Nondescript. Or immortal? Applied to a game, a mere game, which of these two would rivet your gaze? And why ask such a strange question anyway? David Shenk?s The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, Or, How 32 Carved Pieces on a Board Illuminated Our Understanding of War, Science and the Human Brain, is a masterpiece. A grandmasterpiece, rather, utterly provocative in its stimulation right from the very cover. And intensely engaging, too. And this is so even if an Introduction with ?large rocks, severed heads and flaming pots of oil? is too lurid an opening to explain the crazy obsession that chess can be and often is: ?The board may have only 32 pieces and 64 squares, but within that confined space, the game has near infinite depth and possibility,? writes Shenk, ?Quite often, in the middle of an interesting game, it?s almost as if reality has been flipped inside out: the chess game in motion seems to be the only matter of substance, while any hint of the outside world feels like an annoying irrelevance.?
Shenk makes his own opening gambit a couple of page flips later, carving out the so-called ?enemies? of chess over the past millennium-and-a-half.
Thus does he give away his strategic intent: to provoke thought.
Shatranj, as it?s known around here, is a game of Indian origin that made its way West via seventh century Persia, a game that has enlivened the human appreciation of ?free will? all through its chequered history. There?s no question of chance playing a role, nor can you shirk responsibility for your fate by trying to impose such a role upon any agency other than that of your own mind, let alone a force beyond all human ken.
This, suggests Shenk, is just one reason that this ?organized thought paradigm?, like natural selection, has endured just about everything, reaching ever higher levels of sophistication.
Grandmasters, as the cognitive psychologist Alfred Binet observed, have chess memories composed not of board configurations, but an abstract sense of board command scenarios within a meaningful context. This brings up the man-versus-machine question and the hypothesis that a chess winning strategy is essentially an idea, or perhaps some other abstraction, not something that an algorithm can produce. Yet, today?s computers do pass the ?Turing test? (passing off as human), and IBM?s Deep Blue did indeed beat Gary Kasparov of Russia in 1997, giving mankind its first set of intellectual redundancy jitters. Might Bobby Fischer of the US have done any better?
Fischer was certainly far more eccentric, as evident in Shenk?s account of his fierce individualism, first as a solo grandmaster against a Soviet collective of chessplayers, and later as a sort of solo citizen against any grand US representation. Among the book?s many interesting sidelights, Shenk cites Freud?s prot?g? Ernest Jones? description of chess as an ?outlet for Oedipal neurotics?. Comic relief? Tribute to Bob Dylan?s Thin Man? Whatever. Chess is an evocative game.
The Immortal Game of the title, however, refers to a hypnotic game played casually on June 21, 1851 between A Anderssen and L Kieseritzky published for posterity in La Regence, a chess journal that took its name from a Paris caf? frequented by chess players Voltaire and Napoleon. Shenk offers a move-by-move account, a thriller narrative of sorts, of this fascinating 23-move game. It starts as any other would, with attempts to wrest control of the centreboard, but escalates midgame into an adrenalin gush of threats, counterthreats, lures and stunners. With a sequence of moves that could easily be ?mistaken for that of a bumbler?, in Shenk?s words, and an ?immortal flourish? before the surprise knight sounds the opponent?s checkmate, Anderssen scored a victory that still has jaws agape in awe. Rarely has an endgame appeared so suddenly out of nowhere. Rarely has there been so large a gap between the audience?s view and what?s actually happening out there inside the players? heads. That?s the other big reason that chess is such an obsession.
Could Albert Einstein, as Shenk recounts with regret, really have turned his nose up at such a game? The very person, that is, who complained about concepts of man?s own device assuming an authority of supernatural proportion over us? Would a myth mauler of such intellectual clarity really hold chess in low esteem? And, of all questions, why ask such a strange one anyway?
In the words of another Alburt (Lev, page 171), the game of chess is a sort of ?dialectical struggle? in the quest of victory. Each strategic move is really a negation of what is manifestly the conception of the fellow sitting right across, no matter how potent, intelligent and inescapable its hold may seem.