The Speculist

Wired published an article Tuesday about Chess960. This game, also called Fischer Randomized Chess, is a variant of chess invented by the evil genius Bobby Fischer that randomizes the opening board.

According to Wikipedia, the pawns stay where they are, but the ranked pieces are randomized...within limits:

• The white king is placed somewhere between the two white rooks.

• The white bishops are placed on opposite-colored squares.

• The black pieces are placed equal-and-opposite to the white pieces.

Wikipedia also explains how to randomize the board with a regular 6-sided die. I would have thought you'd need an eight-side die. Randomizing in this way allows for 960 possible opening boards. It makes memorization of chess openings mostly ineffective. You have to be creative from the first move.

I find this interesting because Ray Kurzweil has been predicting for years that human interest in chess would wane when computers routinely beat our best chessmasters. Fischer introduced this variant in 1996, the very year that a machine, Deep Blue beat the reigning chess champion Kasparov.

Coincidence? I think not. The thought of being inferior to a machine must have really eaten at Fischer. So he came up with a game where "creativity" is mandatory. It’s the only kind of chess Fischer plays anymore. So, at least with Fischer, Kurzweil appears to have been right all along.

But I'm inspired to ask: "will humans be able to dominate machines with this new game?"

Last year, Armenian grandmaster Levon Aronian -- the 10th-rated chess player in the world -- drew the Baron [a Chess960 computer program] twice in a two-game Chess960 exhibition. Richard Pijl, the Netherlands-based coder who wrote the Baron, says neither game gave his program much trouble, and he thinks that Chess960 might turn out to be even better for computers than conventional chess. "I think it would be more of a problem for a human player than a computer, because the computer just calculates anyways," said Pijl. "But I'm not really certain that's true."

If Chess960 has given human players an edge at all, it's only a momentary reprieve while the computer programmers catch up. Kurzweil:

It is precisely in this area of applying pattern recognition to the crucial pruning decision that Deep Fritz has improved considerably over Deep Blue. Despite Deep Fritz having available only about 1.3% as much brute force computation, it plays chess at about the same level because of its superior pattern-recognition-based pruning algorithm.

Chess programs are not just memorizing opening books or using brute force computation. Instead, they are playing as creatively as our best chessmasters.

All this means little to recreational players like myself. Every computer I've played going all the way back to the old TI 99 4/A could beat me. The difference between me and all these machines (so far), is that I enjoy the game.