-
The attacking infantry advances steadily,
-
their elephants already having
broken the defensive line.
-
The king tries to retreat, but enemy
cavalry flanks him from the rear.
-
Escape is impossible.
-
But this isn’t a real war–
-
nor is it just a game.
-
Over the roughly one-and-a-half millennia
of its existence,
-
chess has been known as a tool
of military strategy,
-
a metaphor for human affairs,
and a benchmark of genius.
-
While our earliest records of chess
are in the 7th century,
-
legend tells that the game’s origins
lie a century earlier.
-
Supposedly, when the youngest prince
of the Gupta Empire was killed in battle,
-
his brother devised a way of representing
the scene to their grieving mother.
-
Set on the 8x8 ashtapada board used for
other popular pastimes,
-
a new game emerged with two key features:
-
different rules for moving
different types of pieces,
-
and a single king piece whose fate
determined the outcome.
-
The game was originally
known as chaturanga–
-
a Sanskrit word for ‘four divisions.’
-
But with its spread to Sassanid Persia,
-
it acquired its current name
and terminology–
-
“chess,” derived from ‘shah,' meaning
king, and “checkmate” from ‘shah mat,’
-
or “the king is helpless.”
-
After the 7th century Islamic conquest
of Persia,
-
chess was introduced to the Arab world.
-
Transcending its role as a
tactical simulation,
-
it eventually became a rich source
of poetic imagery.
-
Diplomats and courtiers used chess terms
to describe political power.
-
Ruling caliphs became avid
players themselves.
-
And historian al-Mas’udi considered the
game a testament to human free will
-
compared to games of chance.
-
Medieval trade along the Silk Road carried
the game to East and Southeast Asia,
-
where many local variants developed.
-
In China, chess pieces were placed at
intersections of board squares
-
rather than inside them, as in the native
strategy game Go.
-
The reign of Mongol leader Tamerlane saw
an 11x10 board
-
with safe squares called citadels.
-
And in Japanese shogi, captured pieces
could be used by the opposing player.
-
But it was in Europe that chess began to
take on its modern form.
-
By 1000 AD, the game had become part
of courtly education.
-
Chess was used as an allegory
-
for different social classes performing
their proper roles,
-
and the pieces were re-interpreted
in their new context.
-
At the same time, the Church remained
suspicious of games.
-
Moralists cautioned against devoting
too much time to them,
-
with chess even being briefly
banned in France.
-
Yet the game proliferated,
-
and the 15th century saw it cohering into
the form we know today.
-
The relatively weak piece of advisor was
recast as the more powerful queen–
-
perhaps inspired by the recent surge
of strong female leaders.
-
This change accelerated the game’s pace,
-
and as other rules were popularized,
-
treatises analyzing common openings
and endgames appeared.
-
Chess theory was born.
-
With the Enlightenment era, the game
moved from royal courts to coffeehouses.
-
Chess was now seen as an expression
of creativity,
-
encouraging bold moves and dramatic plays.
-
This ‘Romantic’ style reached its peak
in the Immortal Game of 1851,
-
where Adolf Anderssen managed a checkmate
-
after sacrificing his queen
and both rooks.
-
But the emergence of formal competitive
play in the late 19th century
-
meant that strategic calculation would
eventually trump dramatic flair.
-
And with the rise of international
competition,
-
chess took on a new
geopolitical importance.
-
During the Cold War,
-
the Soviet Union devoted great resources
to cultivating chess talent,
-
dominating the championships for the rest
of the century.
-
But the player who would truly upset
Russian dominance
-
was not a citizen of another country
-
but an IBM computer called Deep Blue.
-
Chess-playing computers had been
developed for decades,
-
but Deep Blue’s triumph
over Garry Kasparov in 1997
-
was the first time a machine
had defeated a sitting champion.
-
Today, chess software is capable of
consistently defeating
-
the best human players.
-
But just like the game they’ve mastered,
-
these machines are products
of human ingenuity.
-
And perhaps that same ingenuity will guide
us out of this apparent checkmate.