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Journalism of Courage
A warning runs through David Shenk8217;s slim history of chess. 8220;Think of a virus,8221; he writes, 8220;so advanced, it infects not the blood but the thoughts of its human host.8221; Those who have read Vladimir Nabokov8217;s fiction or followed the life of Bobby Fischer know how the chessboard can turn the obsessive genius8217;s brain on himself.
Chess players proceed upon anticipating countermoves and, driven exclusively to thinking their game, they begin to deploy the best of their intelligence into plotting against themselves, bringing on paranoia. But it is this very danger of the chessboard to link up with human thought that makes this social history of the game so compelling. As Shenk subtitles his book, 8220;Or how 32 carved pieces on a board illuminated our understanding of war, art, science, and the human brain8221;.
Interleaved with the evolution of the game are paces of the 8220;immortal game8221;, a casual match between two math professors in a London tavern in 1851. Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky could not have known as they practised for a major tournament that their game would be memorised centuries later8212;that it would inspire a film Blade Runner, a re-enactment every year with live players in an Italian town, and a postage stamp in Surinam. Shenk8217;s narrative is compelling enough but Anderssen8217;s swashbuckling gambits give the book pace, and as the pages turn, the chessboard becomes the dominant reality.
Shenk illuminates our current reality with matches between Garry Kasparov, chess8217;s greatest player, and IBM supercomputers see photograph. In 2003, he avenged a 1997 defeat by Deep Blue by drawing Deep Junior. Chess has been integral to the study of computers and artificial intelligence. In the manner in which he drew Deep Junior, Kasparov invited comments that computers were now beginning to pass the Turing test8212;named after the British pioneer who famously asked, 8220;Can computers think?8221; Chess, in our times, then is the way to understand cognition.
This is a dark book. A menace runs through it. The chessboard is a zone of self-knowledge and advancement that carries danger. Shenk only accentuates that by recounting the ways in which the greatest of chess players brought on schizophrenia. And all of it is guaranteed to send the reader to acquire a chessboard.
