The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, April 27, 2026

Notably: Creepy. Just: creepy. Or, as the Firstpost reporter elegantly put it, “quietly unsettling and undeniably fascinating.” The reporter was referring to last week’s half-marathon in Beijing. The humans were on one circuit. Robots were running parallel to them on a separate circuit, to avoid collisions and sudden trysts. A red robot won. Here’s how The Times’s Adeel Hassan described the weirdly headless horseman-like contraption Washington Irving would never have imagined: “It didn’t have to carbo-load, get a good night’s rest or lace up running shoes. Instead, the toughest challenge for the bright-red humanoid robot named Lightning was avoiding a collision with the more than 300 other robots running in a half-marathon race on Sunday in Beijing. While the approximately 5-foot-5 Lightning crashed into a barricade and fell during its final stretch, it was able to pick itself back up with help from humans, swing its short forearms to rebalance, and stride across the finish line in 50 minutes, 26 seconds, according to the state-run China Daily. Lightning’s time was faster than the human world-record holder, Jacob Kiplimo of Uganda, who finished a half-marathon in 57 minutes, 20 seconds last month in Lisbon. It was also faster than the 12,000 humans running the race in a separate, parallel lane. The men’s and women’s winners needed more than an hour to complete the outdoor course.” I remember in 1996 and 1997 when parts of the world were riveted on the match between Gary Kasparov and IBM’s Deep Blue, Kasparov winning the match in 1996 and Deep Blue winning it the next year. Modern chess engines have far surpassed Deep Blue of course, as now do running robots. Literally, metaphorically, frightfully and existentially, this new Galloping Hessian of the Hollow is a no-brainer.

In brisk and brutal fashion, the I.B.M. computer Deep Blue unseated humanity, at least temporarily, as the finest chess playing entity on the planet yesterday, when Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, resigned the sixth and final game of the match after just 19 moves, saying, ”I lost my fighting spirit.” The unexpectedly swift denouement to the bitterly fought contest came as a surprise, because until yesterday Mr. Kasparov had been able to summon the wherewithal to match Deep Blue gambit for gambit. The manner of the conclusion overshadowed the debate over the meaning of the computer’s success. Grandmasters and computer experts alike went from praising the match as a great experiment, invaluable to both science and chess (if a temporary blow to the collective ego of the human race) to smacking their foreheads in amazement at the champion’s abrupt crumpling. ”It had the impact of a Greek tragedy,” said Monty Newborn, chairman of the chess committee for the Association for Computing, which was responsible for officiating the match. […] Mr. Kasparov, 34, retains his title, which he has held since 1985, but the loss was nonetheless unprecedented in his career; he has never before lost a multigame match against an individual opponent. Afterward, he was both bitter at what he perceived to be unfair advantages enjoyed by the computer and, in his word, ashamed of his poor performance yesterday. ”I was not in the mood of playing at all,” he said, adding that after Game 5 on Saturday, he had become so dispirited that he felt the match was already over. Asked why, he said: ”I’m a human being. When I see something that is well beyond my understanding, I’m afraid.”

–From “Swift and Slashing, Computer Topples Kasparov,” by Bruce Weber, The New York Times, May 12, 1997.

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