The Immortal Game (36 page)

Not surprisingly, in its early years, Nimzowitsch’s Hypermodern approach was considered so strange that it drew little response but deep skepticism. Only after he and others had proven its utility over and over again in tournaments were these ideas slowly welcomed into the canon of chess. In 1929 Nimzowitsch solidified his legacy with the book
My System
, which would garner a long-lasting reputation as eminently accessible and unusually full of energy.

“fear to struggle”:
Alexander Alekhine, “Aryan Chess and Jewish Chess,” online at
www.hagshama.org.il/en/resources/view.asp?id=120
.

Records still exist of an Alekhine–Duchamp game:
Alekhine played White: 1. e4 c5 2. d4 cxd4 3. Nf 3 Nc6 4. Nxd4 Nf6 5. Nc3 d6 6. Bg5 Qb6
7. Bxf6 gxf6 8. Nb3 e6 9. Qf3 Be7 10. O-O-O a6 11. Qg3 Bd7 12. Qg7 O-O-O 13. Qxf7 Qxf2 14. Qh5 Rdg8 15. h4 Ne5 16. Kb1 Be8 17. Qh6 Rg6 18. Qc1 Rhg8 19. Nd4 Bf8 20. b3 Rg3 21. Nce2 Re3 22. g3 Bh5 23. Rh2 Qxh2 24. Qxe3 Bg4 25. Rd2 Qh1 26. Qf 2 Nf3 27. Nxf3 Qxf 3 28. Qg1 Qxe4 29. Qa7 Bxe2 30. Bxe2 Bh6 31. Rd4 Qh1+ 32. Rd1 Qe4 33. Qa8+ Kc7 34. Qxg8 Qxe2 35. Qxh7+ Kc6 36. Qd3 Qe5 37. g4 Bg7 38. Qd4 f 539. Qxe5 dxe5 40. g5 e4 41. h5 e3 42. h6 Bf8 43. Rh1 f4 44. Kc1 f3 45. Kd1 Bb4 46. c3 Bxc3 47. Kc2 e2 48. Kxc3 White resigns.

“[It] would interest no chess player”:
Andrew Hugill, “Beckett, Duchamp and Chess in the 1930s,” originally published online in 2000 at
Samuel-Beckett.net/hugill.htm
.

Beckett published his second play:
Deirdre Bair,
Samuel Beckett: A Biography
(Simon & Schuster, 1990), pp. 465–67.

“a King in a chess-game lost from the start”:
Beckett in a 1967 interview; see Paul Davies, “Endgame,”
The Literary Encyclopedia
(2001), online at
http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=5366
.

other gloomy Beckett works:
Wallace Fowlie noted Beckett’s penchant for writing about the “impotence of man.” Fowlie,
Dionysus in Paris
(Meridian Books, 1960), pp. 214–16.

“yes and chess”:
Timothy Cahill, “Deconstructing Duchamp: The Tang shows why the French innovator deserves his place at the pinnacle of 20th-century art,”
Albany Times Union
, July 6, 2003.

C
HAPTER 11

199
2001: A Space Odyssey
:
Chess experts will notice a very subtle—purposeful?—point in this scene. Hal doesn’t tell the truth about the forced mate. The computer essentially intimidates the player into resigning.

supercomputer known as Deep Blue:
All Kasparov–Deep Blue games online at
research.ibm.com/deepblue/watch/html/c.htm
.

later charged that the rules:
“Kasparov on Computer Chess History,” lecture on April 20, 1999, at Annual Conference on High Speed Computing in Oregon.

the first “purely scientific match”:
CNN, online at
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/fun.games/02/08/cnna.kasparov
.

Kasparov and his seconds possessed a copy:
This according to personal correspondence with Owen Williams, press assistant to Kasparov. Williams clarifies: “Garry received a prototype or generic version of Junior in the sum
mer of 2002 (July). The match was Jan/Feb of 2003. The Junior Team was able to change the program right up to the start of the match and even between matches.”

after the Persian term
shah-mat
:
Murray,
History of Chess
, p. 159.

The eleventh-century Azerbaijani poet Khagani:
Khagani Shirvani, “The Ruins of Madain,” translated by Tom Botting, online at
literature.aznet.org/literature/xshirvani/w2_xshirvani_en.htm
.

“Since Garry knows how the game ends”:
Anne Kressler, “Kasparov: The World’s Chess Champion,”
Azerbaijan International
3, no. 3 (autumn 1995).

Kasparov held the world championship from 1985 to 2000:
The world championship has been embroiled in controversy since the mid-1980s. The story is explained in About.com’s “Reunification of the World Chess Title” (September 2002), online at
chess.about.com/library/weekly/aa091402a.htm
.

“Its play has been almost completely indistinguishable from that of a human master…”:
Mig Greengard, “Mig on Chess #185: Real Chess against a Virtual Opponent,” online at
chessbase.com/columns/column.asp?pid=160
. I have rearranged the order of these two quoted sentences without altering the meaning in any way, in order to make a smoother transition to the next part of the chapter.

popular American chess columnist Mig Greengard:
“Mig on Chess #184: Junior in Deep Against Kasparov,” online at
chessbase.com/columns/column.asp?pid=159
.

Future British champion Harry Golombek:
Andrew Hodges,
Alan Turing: The Enigma
(Walker & Company, 1983), p. 265.

games of perfect information:
Paraphrase from Hodges,
Alan Turing
, p.213.

Turing became perhaps the first person:
Hodges,
Alan Turing
, p. 331.

“It could fairly easily be made”:
Hodges,
Alan Turing
, pp. 332–33.

“What we want is a machine”:
Jack Copeland, “What Is Artificial Intelligence?” May 2000, online at
alanturing.net/turing archive/pages/Reference %20Articles/what is AI/What%20is%20AI03.htm
.

Turing is today revered for his vision:
“At the time,” write Stefano Franchi and Güven Güzeldere, “most specialists in the field tended to consider [computers] just number-crunchers perennially devoted to solving differential equations.” “Machinations of the Mind: Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence from Automata to Cyborgs,” in Stefano Franchi and Güven Güzeldere, eds.,
Mechanical Bodies, Computational Minds: AI from Automata to Cyborgs
(MIT Press, 2005), pp. 15–149.

it managed to beat Champernowne’s wife:
Hodges,
Alan Turing
, p. 388.

Chess computing—and artificial intelligence (AI) itself:
All of computer science would be built on binary thinking. Chess, that complex and resonant game of perfect information, would help them construct the building blocks. “While the Turing Test has served as the center of gravity in the last 50 years of research on language in AI,” write Franchi and Güzeldere, “chess emerged and remained as another similarly important center of gravity in AI research on thought, or thinking. Chess and the Turing Test can be regarded as the central research paradigms of early AI research, being concerned with the two pillars of AI: thought and language.” From “Machinations of the Mind.”

Turing’s counterparts across the Atlantic:
Peter Frey,
Chess Skill in Man and Machine
(Springer-Verlag, 1983).

With Bishops, it would have needed three hours:
Frederic Friedel, telephone interview.

a future computer examining moves:
Ronald Rensink, “Computer Science Lecture 3: Computer Reasoning,” Lecture outline for Cognitive Systems 200, University of British Columbia, online at
www.cogsys.ubc.ca/pdf.

it would henceforth no longer be possible:
Bart Selman, “Intelligent Machines: From Turing to Deep Blue and Beyond,” Lecture outline for CIS300, Cornell University, 2005, online at
http://www.cis.cornell.edu/courses/cis300/2005sp/Lectures/12%20-%20Artificial%20Intelligence.pdf.

David Levy into a draw:
“Man vs. Machine: History of the Battle,” online at
http://web.archive.org/web/20040613231751/http://www.x3dworld.com/x3dEvents/Archives/chessMVM/MvMHistory.htm
.

MIT linguist Noam Chomsky scoffed:
Scott Sanner et al., “Achieving Efficient and Cognitively Plausible Learning in Backgammon,”
Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Machine Learning
(July 2000), pp. 823–30, online at
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~ssanner/Papers/ICML2000.pdf
.

“In fact, little or nothing about human thought”:
Philosophy scholars Stefano Franchi and Güven Güzeldere take this point one step further, arguing that chess computing and related pursuits have proven to be an enormous distraction from what should have been a more humanistic approach to artificial intelligence. “Early AI’s focus on logical-analytical problem-solving skills…tended to eliminate these other components as peripheral to a proper understanding of intelligent human behavior,” they write. “It is this radical stance taken by early AI that generated an almost total disinterest in any analysis of the material conditioning of the thought processes, starting from the material embodiment of the mind. At a time in the development of Western philosophy when many authors focused their attention on the peculiar relationships that obtain, below the level of consciousness, between bodily actions and the sur
rounding environment, AI research moved exactly in the opposite direction.” “Machinations of the Mind.”

218–19 “There are today hundreds of examples”:
Ray Kurzweil, “A myopic perspective on AI,” published on KurzweilAI.net, September 2, 2002, online at
http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.htm?main=memelist.htm?m=3% 23532
.

Then came Game 6:
“Kasparov & Deep Junior Fight to 3–3 Draw!” online at
http://www.thechessdrum.net/tournaments/Kasparov-DeepJr.

T
HE
I
MMORTAL
G
AME
: M
OVES 22 AND 23
(C
HECKMATE
)

As with many top-level chess games, the end of the Immortal Game was likely not played out on the board. It was reported in the journal
Baltische Schachblätter
in 1893, that after Kieseritzky played move 20…. Na6, Anderssen announced the final inevitable moves to checkmate, and Kieseritzky yielded.

“In this game”:
The entire quote from Steinitz is interesting: “In this game, there occurs almost a continuity of brilliancies, every one of which bears the stamp of intuitive genius, that could have been little assisted by calculations, as the combination-point arises only at the very end of the game.” Larry Parr, “The Kings of Chess: A 21-Player Salute: Karl Ernst Adolf Anderssen,” online at
worldchessnetwork.com/English/chessHistory/salute/kings/anderssen.php
.

the onlookers naturally expected landmark-quality play:
Soltis,
The Great Chess Tournaments and Their Stories
(Chilton Book Co., 1975), p. 3.

Most of the eighty-five tournament games:
Soltis,
Great Chess Tournaments
, p. 14. All final match scores of the 1851 tournament are available online at
mark-weeks.com/chess/v1lon-ix.htm
.

He died in a Paris mental hospital:
Bill Wall, “The Immortal Game,” online at
geocities.com/siliconvalley/lab/7378/immortal.htm
.

C
HAPTER 12

Membership in the United States Chess Federation:
Paul Hoffman, “Chess Queen: At 22, Jennifer Shahade is the strongest American-born woman chess player ever,”
Smithsonian Magazine
, August 2003.

Sales of chess sets in Britain were booming:
In Britain, one chess set manufacturer reported that recent sales were twice what had been forecast. Stephen Moss, “Chess: the new rook’n’roll? Madonna’s influence has helped
the game become cool,”
Guardian
, November 20, 2004, online at
guardian.co.uk/uknews/story/0,3604,1355581,00.htm
.

upwards of 100 million games played online annually:
Frederic Friedel reports 49 million games per year on playchess.com. Personal correspondence.

Arnold Schwarzenegger:
“Judgment day for chess players,” chessbase.com, May 8, 2003, online at
chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=1100
.

The improvisational rock band Phish:
“What does chess have to do with Phish?” online at
phish.net/faq/chess.htm
.

the game was becoming an integral part of school life:
Cindy Kranz, “Chess offers children a challenge, a chance,”
Cincinnati Enquirer
, April 2, 2003.

In the mid-1970s, studies in Belgium and Zaire:
Johan Christiaen, “Chess and Cognitive Development,” doctoral dissertation, Belgium, 1976, English language edition prepared for the Massachusetts Chess Association and American Chess Foundation by H. Lyman, 1981; Albert Frank and W. D’Hondt, “Aptitudes and Learning Chess in Zaire,”
Psychopathologie Africaine
15, no. 1, pp. 81–98; Robert Ferguson, Jr., “Chess in Education Research Summary,” paper presented at the Chess in Education: A Wise Move conference, Borough of Manhattan Community College, New York, January 1995, online at
http://www.gardinerchess.com/publicationsbenefits/ciers.pdf
.

Maria Manuri:
Phone interview.

Peter Dauvergne:
Peter Dauvergne, “The Case for Chess as a Tool to Develop Our Children’s Minds,” in “The Benefits of Chess in Education: A Collection of Studies and Papers on Chess and Education,” compiled by Patrick S. McDonald, Youth Coordinator for the Chess Federation of Canada, online at
http://www.psmcd.net/otherfiles/BenefitsOfChessInEdScreen2.pdf
.

Dianne Horgan:
Dianne D. Horgan, “Chess as a Way to Teach Thinking,”
Teaching Thinking and Problem Solving,
vol. 9 (1987).

Over the previous half century:
Saidy,
The March of Chess Ideas
(McKay Chess Library, 1994).

Frankenstein-Dracula Variation:
Tim Harding, “Frankenstein and Dracula at the Chessboard,” online at
http://www.chesscafe.com/text/kibitz01.txt.
The Frankenstein-Dracula Variation is 1. e4 e5 2. Nc3 Nf6 3. Bc4 Nxe4!?; as cited by Eric Schiller in his book
The Frankenstein-Dracula Variation in the Vienna Game
.

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

an episode of the television show
West Wing
:
Episode 58, “Hartsfield’s Landing,” originally broadcast February 27, 2002.