Playing Chess & Slaying Dragons
Playing Chess & Slaying Dragons
On unbeatable dads, chess clubs, folk-heroes, AI, and wooden boards
First thing’s first; I am not a good chess player. I’m passable in a social environment, which is the reason for my coming lament — that chess is becoming increasingly less social. But allow me to get there in time.
Chess has shown itself to have been stubbornly resilient to change over the ages, though it has picked up more than a few cultural nuances in its history (most notably the evolution of the queen piece, which has appropriated every role unto herself except for the knight… I’ll leave that with you). Even though its nearly as old as the hills, chess has had a bend-but-don’t-break policy which has led to our current global consensus on how the game should be played.
Enter the digital age. Most of us are old enough to remember that watershed moment in 1997, when the relationship between man and machine would be forever altered. Garry Kasparov (who was said, by the way, to be one of the greatest grandmasters of all time!) faced-off against IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue, an artificial intelligence built solely to defeat the champ.
The match carried all the ethical ambiguity of an international conflict settled by drone strike. Sadly, it resulted in a Kasparov loss. With a record of two losses to one, with three draws, Kasparov resigned after just 19 moves in the sixth and final game. The word is that Kasparov’s resignation was due to his suspicions of human interference, following an illogical move by the computer. Kasparov thought he understood his AI opponent, and this unmethodical move didn’t pass his smell test.
Later on, it was revealed what really happened with that fateful move: Deep Blue had calculated two equally advantageous options and defaulted to a random move. It was a glitch! But the damage was done. Today, full-powered chess bots are said to be unbeatable by human minds.
I think, or at least I fancy that one day, people will remember Kasparov as our generation’s John Henry — the legendary folk-hero who raced against the steam-powered machine of his day to prove man’s worth. But as Gordon Lightfoot once said, heroes often fail.
Despite my personal lamentations on the matter though, Pandora’s Box has been opened and AI seems to be here to stay. Still, I think its over-simplified to call chess a battle of wits, as its probably better described as a battle of pattern recognition. Hence why humans now fall to computers, and why I am still confident that a well-rounded human mind is of infinitely greater ability than the best computer programing. Real life is not a grid with finite patterns. As long as AI remains a tool for humans to use, rather than the other way around, I suppose I can stomach it. Ask me again in five years. But, when it comes to chess, its not so much the AI that bothers me but rather the digital platforms which it inhabits.
From its inception and all throughout its history, chess has been a social game. Even in international competitive play, you have always had to sit in front of another human being, close enough to see not just the white in his eyes, but the sweat on his brow. But where physical chess is social, online chess is not. And while I’m hopeful that most people would rather play a physical game, the online experience has been deemed close enough for many, meaning we seldom see physical chess boards in public anymore. The inhumanity of it all!
My unspoken hope is that, in the privacy of their own homes, dad’s are still owning their kids at the game, schooling them through an endless tide of bitter defeats. In my mind, chess is a rite of passage, and physical chess is where boys become men. When I was a kid, I considered my dad unbeatable. He had all these self-proclaimed legends about himself beating some mysterious Mexican grandmaster who reluctantly gifted him this hand carved set (which I still have, though I find some of the details of the “Carlos” story a bit foggy). Either way, the shroud of mystery was there, and the mythology acted like a psychological wall. I knew that beating my dad was a dragon worth slaying, but I just couldn’t manage it.
My routine losses to my father whet my appetite for more and more chess. Chess became a staple of my youth. Despite remaining a novice at the game (my younger brother Matlock, who was quite good, could beat me 3 out of 5 times), I founded a chess club at my high school where trash-talking chess became a cultural phenomenon. By our second year, our club was gifted an empty classroom, with tournament boards and clocks. There, we invented wild strategies like The Von Schlieffen Plan — one of many outlandish ideas that were less than optimal but tremendously satisfying to execute. And it was there, in a cloud of witnesses, that I watched my brother slay the local grandmaster (a hoity toity teacher at our school) in a hotly contested match. Tables may have been overturned that day. Good times. The stuff of legends, really.
But all the while I knew I had a dragon to slay at home.
I think it was some time in my college days when I had finally become sufficiently tired of loosing to my dad. One day, I made a very specific Google search, “How to Beat Your Dad in Chess” is what I typed. And to my great surprise, I found a book matching that exact title. I immediately ordered what would become the only self-help book I would ever purchase. I gobbled up the book’s contents and challenged my dad with a newfound confidence. The beating I unleashed that day was apocalyptic. I became a man that day.
But all good things come to an end, it seems. My dad lost his edge after that thorough beating. And as people who remember the joy’s of that trash-talking chess club have largely moved away, the evolution of online chess has understandably accelerated. But internet chess, even between friends, lacks the community which underpins the game’s enjoyment. A couple of us had tried to pull away from this digital gravity by having long-distance physical games. This is when each player has a physical board set up in your home or office and you call in your moves. Some of these games would last days. But alas, leaving a game in-progress takes up precious surface area and becomes all the more challenging in a bustling environment. We still get together for annual ice fishing trips, and we’re always sure to pack a board and a clock. But public chess happens much less commonly, and I think the pandemic put the nail in our local club’s coffin.
Today, I’m grateful that the good Lord has blessed me with children of my own. And like my father before me, I am convinced that I should show no mercy to their blossoming skillsets. Using AI as a tool, they’re enrolled in free online chess programs, where they can hone their skills between our physical games, which happen on our family board. Now, I am the chess-dragon I hope they will labour to slay. Perhaps one day, I will give that little how-to book to my kids. But not before I refresh my game.
If you’ve got fond chess memories of your own, please share in the comments. I’d love to hear from you. By the way, have you read Frog of Arcadia?
Haha! The Von Schlieffen Plan!