Loners Inc

Daniel Soar

Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer that Defeated the World Chess Champion by Feng-hsiung Hsu
Princeton, 300 pp, £19.95, November 2002, ISBN 0 691 09065 3

Two bishops side by side put pressure at long range on the pawns defending the castled Black king. My queen, ready to advance to the middle of the board, completes the threat. Black will have to weaken his defence by advancing a pawn. There are further forces I can bring into play. I find it slightly frustrating that my mechanical opponent either knows what I mean to do or has taken standard precautions: there’s a knight in the way, and I can’t get at it. My plan – single-minded, bloody-minded, suicidal – revolves around a single square, h7, and he has it covered. Evidently, an all-out attack in the middle game isn’t the answer: there will be refutations, counter-attacks, sacrifices and exchanges; the balance of power will change. A dramatic early mate following an unstoppable combination would be a good way to win a game of chess, but I’ve never won like this. In fact, I’ve rarely won. I know the moves (though I have to remind myself how the en passant rule works), I can follow the basic openings, and I know the principles of development – advance bishops and knights, line up the rooks. But I can’t seem to beat anyone other than myself. I’m not patient enough. I don’t play well enough.

You are not Logged In

If you have already registered login here
If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions

Vol. 25 No. 7 · 3 April 2003 » Daniel Soar » Loners Inc (print version)
Pages 28-29 | 3917 words

Letters

From Jeremy Bernstein

Reading the pieces by Daniel Soar and Ruth Franklin (LRB, 3 April) reminded me of the Sundays I spent in Boreham Wood in the spring of 1972 watching movies with Stanley Kubrick. Playboy had just commissioned me to cover the Fischer-Spassky match in Iceland. Kubrick had been a professional chess hustler and he and I studied with care the bizarre preliminaries that led up to the match. One Sunday we interrupted our film-viewing to watch a BBC documentary about Fischer called This Little Thing with Me and Spassky. In it Fischer described how his older sister taught him chess when he was six. Soon he was beating her handily, so when things got bad he would change ends and still beat her. Finally he began to play against himself. Then he said something so remarkable that Kubrick and I got hold of the transcript to see if we had misheard. With no trace of humour – never a Fischer strong suit – he said: 'Mostly I won.'

Jeremy Bernstein
New York

From Justin Horton

Daniel Soar (LRB, 3 April) has Boris Spassky retiring and Viktor Korchnoi then dominating Soviet chess until Anatoly Karpov's emergence and Korchnoi's subsequent defection. However, Spassky didn't retire until long after Korchnoi's defection, which took place in 1976 in Amsterdam. Indeed, he played Korchnoi in a match in Belgrade – a match Soar mentions elsewhere in his piece – in 1977, and was still competing in World Championship qualifiers as late as 1982. Korchnoi didn't dominate Soviet chess at any stage. Karpov's rise took place immediately after Fischer defeated Spassky, culminating in a 1974 match in which he beat Korchnoi to become Fischer's official challenger (and subsequently World Champion by default). Soar also claims that Tigran Petrosian defected. He did not, though Igor Ivanov and many others certainly did; nor did Spassky, whose move to France was sanctioned by the Soviet authorities. Finally, the story of Frank Marshall saving up his innovation in the Ruy Lopez opening for ten years in order to use it on Capablanca, though a good one, is now, I believe, generally agreed to be false.

Justin Horton
London SW2