To be blunt, I’m a novice in chess. Tactics puzzles and lots of play have enabled me to handily beat your average person, but online players regularly crush me. Indeed, it takes a lot of practice to become truly good at chess, and improvement comes slowly. Players need to analyze and memorize dozens to hundreds of opening lines, immerse themselves in middle game strategic theory and attain the ruthless endgame efficiency of a computer. Ten thousand hours at study couldn’t make you a master of chess. And yet, what’s the point?
Baldassare Castiglione admits that chess is “truely an honest kynde of enterteynmente and wittie,” but he correctly observes that the master of chess “in the ende in beestowing all that laboure, he knoweth no more but a game.” Chess is — like tetris, Dance Dance Revolution, tennis or tag — a game. Moreover, it’s a game dominated by computers. Early computers were competition for kids. They regularly played questionable moves. But with advances in hardware and coding, they started beating decent players, then experts, then masters, then grandmasters, until in 1989 IBM developed a computer, Deep Thought, that “might challenge a human world champion.” Now, since 1997’s Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov, computers have been consistently beating top players. So what’s the point of striving for mastery when the best players are bits of code you could run on your laptop?
The quaint Middle English dialect of Castiglione is hard to argue against. Why should these geniuses devote their lives to chess rather than to the sciences, or mathematics? Could we all be flying around in hovercraft if Bobby Fischer had just cracked down and hit the books? Yes, these people could have contributed something beyond chess, just like those who devote their lives to football or hockey. But the pursuit of perfection in a task is a noble goal regardless of its real-life applications, and the brief glimpses of perfection humans sometimes achieve in a game or sport are as beautiful as any David.
Human mastery demands an economy of thought and time. The human player needs to build his intuition — that factor that allows us to subconsciously evaluate and reject different courses of action. That’s what separates the human player from computers. A chess engine evaluates trees of moves as far out as possible and assigns them relative values using algorithms. Thus, a computer indiscriminately pours over millions of positions despite any line’s obvious unviability. Computers consider every move, no matter how stupid. Computers don’t locate weaknesses and seek to take advantage. A computer doesn’t intuitively understand that a bishop on an open diagonal is valuable, or that a knight in the center of the board is generally more powerful than one on the edge. Human players understand these concepts. They don’t consider obviously bad moves. They recognize weak points, stake out objectives and plan attacks.
The computational efficiency of human play is what makes it beautiful and interesting in the computer age. Chess represents what remains unattainable for computers: that intangible factor that guides the conscious, logical mind. Pursuit of chess mastery is the pursuit of what makes us human. It’s the mastery of the logical and intuitive parts of the brain. It’s the attempt to meet the edge of human ability and poke through.
So, if any person wanted to see the objectively best chess ever played, all they’d have to do is look up the recent Thoresen Chess Engines Competition superfinal between Stockfish and Komodo. The games are a testament to computers’ domination of chess. But glaringly absent in those games is the touch of human play. The play lacks the structure of human thought. There weren’t at any time two players sitting across from each other, sweating, thinking, slapping down pieces decisively. There wasn’t any emotion. Computers played these games via brute force calculation in a server room. Where was the brilliancy? Where was the triumph? Fortunately, those are still only for people.
Brennan Edel is an Opinion Columnist for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at b.edel@cavalierdaily.com.
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