Play chess online vs the computer code#

Play chess online vs the computer code#

The earliest programs, gawkish code running on ungainly mainframes, were woodpushers, capable of playing chess technically but not well. My progression mirrors how we taught our computers to play chess.

Essences of gnarly, complex positions can, like painting, be distilled and altered and presented in pure form. Lengthy tactical combinations, complex and previously unseen, can, like music, unfold as if they were ordained. And one can appreciate beauty in a game of chess it is art. But even if I’ve never stretched a canvas, I can still appreciate Rothko and de Kooning - appreciate the beauty in the picture. I lacked skill, and, just as important, I lacked the obsession to internalize - to actualize - all those volumes of theory. My competitive career never amounted to much my fourth-grade Greenwood Elementary championship remains its only highlight. Today I enjoy chess on an aesthetic level. I would fall asleep reading the heavy reference book “Modern Chess Openings,” comforted and delighted by the fine- grained taxonomy and analysis of just the first few possible moves in a game, and the names they’d acquired - the Halloween Gambit, the Maróczy Bind, the Accelerated Dragon, the Hedgehog Defense. Experimentation was enough for me.Īs I grew older, I grew fascinated with chess theory and studied diagrams of the intricate machine picked apart by countless tinkerers over hundreds of years. I was, to use my favorite chess insult, a woodpusher, curious about how the pieces worked. More often, it sputtered out, and I lost. Occasionally, the reassembled machine ran smoothly, and I won. I took chess apart like a child disassembling a motor - curious and eager but mostly hapless and messy.

When I finally beat Grandpa Jack, around age nine, I remember running into the kitchen to tell Grandma Shirley, who hugged me and who was, to borrow her word, tickled.Īt first, I saw the game like a machine, not unlike the Mechanical Turk, that impressive 18th-century hoax of a chess-playing automaton, its parts moving and interacting according to complex yet intuitive principles. Therefore, every chess player in my family has a cherished memory of their first victory. And as a matter of strict principle, he never let kids win. Grandpa Jack was a strong player, the wielder of a conservative and positional style. I remember the clunk of the dense pieces on wood.Īs a child, I spent every summer on that farm, jumping on hay bales and swimming and playing game after game of chess in the late-afternoon light. I remember the sharp spikes on the rims of the queens’ crowns and the neat, crenelated battlements of the rooks. The other knights, I thought, had a look of terror in their eyes.

By the time I arrived, one of the knights had lost its head. The pieces, purchased by my grandparents on their honeymoon to Mexico in 1949, were slender, made of ebony and ivory. The felt had curled up at its corners after hosting decades of battle in a small farmhouse in eastern Iowa. It was a homemade Christmas gift from my mother’s siblings to their father, my grandfather Jack. It was an irregular and heavy slab of walnut, maybe 14 inches on a side, onto which green squares of felt had been carefully glued by hand. I still remember the first board on which I ever played chess.