I am not a chess player.
I know how to play, and I have played. But, I don’t know about any strategies for winning.
Truthfully, I’d rather have a good game of Yahtzee. Not as much thinking, more luck. I like my games to feel more like fun and less like chores.
Anyway, I am yammering about all of this because a Pentium computer beat the world chess champ, Garry Kasparov, on this date, August 31, 1994. Yes, a box of wire, conduits, and thingamabobs.
But truly? This was some feat.
For that computer to beat Kasparov, one of two things happened.
It had been programmed reasonably well, and that computer got lucky.
Or.
It had been programmed with every possible move, of every possible piece, in every possible sequence, from start to finish. Then it had to draw upon that data and construct a corresponding move every time. This kind of programming had to have taken years, decades even, by a team of intelligent people.
The numbers are astronomical. They are unfathomable to me. A lot of people have written explanations about how many possible moves there are in chess. They all seem slightly different and mind-boggling, but many reference the “Shannon Number.”
The Shannon number is named after the American mathematician Claude Shannon. Here is the definition — if you care to labor through this explanation — as given on Wikipedia:
“The Shannon Number is a conservative lower bound of the game-tree complexity of chess of 10 to the 120th power, based on an average of about 10 to the third power possibilities for a pair of moves consisting of a move for White followed by a move for Black, and a typical game lasting about 40 such pairs of moves.”
One website said, amazingly, there are even more possible variations of chess games than there are atoms in the observable universe.
Back to the computer. Its name was Deep Blue. It was a big dang deal at the time. The first time they played — a pair of six-game chess matches — Kasparov won by a score of 4–2.
Apparently, good old Deep Blue wanted a rematch. The computer came through victorious the second time around, scoring 3½–2½. This marked the first defeat of a reigning world chess champion by a computer.
So there it is.
And when you think about it, isn’t chess just like life?
Any of us can set up a chess board, putting all the pieces before us. All the lowly pawns, the brave knights, the reverent bishops. The all-powerful queens. And as those pieces stand there, staring at one another, as different as black and white, they are really the same. The each of them has no more power than their counterparts. And no less.
Yet there they stand, ready to go through yet another series of movies, trying to find ways to move safely around the board. But it can only take place with one simple move at a time. One simple decision. That’s all.
But in that one action is the possibility of many. There are more possibilities before us than there are atoms in the Universe. And so we go out today, on our way, in our lives. One move at a time.
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“The less I understood of this farrago, the less I was in a position to judge of its importance.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
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Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’
‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat.
‘I don’t much care where -‘ said Alice.
‘Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat.
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
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“Everyone has choices to make; no one has the right to take those choices away from us.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Ashes
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From the pawn to the queen. The choices are there.
