-game re-match, it defeated Kasparov by winning two games and drawing three. Deep Blue's victory is considered a milestone in the history of artificial intelligence and has been the subject of several books and films.

Feng-hsiung Hsu is a Taiwanese-American computer scientist and the author of the book Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer that Defeated the World Chess Champion. His work led to the creation of the Deep Thought chess computer, which led to the first chess playing computer to defeat grandmasters in tournament play and the first to achieve a certified grandmaster-level rating.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deep Blue versus Kasparov, 1996, Game 1</span> Computer vs. human chess match

Deep Blue–Kasparov, 1996, Game 1 is a famous chess game in which a computer played against a human being. It was the first game played in the 1996 Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov match, and the first time that a chess-playing computer defeated a reigning world champion under normal chess tournament conditions.

This is a timeline of chess.

Deep Thought was a computer designed to play chess. Deep Thought was initially developed at Carnegie Mellon University and later at IBM. It was second in the line of chess computers developed by Feng-hsiung Hsu, starting with ChipTest and culminating in Deep Blue. In addition to Hsu, the Deep Thought team included Thomas Anantharaman, Mike Browne, Murray Campbell and Andreas Nowatzyk. Deep Thought became the first computer to beat a grandmaster in a regular tournament game when it beat Bent Larsen in 1988, but was easily defeated in both games of a two-game match with Garry Kasparov in 1989 as well as in a correspondence match with Michael Valvo.

<i>Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine</i> 2003 Canadian film

Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine is a 2003 documentary film by Vikram Jayanti about the match between Garry Kasparov, the highest-rated chess player in history, the World Champion for 15 years (1985–2000) and an anti-communist politician, and Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer created by IBM. It was coproduced by Alliance Atlantis and the National Film Board of Canada.

Advanced chess is a form of chess in which each human player uses a computer chess program to explore the possible results of candidate moves. Despite this computer assistance, it is the human player who controls and decides the game.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deep Blue versus Kasparov, 1997, Game 6</span> Chess game between human and computer

Game 6 of the Deep Blue–Kasparov rematch, played in New York City on May 11, 1997 and starting at 3:00 p.m. EDT, was the last chess game in the 1997 rematch of Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov.

Carol H. Jarecki was an American chess organizer, an International Arbiter, and a chess writer. She served as director or deputy director of many national and international tournaments, including the women’s division of the 40th Chess Olympiad in 2012; the Women’s World Chess Championship 2013; and the U.S. Chess Championship in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2016 and 2017. She was the arbiter and referee for the 1997 match between Garry Kasparov and the IBM supercomputer program Deep Blue.

Thomas S. Anantharaman is a computer statistician specializing in Bayesian inference approaches for NP-complete problems. He is best known for his work with Feng-hsiung Hsu from 1985 to 1990 on the Chess playing computers ChipTest and Deep Thought at Carnegie Mellon University which led to his 1990 PhD Dissertation: "A Statistical Study of Selective Min-Max Search in Computer Chess". This work was the foundation for the IBM chess-playing computer Deep Blue which beat world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.

Murray Campbell is a Canadian computer scientist known for being part of the team that created Deep Blue; the first computer to defeat a world chess champion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov</span> 1996 and 1997 chess matches

Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov was a pair of six-game chess matches between then-world chess champion Garry Kasparov and an IBM supercomputer called Deep Blue. Kasparov won the first match, held in Philadelphia in 1996, by 4–2. Deep Blue won a 1997 rematch held in New York City by 3½–2½. The second match was the first defeat of a reigning world chess champion by a computer under tournament conditions, and was the subject of a documentary film, Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine.

<i>Power Chess</i> 1996 video game

Power Chess is a chess-playing video game originally released in September 1996 by Sierra On-Line for the Microsoft Windows 95 operating system. Later revisions of the software were released as Power Chess 98 (1997) and Power Chess 2.0 (1998). Power Chess was also the "intermediate" game included in Sierra's Complete Chess (1998) along with Maurice Ashley Teaches Chess (1995) and Extreme Chess (1996).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anti-computer tactics</span> Human methods against game-playing computers

Anti-computer tactics are methods used by humans to try to beat computer opponents at various games, most typically board games such as chess and Arimaa. They are most associated with competitions against computer AIs that are playing to their utmost to win, rather than AIs merely programmed to be an interesting challenge that can be given intentional weaknesses and quirks by the programmer. Such tactics are most associated with the era when AIs searched a game tree with an evaluation function looking for promising moves, often with Alpha–beta pruning or other minimax algorithms used to narrow the search. Against such algorithms, a common tactic is to play conservatively aiming for a long-term advantage. The theory is that this advantage will manifest slowly enough that the computer is unable to notice in its search, and the computer won't play around the threat correctly. This may result in, for example, a subtle advantage that eventually turns into a winning chess endgame with a passed pawn.

My Great Predecessors is a series of chess books written by former World Champion Garry Kasparov et al. The five volumes in the My Great Predecessors series are about the players who preceded Kasparov in being official World Champions. The series of books continued with the Modern Chess volumes that covers developments in the 1970s and Kasparov's games with Anatoly Karpov. The series is being extended with three volumes of Garry Kasparov on Garry Kasparov, covering his other games. The books contain historical details, but for the most part the books are made up of annotated games.

Below is a list of events in chess in 1997, as well as the top ten FIDE rated chess players at the start of that year.

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<i>Kasparovs Gambit</i> 1993 video game

Kasparov's Gambit, or simply Gambit, is a chess playing computer program created by Heuristic Software and published by Electronic Arts in 1993 based on Socrates II, the only winner of the North American Computer Chess Championship running on a common microcomputer. It was designed for MS-DOS while Garry Kasparov reigned as world champion, whose involvement and support was its key allure. A Macintosh version was planned to be released in 1995.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yan England</span>

Yan England-Girard is a Canadian actor, television and radio presenter, screenwriter, film producer and director of short films. From the age of eight, he was known for his role of Einstein in the youth program Watatatow during 13 years.

References

  1. Leffler, Rebecca (7 February 2024). "Series Mania to open with Netflix's '3 Body Problem', unveils 2024 line-up". Screen Daily. Retrieved 19 March 2024.
  2. Layton, Mark (14 December 2022). "France's Arte makes its move for Garry Kasparov chess drama". tbivision. Retrieved 19 March 2024.
  3. Keslassy, Elsa (28 February 2024). "Chess Thriller 'Rematch,' Bought by HBO Europe and Disney+, Sets Milestone for French Banners Arte, Unité and Federation (EXCLUSIVE)". Variety. Retrieved 19 March 2024.
  4. Pien, Malcolm [@TelegraphChess] (29 February 2024). "I enjoyed working on this as chess consultant, filmed in Montreal and Budapest and Christian Cooke was fantastic as GK" (Tweet). Retrieved 19 March 2024 via Twitter.
  5. 1 2 3 Berny, Laura (22 March 2024). "Rematch: Dans une telle histoire, on doit forcément jouer un peu avec la réalité". Les Echos (in French).
  6. Whittock, Jesse (7 February 2024). "'Apples Never Fall', 'Hotel Cocaine' & 'So Long, Marianne' In Main Competition At Series Mania". Deadline Hollywood. Retrieved 19 March 2024.
  7. Martin, Charles (19 March 2024). "Garry Kasparov against Deep Blue, the Rematch is played at Séries Mania (review)". Première (in French). Retrieved 19 March 2024.
  8. Valière, Laurent (23 March 2024). "Rematch de Yan England : grand prix du Festival Séries Mania 2024". France Info (in French).
  9. Leffler, Rebecca (22 March 2024). "Chess thriller Rematch awarded grand prize at 2024 Series Mania". Screen Daily .