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.”

Guantánamo for kids

Anna Perera’s book Guantánamo Boy is the fictional account of a teenager from the UK who is abducted from his relatives’ house in Karachi and sent to the detention camp.

It sounds unlikely but, according to Perera, it is well-established that juveniles have been held at Guantánamo, although the numbers are disputed. Reprieve, the charity for prisoners from death row to Guantánamo, has recorded that 22 under-16s have been held at the camp. The youngest juvenile still in custody is Mohammed el Gharani, who was 14 when picked up in a random raid on a mosque by Pakistani bounty-hunters and “sold” to the American authorities for $5,000.

It was stories like these that Guantánamo Boy is based on, although the book itself emerged out of just one line delivered by the human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith at a benefit event for Reprieve in 2006.

“At that gig Clive Stafford Smith simply said ‘children are also held in Guantánamo Bay’ and that one statement inspired this novel,” says Perera.

The book is available at Amazon UK.

The Book of Comparisons

The Diagram Group’s Book of Comparisons uses the size of familiar objects and experiences—a pencil, the capacity of a taxi, a walk around the block—to help us comprehend the size of less familiar objects and experiences—a giraffe, the capacity of a ship, a run around Manhattan. It’s an imperfect book but wonderfully illustrated and worth checking out.

What single book is the best introduction to your field (or specialization within your field) for laypeople?

So what if this has been bookmarked by 1,160 delicious-users and added as a favorite by 1,035 MeFites? It’s new to me.

My addition to this list would be Kenneth T. Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. It can get a little academic at times but I think it would satisfy a layperson interested in the history of the American urban form.

What would you add?

Camps: A Guide to 21st-Century Space, by Charlie Hailey

The Guantánamo Bay detention camp, Cindy Sheehan’s Camp Casey, the Seeds of Peace Camp, the Post-Katrina Superdome:

The ubiquity and diversity of camps calls for a guidebook. This is what Hailey offers, but it is no ordinary one. Not only does he establish a typology of camps, but he also embeds within his narrative a key to camp ideology. Thus we see how camp spaces are informed by politics and transform the ways we think about and make built environments.