Jan

23

Checkmate.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

January 23, 2008 |

The death of Bobby Fischer put chess, briefly, back on the front page, at least in the United States. Fischer, the strange, eccentric genius who took on the Soviet chess juggernaut and won, then disappeared and descended into madness, appearing only occasionally to make outrageous and often anti-Semitic or anti-American remarks, is considered by many to be the greatest chess player of all time, a man with a brilliant mind for chess but, unfortunately crippled by insanity. Grandmaster Raymond Keene has appropriately called Fischer the “pride and sorrow of chess”. Chess itself, a game that’s been around since at least the 6th Century when a version of it was played in India, has been seen as a game of pure intellect. Even outside of chess one person who outwits or out-intellects another might say, “Checkmate!” For a long time the fact that no computer had beaten a chess grandmaster was held up as proof of human superiority to machines. No machine, so the argument went, could think, and thinking was a sign of real intelligence. Is chess really a game of pure intellect, though?

During the 1984 World Chess Championship, player Garry Kasparov took on then champion Anatoly Karpov. Karpov was known to be the stronger player and it was assumed Kasparov would lose, but, using a surprising strategy, Kasparov managed to push back hard enough that he and Karpov had seventeen successive draws. Knowing he couldn’t win, Kasparov forced the games to a draw again and again. Kasparov, twelve years younger, was pushing Karpov to exhaustion. After forty-eight games, Florencio Campomanes, then head of the World Chess Federation, ended the match and declared a new match a few months later.

What makes this particular event, as well as the life of Bobby Fischer, not to mention books like Fred Waitzkin’s Searching For Bobby Fischer (which was also made into a film) about his son who was a chess prodigy, and who would go on to win the U.S. Junior Chess championship in 1993 and 1994, is only partly the game of chess. It’s also the personalities involved. Maybe I’m wrong about this–after all, I know the rules of the game but I’m not good enough to consider myself a real chess player–but it seems that chess is as much about force of will, about two human beings being able to stare down and intimidate each other, as it is about the players’ powers of concentration. Chess has at least this much in common with poker, where the cards are only half the game, and where knowing your opponent can turn a certain loss into a win. When the computer Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997 it seemed to me more like a parlor trick than an actual accomplishment because we all already knew that a computer doesn’t get flustered, or exhausted; you can’t break a computer’s concentration. And let’s not ignore the fact that Kasparov wasn’t completely defeated by Deep Blue. In a six-game match, he’d won the first game and, after losing the second, managed a draw in the third, fourth, and fifth games. He was tired when he was finally beaten in the sixth game. As commentator Yasser Seirawan suggests, Kasparov made errors and missed moves he shouldn’t have. There is, admittedly, a little excitement in seeing a human go up against a computer in chess, but only because of the human element. How exciting would it be to watch two chess-playing computers go up against each other?


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1 Comment so far

  1. Media Districts Entertainment Blog » Checkmate. on January 23, 2008 12:49 am

    […] Just Write put an intriguing blog post on Checkmate.Here’s a quick excerpt […]

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