Dec. 9: Chess

It seems like the game of chess should prove the existence of God.

Chess is a perfect game; it's a triumph of design, strategy, and creativity. History has forgotten who invented the game, though it probably originated in India. Its unknown author probably grabbed the game from the ethos, not so much inventing it as he (or she) channeled it. There will never be a strategic game better than chess.

Now I am a terrible chess player. My rating is probably around 1000. Magnus Carlsen, the Norwegian chess master who once checkmated Bill Gates in about 10 seconds, has the highest rating in recorded history, which is 2882.   

I was a member of the St. Stephen's Chess Club when I was in Grade 7 and part of Grade 8. I stopped playing chess when our coach, Mr. Campbell, said that if we wanted to improve our game, we had to study the game, do chess puzzles and exercises, and much much more than simply playing. I didn't like this, so I quit. I was an idiot.

Fast forward 20 years and I am interviewing a local man who is almost a chess grandmaster, but not quite. He challenges me to a game. Four moves in, he tells me that he is going to checkmate me in three moves. "You have made a terrible mistake," he says. Sure enough, three moves later he checkmates me.

I tell him what Mr. Campbell told me way back in Grade 8 and he tells me that Mr. Campbell was a wise man. "So much of my day consists of doing chess puzzles," he says. He gestures to a shelf behind him, which is filled with books about chess. He tells me that he runs chess clubs in local schools and that so much of his waking life is filled with thinking about chess. I ask him why he isn't a grandmaster and he tells me he would have to study much more.

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My dad taught me to play chess. His set was a cheap one, black and white plastic pieces with green felt taped to the bottoms. I liked the smell of that felt. For Christmas one year, dad bought me a marble chess set, which was a mainstay in my bedroom for a while. The set largely went ignored since none of my friends enjoyed chess. Once the black king fell on the floor and shattered. I repaired it with crazy glue but it wasn't the same.

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For some reason, my Facebook algorithm thinks I'm fascinated with chess (it also thinks I'm fascinated with southern cooking, the body counts of various nubile women in California, and the birthdays of movie stars.) Because of this, I am routinely flooded with chess puzzles. WHITE TO MOVE, MATE IN TWO. I can rarely solve these problems, but that is because I have a chess rating of 1100. Magnus Carlsen could likely solve them in a second.

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From a chess website: In chess, a player rated 1500 is generally considered to be an intermediate player, while a 2500-rated player is classified as a grandmaster or an elite player. While it is highly unlikely for a 1500-rated player to consistently defeat a 2500-rated player, it is not impossible for an upset to occur in a single game.

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There was a computer called Deep Blue which was designed by IBM to be the best chess computer in the world. Former champion Gary Kasparov played it in a six-game match, winning four times and losing twice. The computer was then upgraded and a rematch was planned. In it, Deep Blue won two games and drew three. It was a major coup for Artificial Intelligence and made pessimists like me think that computers will make people obsolete one day.

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