The Chess Master and the Computer, a book review by Garry Kasparov
I recently got my first smartphone and I’ve so far used it for chess more than any other application. I’ll start a game while morning coffee is brewing, play it throughout the day whenever I have time, and finish just before bedtime. Though I’ve set the chess program at the lowest level (it only thinks for one second as opposed to one minute, or five) , I have never managed to be handed anything less than demoralizing defeat from my cell phone’s microprocessor. It doesn’t just hurt when I lose, it megahertz.
But I feel better today after reading Kasparov’s review of Chess Metaphors, by Diego Rasskin-Gutman. He puts my recent failure in perspective.
The number of legal chess positions is 1040, the number of different possible games, 10120. Authors have attempted various ways to convey this immensity, usually based on one of the few fields to regularly employ such exponents, astronomy. In his book Chess Metaphors, Diego Rasskin-Gutman points out that a player looking eight moves ahead is already presented with as many possible games as there are stars in the galaxy. Another staple, a variation of which is also used by Rasskin-Gutman, is to say there are more possible chess games than the number of atoms in the universe. All of these comparisons impress upon the casual observer why brute-force computer calculation can’t solve this ancient board game.
At the article’s conclusion, Kasparov offers some insightful comments regarding poker as the “game for our times.”
