00:01:10.833 --> 00:01:13.800
Modern chess began in the late
15th century.

00:01:14.500 --> 00:01:17.133
That statement, accepted by anyone

00:01:17.133 --> 00:01:20.200
who has examined chess history
to any significant extent,

00:01:20.700 --> 00:01:22.766
is itself a very revealing one.

00:01:23.233 --> 00:01:26.566
For what other popular activity
can be universally regarded

00:01:26.566 --> 00:01:29.900
as having entered the modern era
over 500 years ago?

00:01:31.533 --> 00:01:34.333
How precisely it happened
is typically murky,

00:01:34.700 --> 00:01:38.400
with some attributing the change
to the transformative cultural impact

00:01:38.400 --> 00:01:42.600
of celebrated historical figures
such as Queen Isabella of Spain

00:01:43.300 --> 00:01:46.933
and others, more matter of factly,
maintaining that the game simply needed

00:01:46.933 --> 00:01:50.333
to find a way of being played faster
to move with the times.

00:01:51.800 --> 00:01:55.466
Where the pivotal innovation occurred
is also a matter of debate

00:01:55.966 --> 00:01:59.000
with some arguing for Spain
and others for Italy.

00:01:59.366 --> 00:02:02.866
But what is incontestable
is that sometime in the late

00:02:02.866 --> 00:02:06.866
1400s, the rules of chess
fundamentally changed.

00:02:07.500 --> 00:02:12.300
With the bishop now allowed to travel
to any free square along an open diagonal

00:02:12.700 --> 00:02:16.933
while the queen was suddenly transformed
into by far the most powerful piece

00:02:16.933 --> 00:02:22.100
on the board with a movement that combined
both the rook and the new bishop.

00:02:23.700 --> 00:02:26.066
In a remarkably short period of time,

00:02:26.066 --> 00:02:29.700
the new chess,
sometimes referred to as “Queen's chess”

00:02:29.700 --> 00:02:33.366
or even “mad chess”, swept
through Europe,

00:02:33.366 --> 00:02:39.233
comprehensively replacing its 1000-year-old predecessor
in little more than a generation or two.

00:02:39.966 --> 00:02:43.800
Unlike previous variations
that resulted in minor deviations

00:02:43.800 --> 00:02:45.266
from place to place of the rules

00:02:45.266 --> 00:02:48.600
for the King's leap or
how to set up the pieces to begin play,

00:02:49.066 --> 00:02:51.500
this change completely
transformed the game

00:02:52.133 --> 00:02:56.300
with the threat of checkmate now
suddenly possible after only a few moves.

00:02:56.733 --> 00:03:00.533
Players now had to pay close attention
to what their opponents were doing

00:03:00.600 --> 00:03:05.333
right from the outset; the opening phase
of the game took on a life of its own

00:03:05.566 --> 00:03:08.800
and was quickly recognized
as a subject for methodical study,

00:03:09.600 --> 00:03:14.033
as was equally the end game.
With pawn promotion

00:03:14.033 --> 00:03:16.466
now giving players a crushing advantage,

00:03:16.766 --> 00:03:20.133
the emphasis abruptly shifted
to finding a way to do whatever

00:03:20.133 --> 00:03:24.633
might be required to queen a pawn,
even if it meant sacrificing a knight,

00:03:24.633 --> 00:03:28.800
a newly empowered bishop,
or even a once mighty rook,

00:03:29.200 --> 00:03:32.033
the game's
most powerful piece for a millennium.

00:03:33.066 --> 00:03:37.400
By the turn of the 16th century,
a stream of instructional books on the new

00:03:37.400 --> 00:03:41.700
chess were being produced strongly aided
by the new printing technology.

00:03:43.100 --> 00:03:45.300
The oldest surviving manuscript

00:03:45.300 --> 00:03:48.333
by Lucena appeared in 1497,

00:03:48.800 --> 00:03:52.366
containing a mixture of problems
for both the old and new chess.

00:03:53.100 --> 00:03:57.733
In 2006, the long lost manuscript
“On the Game of Chess”,

00:03:58.033 --> 00:04:02.466
informally known as “The Boredom Dodger”
by the Renaissance mathematician

00:04:02.566 --> 00:04:06.466
Luca Pacioli, was rediscovered
in an Italian library.

00:04:07.566 --> 00:04:10.566
It, too, contains problems
for both the old and new rules

00:04:11.033 --> 00:04:15.300
and was dedicated to Isabella D’Este,
one of the leading cultural figures

00:04:15.300 --> 00:04:18.400
of the Italian Renaissance,
and a known chess fan,

00:04:18.800 --> 00:04:21.433
among many other things.

00:04:21.700 --> 00:04:25.666
As the game's new principals
began to be rigorously studied in earnest,

00:04:26.100 --> 00:04:30.066
expert players correspondingly emerged
who had famously mastered them.

00:04:30.533 --> 00:04:33.933
Now legendary names such as Ruy Lopez,

00:04:33.933 --> 00:04:37.200
Paulo Boi, Giovanni Leonardo da Cutri,

00:04:37.566 --> 00:04:41.233
otherwise known as Il Puttino
and Gioachino Greco,

00:04:41.733 --> 00:04:46.400
internationally renowned chess masters
who wrote books, played blindfolded

00:04:46.800 --> 00:04:50.366
and thrilled princes and kings
throughout many European courts

00:04:50.366 --> 00:04:51.500
with their brilliant play.

00:04:52.700 --> 00:04:53.700
Much like the glory

00:04:53.700 --> 00:04:56.400
days of Shatranj
during the Abbasid Caliphate,

00:04:56.833 --> 00:05:01.100
the image of chess shifted steadily
back to a focus on the detailed tactics

00:05:01.100 --> 00:05:05.066
and strategy of the game itself
and the star players who developed them.

00:05:05.966 --> 00:05:09.133
And while chess was still often
associated with romance,

00:05:09.733 --> 00:05:11.166
the focus subtly shifted

00:05:11.166 --> 00:05:14.833
from its medieval
use as a proxy for a well-ordered society

00:05:15.266 --> 00:05:18.333
to glowing tributes
and descriptions of the game itself,

00:05:18.800 --> 00:05:21.266
starting with the late 15th century poem

00:05:21.600 --> 00:05:24.466
Scachs d’Amor - 64 stanzas

00:05:24.466 --> 00:05:28.533
describing the Courtship of Venus by Mars
through a chess game

00:05:28.766 --> 00:05:31.200
according to the new rules.

00:05:31.200 --> 00:05:35.700
This was shortly followed by Marco
Girolamo Vida's influential Latin poem

00:05:36.033 --> 00:05:40.533
Scacchia Ludus, where the new game
was provided with a classical origin

00:05:40.533 --> 00:05:44.100
myth befitting its station,
through the telling of a chess game

00:05:44.100 --> 00:05:46.866
between Apollo and Mercury
on Mount Olympus.

00:05:47.200 --> 00:05:48.900
In Virgilian hexameters.

00:05:50.266 --> 00:05:51.100
Scacchia Ludus was

00:05:51.100 --> 00:05:54.300
very well received
and inspired several imitators

00:05:54.300 --> 00:05:55.233
over the years,

00:05:55.233 --> 00:05:59.466
the most famous of which was William
Jones's English poem “The Game of Chess”

00:05:59.600 --> 00:06:02.900
over 200 years later; where Caissa,

00:06:02.900 --> 00:06:05.233
the goddess of chess, is introduced.

00:06:06.800 --> 00:06:08.300
Meanwhile,

00:06:08.800 --> 00:06:11.433
as genre paintings and portraits
became increasingly

00:06:11.433 --> 00:06:14.900
popular, chess
naturally began to appear there, too;

00:06:15.433 --> 00:06:18.033
representing friends, family,

00:06:18.466 --> 00:06:21.466
royal households, or even prisoners,

00:06:21.766 --> 00:06:25.000
immersed in a suitably dignified
and elevated pastime.

00:06:26.333 --> 00:06:29.966
Of course, the broader allegorical
use of chess hardly ended overnight.

00:06:30.633 --> 00:06:34.100
From Rabelais’ chess ballet
in the fifth book of Pantagruel,

00:06:34.700 --> 00:06:39.066
to Saint Teresa of Avila, detailing
how nuns could harness their humility

00:06:39.066 --> 00:06:42.466
to “checkmate the Divine King”
to Shakespeare's

00:06:42.466 --> 00:06:46.166
famous chess scene between Ferdinand
and Miranda in The Tempest,

00:06:46.833 --> 00:06:51.033
to Thomas Middleton's political satire
A Game At Chess,

00:06:51.033 --> 00:06:55.600
chess imagery continued to be used
to express a wide range of topics.

00:06:56.933 --> 00:07:00.700
But something was clearly different now.

00:07:00.700 --> 00:07:03.466
The more advanced
chess play came to be appreciated

00:07:03.466 --> 00:07:06.766
as something that could be acquired
through patient and deliberate study,

00:07:07.500 --> 00:07:10.466
the more it took on the air
of a specialized craft

00:07:10.866 --> 00:07:14.900
rather than a natural metaphor
to reflect broader societal concerns.

00:07:16.033 --> 00:07:20.500
So when the 1597 English edition
of Pedro Damianos famous instruction

00:07:20.500 --> 00:07:22.200
manual of the new chess

00:07:22.200 --> 00:07:25.633
fell back on the familiar
trope of equating chess knowledge

00:07:25.633 --> 00:07:26.700
with a heightened political

00:07:26.700 --> 00:07:30.300
understanding of how
to appropriately govern the citizenry,

00:07:30.300 --> 00:07:32.533
the young John Donne wouldn't
have any of it:

00:07:33.200 --> 00:07:36.533
ridiculing such moral allegorizing
seeing as woefully outdated

00:07:36.566 --> 00:07:40.466
in a letter to his friend
Henry Wotton. Meanwhile,

00:07:40.500 --> 00:07:44.566
the corresponding effort involved in
achieving genuine proficiency at new chess

00:07:44.566 --> 00:07:48.300
became steadily recognized
as something of a game changer in itself.

00:07:48.866 --> 00:07:51.533
In Part Two, we saw how Petrus Alphonsi’s

00:07:51.533 --> 00:07:55.066
12th century
book of fables, Disciplina Clericalis,

00:07:55.400 --> 00:07:59.100
listed chess as one of the seven skills
every knight should possess,

00:07:59.666 --> 00:08:04.800
eerily echoing Sassanian texts of noble,
well-roundedness six centuries earlier.

00:08:05.733 --> 00:08:07.966
But by the time of Baldassare Castiglione’s

00:08:07.966 --> 00:08:11.666
dialogue of the ideal courtier
in the early 16th century,

00:08:12.233 --> 00:08:15.866
things are quite different
with competency in the new chess

00:08:15.866 --> 00:08:20.133
now being explicitly acknowledged
to require a great deal of time

00:08:20.500 --> 00:08:26.233
and as much study as some noble science
or anything of importance; with the upshot

00:08:26.233 --> 00:08:31.466
that when it comes to chess, mediocrity
is more to be praised than excellence.

00:08:32.333 --> 00:08:35.833
A sentiment vitriolic echoed
some 50 years later

00:08:35.833 --> 00:08:39.733
by Michel de Montaigne,
whose bitter denunciations of the misspent

00:08:39.733 --> 00:08:43.500
time required to develop expertise
at such a “puerile game”

00:08:43.900 --> 00:08:47.733
seemed to be clearly tinged
with a sense of personal disappointment.

00:08:48.400 --> 00:08:49.833
Love it or loathe it,

00:08:49.833 --> 00:08:53.100
by the 17th century,
the new chess had become firmly

00:08:53.100 --> 00:08:57.266
established as a remarkably stimulating
game of intriguing complexity

00:08:57.966 --> 00:09:02.466
an ingenious world of its own,
filled with depth and sophistication.

00:09:03.433 --> 00:09:06.200
And while minor variations of how
the game was played

00:09:06.200 --> 00:09:09.966
existed as before,
with regional distinctions for stalemate,

00:09:10.233 --> 00:09:13.200
bare King, castling,
and so forth, continuing

00:09:13.200 --> 00:09:17.133
until the 19th century, matters
were steadily converging.

00:09:17.933 --> 00:09:22.433
Throughout its first millennium,
from Chaturanga to Chatrang

00:09:23.066 --> 00:09:27.000
to Shatranj to the medieval Christian world,

00:09:27.000 --> 00:09:29.933
the cultural impact of chess
had varied considerably,

00:09:30.266 --> 00:09:33.366
but the game itself
had essentially remained the same.

00:09:34.366 --> 00:09:36.466
But now the ground had shifted

00:09:36.466 --> 00:09:39.900
and chess was suddenly born anew: faster,

00:09:40.400 --> 00:09:45.100
vastly more complex, and requiring
intimate knowledge of the rapidly

00:09:45.100 --> 00:09:48.200
exploding analytical treatments
in order to master it.

00:09:49.533 --> 00:09:52.066
How would all that affect its broader

00:09:52.066 --> 00:09:53.433
cultural impact?

00:09:59.966 --> 00:10:01.966
By the turn of the 18th century,

00:10:01.966 --> 00:10:05.400
chess had become sufficiently well
established in the public consciousness

00:10:05.500 --> 00:10:08.700
to merit a scholarly investigation
into its origins.

00:10:09.266 --> 00:10:13.266
And the first person to do
so was the celebrated English orientalist

00:10:13.333 --> 00:10:16.633
Sir Thomas Hyde, who traced its origins
to India

00:10:17.000 --> 00:10:20.966
before charting its development through
Sasanian Persia and Islamic lands,

00:10:20.966 --> 00:10:24.033
in the story we've seen unfold in Part Two.

00:10:26.666 --> 00:10:28.700
But that was the old chess.

00:10:28.700 --> 00:10:32.633
The modern game, however, is typically
characterized quite differently

00:10:33.133 --> 00:10:38.300
as part art, part science and part sport,
a description

00:10:38.300 --> 00:10:41.966
that's been attributed to a number
of different great 20th century players,

00:10:42.266 --> 00:10:46.966
including Anatoly Karpov,
Mikhail Botvinnik and Bent Larsen.

00:10:48.000 --> 00:10:52.200
Well, to what extent chess itself
can be appropriately categorized

00:10:52.200 --> 00:10:55.800
as an art, science or sport has long
been a matter of debate.

00:10:56.466 --> 00:11:02.533
But what's unquestionably true is that
it's managed, in a way that no other game has,

00:11:02.533 --> 00:11:07.600
to exert considerable
cultural influence in all three areas.

00:11:08.533 --> 00:11:11.333
And to examine this trifold impression
in detail,

00:11:11.733 --> 00:11:14.633
the most obvious starting
point is the 18th century;

00:11:15.066 --> 00:11:18.866
because while chess has long featured
celebrated players

00:11:18.866 --> 00:11:22.033
who've contributed to our evolving notions
of sporting combat,

00:11:22.800 --> 00:11:26.766
and we've witnessed countless examples
of its profound artistic impact

00:11:26.766 --> 00:11:28.600
throughout the ages,

00:11:28.600 --> 00:11:31.066
from sculptures to literary allegories,

00:11:31.866 --> 00:11:36.666
it was only in the 18th century that chess’ future scientific influence began.

00:11:37.933 --> 00:11:38.766
This was,

00:11:38.766 --> 00:11:41.633
after all, the so-called Age of Enlightenment, when

00:11:42.600 --> 00:11:45.300
in the wake of Newton's
transformative insights,

00:11:46.000 --> 00:11:49.433
Many became convinced that
all of our problems could be similarly

00:11:49.433 --> 00:11:53.466
dealt with through a dispassionate
combination of reason and knowledge -

00:11:54.733 --> 00:11:58.400
a view vividly
incarnated in the great Encyclopedia project

00:11:58.400 --> 00:12:02.266
of Diderot and d’Alembert,
that strove to establish a baseline

00:12:02.266 --> 00:12:06.566
of all human knowledge
within one single work, so as to create

00:12:06.566 --> 00:12:11.066
the appropriate conditions for a rational
based scientific civilization

00:12:11.533 --> 00:12:15.133
that would duly lead us out
of the darkness of superstition and fear

00:12:15.666 --> 00:12:18.433
and into the light.

00:12:19.133 --> 00:12:21.666
Others, however, famously disagreed.

00:12:22.366 --> 00:12:26.100
For Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
the entire framework was backwards;

00:12:26.566 --> 00:12:30.166
by unthinkingly shackling ourselves
to the so-called institutions

00:12:30.166 --> 00:12:35.666
of civilization, we've actually become
unnatural, unhappy and wicked.

00:12:36.533 --> 00:12:39.333
And what is particularly
fascinating for our story

00:12:39.600 --> 00:12:42.666
is that somehow both of these views:

00:12:42.666 --> 00:12:46.600
one wholly aligned with the formal rigors
of science and technology,

00:12:47.166 --> 00:12:52.233
and the other a romantic assertion
of the creative powers of human emotion and desire

00:12:52.233 --> 00:12:57.266
v have so strongly overlapped
with chess right from the outset.

00:12:57.266 --> 00:13:01.466
Not only that they could even be traced
back to one particular place,

00:13:01.800 --> 00:13:05.700
the Café de la Régence,
the epicenter of the chess world.

00:13:06.366 --> 00:13:10.466
In the 18th century,
Paris was not only the home of many of the

00:13:10.466 --> 00:13:15.300
world's most famous philosophers,
it was also the home of topflight chess,

00:13:15.766 --> 00:13:19.933
led by the brilliant Philidor,
the world's most dominant chess player

00:13:20.333 --> 00:13:23.333
and author of a bestselling book
on the principles of chess,

00:13:23.700 --> 00:13:28.000
in which he famously declared
that pawns were the soul of chess.

00:13:29.100 --> 00:13:30.700
But it was his blindfold play

00:13:30.700 --> 00:13:33.966
that truly gave Philidor
his public rockstar status,

00:13:34.500 --> 00:13:37.200
with his feat
of having played two simultaneous

00:13:37.200 --> 00:13:41.200
blindfold games singled out in the chess
entry of the Encyclopedia

00:13:41.200 --> 00:13:45.100
as one of the most extraordinary mental
feats imaginable.

00:13:45.866 --> 00:13:48.266
The links between Philidor, Diderot

00:13:48.266 --> 00:13:51.200
and Rousseau were intriguingly strong,

00:13:51.766 --> 00:13:54.666
with all three meeting in the early 1740s,

00:13:55.033 --> 00:13:57.800
quite possibly at the Café de
la Régence itself.

00:13:58.800 --> 00:14:04.066
Rousseau and Philidor, both musicians,
had a brief collaboration over Rousseau's

00:14:04.066 --> 00:14:08.933
1743 opera, Les Muses galantes,
before there was a falling out.

00:14:09.500 --> 00:14:13.200
While Diderot and Rousseau
had their own close friendship

00:14:13.200 --> 00:14:16.766
until that famously fell apart too a decade or so later.

00:14:16.766 --> 00:14:19.166
Diderot and Philidor, meanwhile,

00:14:19.500 --> 00:14:23.633
remained friends for life.

00:14:23.633 --> 00:14:26.600
Rousseau became passionately absorbed in chess

00:14:26.866 --> 00:14:29.533
after having been introduced to it
in his mid-twenties,

00:14:29.933 --> 00:14:32.500
at one point,
even having dreams of breaking through

00:14:32.500 --> 00:14:36.200
as a great player himself while a regular
at the Café de la Régence.

00:14:36.900 --> 00:14:39.900
His exact skill
level has long been a subject of debate

00:14:40.300 --> 00:14:45.100
with Rousseau himself, often supplying
contradictory evidence in his Confessions.

00:14:45.766 --> 00:14:48.133
But what is not in any doubt was his

00:14:48.133 --> 00:14:50.800
deep determination to win at all costs.

00:14:51.600 --> 00:14:55.166
The most illuminating account
is provided by none other than Diderot,

00:14:55.266 --> 00:14:59.966
who, when writing years later to a friend
lamenting man's unceasing quest

00:14:59.966 --> 00:15:04.466
for superiority in all things,
no matter how small, cited the example of

00:15:04.466 --> 00:15:08.166
Rousseau refusing to give him a handicap
to even out their chess games.

00:15:08.933 --> 00:15:12.100
“vDoes it pain you so much to lose?” sneered Rousseau.

00:15:12.733 --> 00:15:14.900
“Not at all,” responded Diderot,

00:15:14.900 --> 00:15:18.700
“But I could defend myself better,
and you would enjoy the game more.”

00:15:19.500 --> 00:15:21.700
“That may be,” replied Rousseau,

00:15:22.066 --> 00:15:23.966
“but I'd rather leave
things the way they are.”

00:15:25.200 --> 00:15:26.433
Here we see chess as the

00:15:26.433 --> 00:15:30.066
perfect prism to highlight
these two very different perspectives.

00:15:30.900 --> 00:15:35.400
Diderot, the unperturbed rationalist,
coolly suggesting a way

00:15:35.400 --> 00:15:40.100
to enhance the enjoyment of a game
whose only purpose is mental stimulation.

00:15:40.966 --> 00:15:44.866
And Rousseau,
the emotionally invested hyper competitor,

00:15:45.166 --> 00:15:48.966
unwilling to do anything that might
jeopardize his chances of winning.

00:15:49.933 --> 00:15:54.300
And then there was Philidor,
the artistic chess genius whom Diderot

00:15:54.300 --> 00:16:00.666
explicitly refers to at the outset
of his wide ranging philosophical dialogue, Rameau’s Nephew,

00:16:00.666 --> 00:16:02.233
which was set in

00:16:02.400 --> 00:16:05.433
naturally enough, the Café de la Régence.

00:16:06.533 --> 00:16:10.066
The question of genius
was a particularly troubling one for Diderot,

00:16:10.066 --> 00:16:12.633
because its very existence seemed to fly

00:16:12.633 --> 00:16:15.666
in the face of his entire scientific
rationalist agenda.

00:16:16.433 --> 00:16:20.166
Here was an obvious phenomenon
that equally obviously

00:16:20.533 --> 00:16:23.600
a rationalistic scientific approach
didn't seem to have

00:16:23.600 --> 00:16:27.566
any coherent way of addressing.

00:16:27.566 --> 00:16:31.833
In the 18th century, then, the question of chess
ever being able to produce any legitimate

00:16:31.833 --> 00:16:36.033
scientific impact was all quite theoretical.

00:16:37.033 --> 00:16:40.100
There had
been the odd mathematical spillover here and there

00:16:40.100 --> 00:16:42.333
most notably  the Knight's Tour.

00:16:43.466 --> 00:16:46.533
This problem
trying to find a way for a knight to move

00:16:46.533 --> 00:16:50.800
directly to all 64 of the squares on a
chess chessboard without repeating itself

00:16:51.166 --> 00:16:54.733
had been explicitly treated in ancient
Arabic chess manuscripts,

00:16:55.066 --> 00:16:56.333
as well as some Indian

00:16:56.333 --> 00:17:00.366
mathematical treatise before
becoming rediscovered in the 18th century

00:17:00.366 --> 00:17:04.166
by French mathematicians largely
ignorant of the previous work.

00:17:04.900 --> 00:17:08.500
But it was left
customarily enough to the renowned Swiss

00:17:08.500 --> 00:17:12.300
mathematician Leonard Euler
to make a rigorous study of the problem

00:17:12.666 --> 00:17:17.333
which he presented to the Academy
of Sciences in Berlin in 1759.

00:17:18.300 --> 00:17:21.566
The Knight's Tour,
like the later eight Queens problem,

00:17:21.733 --> 00:17:25.366
where the goal was to place
eight Queens on a chessboard in such a way

00:17:25.366 --> 00:17:27.500
where none of them
are attacking each other,

00:17:27.500 --> 00:17:32.200
famously tackled by the likes of Gauss
a century later, were chess-inspired

00:17:32.200 --> 00:17:37.033
mathematical recreations that opened up
a great many unexpected and intriguing

00:17:37.033 --> 00:17:42.000
research avenues. but in themselves
were hardly evidence of chess’ ability

00:17:42.000 --> 00:17:45.300
to uniquely produce
a substantial scientific impact

00:17:45.733 --> 00:17:48.566
any more than a careful study
of backgammon, might

00:17:48.566 --> 00:17:51.933
naturally deepen
one’s understanding of probability theory.

00:17:53.266 --> 00:17:56.233
Ironically
enough, the start of chess’ notable

00:17:56.233 --> 00:17:57.700
scientific influence occurred

00:17:57.700 --> 00:18:01.700
for something that wasn't actually science
at all, but was,

00:18:02.066 --> 00:18:05.366
depending on your perspective,
either a clever hoax

00:18:05.366 --> 00:18:07.800
or a prescient harbinger of things
to come:

00:18:08.366 --> 00:18:11.233
the so-called Mechanical Turk, the chess-

00:18:11.233 --> 00:18:17.100
playing automaton by Wolfgang von Kempelen
that first made its appearance in 1770

00:18:17.100 --> 00:18:20.833
in Vienna at the court of the Hapsburg
Empress Maria Teresa.

00:18:21.700 --> 00:18:25.200
Kempelen, a serious
and scientifically literate fellow,

00:18:25.533 --> 00:18:29.000
had been expressly
invited to Vienna to critically examine

00:18:29.000 --> 00:18:31.933
a theatrical performance
of a traveling French conjuror.

00:18:32.466 --> 00:18:35.166
And when the Empress asked
for his assessment at the end,

00:18:35.666 --> 00:18:39.400
he simply declared that he was quite
capable of constructing a machine

00:18:39.400 --> 00:18:40.233
that would prove to be

00:18:40.233 --> 00:18:43.200
vastly more astonishing than the show
they had just witnessed.

00:18:43.733 --> 00:18:48.066
And when the Empress pressed him to do
so, the Mechanical Turk was born.

00:18:49.066 --> 00:18:51.700
The timing was perfect.

00:18:51.700 --> 00:18:55.033
Throughout the 18th century,
a wide range of ingenious

00:18:55.033 --> 00:18:58.700
automata had steadily appeared:
from silver swans

00:18:58.700 --> 00:19:02.700
that could preen themselves
before bending down to catch silver fish,

00:19:03.466 --> 00:19:09.033
to dolls that could write, draw
and play a miniature harpsichord,

00:19:09.033 --> 00:19:13.400
to metallic digesting
ducks and flute-playing statues,

00:19:14.100 --> 00:19:17.033
it had been amply demonstrated
that wind up machines

00:19:17.033 --> 00:19:20.600
could be built to imitate many basic
human and animal functions.

00:19:21.133 --> 00:19:25.000
But the Mechanical Turk took things
to another level entirely

00:19:25.366 --> 00:19:29.033
by directly confronting people
with the notion that it was now possible

00:19:29.033 --> 00:19:31.700
to build a machine
that could actually think;

00:19:32.000 --> 00:19:38.966
With chess, the calculational game par
excellence, the obvious proving ground.

00:19:38.966 --> 00:19:42.600
The exhibitions were a beguiling mix
of performance art,

00:19:42.966 --> 00:19:45.366
basic mathematics and chess.

00:19:45.900 --> 00:19:49.700
With von Kempelen first opening up
the doors at the front and back to allow

00:19:49.700 --> 00:19:53.933
spectators to peer through the device
before winding it up with a large key.

00:19:54.533 --> 00:19:57.833
In addition to soundly beating
most of the opposition, it faced,

00:19:58.233 --> 00:20:02.100
public performances also included
demonstrations of the Knight’s Tour,

00:20:02.866 --> 00:20:05.533
with audience members
invited to choose any square

00:20:05.533 --> 00:20:08.466
they wished for the Knight
to begin his journey around the board.

00:20:09.233 --> 00:20:13.300
Tokens were placed on each successive
square, landed on to demonstrate

00:20:13.300 --> 00:20:18.366
that every one of the 64 squares of the
chessboard was reached without repetition,

00:20:18.366 --> 00:20:22.033
a seemingly astonishing feat
that never failed to bring the house down,

00:20:22.533 --> 00:20:25.800
but, of course, can always be
straightforwardly

00:20:25.800 --> 00:20:28.933
accomplished
by simply knowing any closed solution

00:20:29.300 --> 00:20:33.333
and then taking the Knight on a full loop
from wherever the audience chooses.

00:20:34.433 --> 00:20:37.500
Eventually, as many long suspected,

00:20:37.500 --> 00:20:41.500
the Mechanical Turk was revealed
to be a far cry from a real automaton

00:20:41.933 --> 00:20:44.833
with a highly skilled
human player lodged within it,

00:20:45.466 --> 00:20:49.566
but not before it had played for decades
under several different owners

00:20:49.566 --> 00:20:51.833
against some of the world's
most famous people,

00:20:52.500 --> 00:20:55.400
notoriously
defeating Benjamin Franklin,

00:20:55.400 --> 00:20:59.800
a chess fanatic who once wrote about the game's
morally elevating abilities,

00:20:59.833 --> 00:21:03.300
although never having attained
a particularly high level of play himself,

00:21:04.100 --> 00:21:06.766
and Napoleon Bonaparte,
who by many accounts

00:21:06.766 --> 00:21:09.533
was equally passionate
and a good deal worse,

00:21:09.966 --> 00:21:12.966
although many of his opponents
wisely elected to let him win,

00:21:13.466 --> 00:21:16.266
at least until his career
had come to a decided close.

00:21:17.333 --> 00:21:20.466
The Mechanical Turk seemed to play against
just about everyone -

00:21:21.100 --> 00:21:24.833
even the great Philidor,
who won, unsurprisingly,

00:21:25.200 --> 00:21:28.833
but later admitted that the experience
had been particularly exhausting -

00:21:29.266 --> 00:21:32.500
a sentiment Garry Kasparov would doubtless have empathized with

00:21:32.766 --> 00:21:36.600
from his similar encounters
over 200 years later against Deep Blue.

00:21:37.466 --> 00:21:40.700
In fact, Kasparov's
future struggles were directly linked

00:21:40.700 --> 00:21:43.600
to two significant events several decades later.

00:21:43.600 --> 00:21:45.333
In 1820,

00:21:45.733 --> 00:21:48.266
the alleged automaton locked horns

00:21:48.466 --> 00:21:52.933
and beat the 28 year old Charles Babbage,
the English polymath

00:21:52.933 --> 00:21:56.400
who today is widely regarded
as the father of computer science.

00:21:57.100 --> 00:21:59.566
Babbage
had long been fascinated by automata,

00:21:59.966 --> 00:22:03.566
and while he seemed quite certain
that the Turk was controlled by a human,

00:22:03.900 --> 00:22:06.633
the experience further
piqued his burgeoning interest

00:22:06.633 --> 00:22:09.033
in developing mechanical,
calculating devices.

00:22:09.900 --> 00:22:13.166
The next year,
a pamphlet appeared by Robert Willis,

00:22:13.566 --> 00:22:16.133
a precocious inventor
and mechanical engineer,

00:22:16.533 --> 00:22:21.100
accurately describing how a full grown man
could be concealed within the mechanism,

00:22:21.700 --> 00:22:25.500
prefacing his analysis with a description
of how he could be certain

00:22:25.700 --> 00:22:29.033
that the Mechanical Turk
must be controlled by a human agent:

00:22:30.033 --> 00:22:31.666
“The phenomena of the chess player,”

00:22:31.666 --> 00:22:35.500
he said, “are inconsistent
with the effects of mere mechanism.

00:22:36.133 --> 00:22:39.700
For however great and surprising
the powers of mechanism may be,

00:22:40.100 --> 00:22:44.666
the movements which spring from it
are necessarily limited and uniform.

00:22:45.500 --> 00:22:48.833
It cannot usurp an exercise
the faculties of mind.

00:22:49.500 --> 00:22:52.133
It cannot be made to vary its operations

00:22:52.433 --> 00:22:56.266
so as to meet the ever varying
circumstances of a game of chess.

00:22:57.000 --> 00:22:59.900
This is the province of intellect alone.”

00:23:01.200 --> 00:23:04.633
Babbage vigorously disagreed with Willis's
analysis.

00:23:05.400 --> 00:23:07.733
He was convinced that all highly

00:23:07.733 --> 00:23:12.866
complex calculations could in principle,
be broken down into a series

00:23:12.866 --> 00:23:17.100
of elementary steps, each one of which
could be performed mechanically.

00:23:17.966 --> 00:23:21.700
And he didn't see why chess in principle
was any different.

00:23:22.733 --> 00:23:25.733
In his eyes,
the “ever varying circumstances”

00:23:25.733 --> 00:23:30.300
of a game of chess that had so preoccupied
Willis and convinced him that a chess

00:23:30.300 --> 00:23:34.833
machine could never be built was simply
a matter of degree and not one of kind.

00:23:35.466 --> 00:23:36.300
A consequence

00:23:36.300 --> 00:23:40.333
of the inherent complexity of a game
where the values of the pieces fluctuated

00:23:40.333 --> 00:23:44.133
depending on their positions on the board
and how they interacted with one another.

00:23:45.600 --> 00:23:48.433
Rigorously evaluating any given
chess position

00:23:48.666 --> 00:23:50.700
was always going to be more challenging

00:23:50.700 --> 00:23:53.833
than devising a machine that could find
the square root of any number.

00:23:54.466 --> 00:23:59.466
But the principles were exactly the same -
principles that formed the cornerstone

00:23:59.466 --> 00:24:03.300
of Babbage's generalized analytical engine
that he was determined to build.

00:24:04.133 --> 00:24:06.800
He would eventually
be spectacularly vindicated,

00:24:07.400 --> 00:24:09.500
but that took almost two centuries.

00:24:10.166 --> 00:24:14.600
For the longest time, the prevailing view
was that there was a clear, unbridgeable

00:24:14.600 --> 00:24:17.466
divide between mere mechanical calculation

00:24:17.966 --> 00:24:21.766
and the glories of human intelligence.

00:24:21.766 --> 00:24:24.133
And as the 19th century gathered steam,

00:24:24.500 --> 00:24:28.833
the old hyper rationalist Enlightenment
dream was increasingly viewed

00:24:28.833 --> 00:24:33.966
as a dangerous distortion of mankind's
natural tendencies that ultimately led

00:24:33.966 --> 00:24:39.566
to the Terror of Robespierre,
a regular chess player at the Café de la Régence, by the way.

00:24:43.800 --> 00:24:45.033
Instead,

00:24:45.033 --> 00:24:48.233
attention turned
to the manifestly unscientific notion

00:24:48.233 --> 00:24:51.633
of the human condition,
with a corresponding focus on passion,

00:24:52.166 --> 00:24:55.066
creativity and artistic sensitivity.

00:24:56.733 --> 00:24:59.233
And once more, chess followed suit,

00:24:59.833 --> 00:25:02.700
adopting a boldly attacking romantic style

00:25:02.733 --> 00:25:06.266
characterized by dashing attacks
and stunning sacrifices

00:25:06.966 --> 00:25:10.166
increasingly implemented
with the captivating new half

00:25:10.166 --> 00:25:14.033
abstract, half figural pieces
endorsed by Howard Staunton,

00:25:14.366 --> 00:25:18.000
one of the leading players of the age.

00:25:18.000 --> 00:25:21.433
Beauty and artistry
reigned on the chessboard,

00:25:21.433 --> 00:25:25.233
not only in the games themselves,
but also in the parallel

00:25:25.233 --> 00:25:29.100
chess problems that sprouted up.
Unlike modern chess puzzles,

00:25:29.600 --> 00:25:34.066
these problems weren't about preparing
players for possible game like situations,

00:25:34.566 --> 00:25:38.433
but rather miniature works of art,
where prizes were awarded

00:25:38.433 --> 00:25:41.533
solely on aesthetic grounds
to those that offered

00:25:41.533 --> 00:25:44.433
the most surprising
and ingenious solutions.

00:25:46.033 --> 00:25:47.766
Take this characteristic example

00:25:47.766 --> 00:25:52.333
from Eugene Cook in 1855,
where White moves first

00:25:52.466 --> 00:25:56.400
and is required to engineer
a mating net. White has a bishop

00:25:56.400 --> 00:26:00.500
and four pawns to Black's three pawns,
two of which are doubled,

00:26:00.500 --> 00:26:03.600
and in any real game, Black
would have resigned long ago.

00:26:04.466 --> 00:26:07.433
White has many surefire ways
to engineer checkmate,

00:26:07.933 --> 00:26:12.000
such as promoting the pawn on f7
to a queen and forcing the king

00:26:12.000 --> 00:26:16.833
to move to c6 before
promoting his pawn on e7 to another queen,

00:26:17.200 --> 00:26:21.000
checking the king
and forcing it to take the pawn on f6,

00:26:21.500 --> 00:26:25.800
then following up with another check
and forcing the king to a6 before

00:26:25.800 --> 00:26:29.633
bringing the other queen into action
and producing a mate on a8.

00:26:30.900 --> 00:26:32.433
So that's it, right?

00:26:32.433 --> 00:26:36.866
Well, no,
because the problem isn't just producing mate,

00:26:36.866 --> 00:26:39.633
it's producing mate
in the right number of moves.

00:26:40.200 --> 00:26:42.433
All of that took White four moves,

00:26:42.766 --> 00:26:46.466
but the problem stipulates that we must do
so in only three.

00:26:47.700 --> 00:26:50.966
Well, you might say just first
promote the e7 pawn.

00:26:51.300 --> 00:26:53.833
But now Black has no legal move.

00:26:53.833 --> 00:26:57.333
He can't move any of his pawns
and his king has no place to go.

00:26:57.833 --> 00:27:00.266
So it's a stalemate.

00:27:00.266 --> 00:27:02.700
Over and over you search,

00:27:02.700 --> 00:27:04.866
but it seems that the task is impossible.

00:27:05.466 --> 00:27:09.000
There just doesn't seem to be a way
for White to get the job done

00:27:09.000 --> 00:27:11.633
in only three moves,
no matter what Black does.

00:27:12.433 --> 00:27:17.200
And part of the reason the solution is
so hard to find is that it is precisely

00:27:17.200 --> 00:27:20.900
the sort of thing that no chess player
would ever do in an actual game.

00:27:22.033 --> 00:27:23.366
Here it is.

00:27:23.366 --> 00:27:25.800
White first promotes his pawn on e7,

00:27:26.233 --> 00:27:30.800
but instead of promoting it to a queen,
he under promotes it to a bishop

00:27:31.466 --> 00:27:35.933
driving the king to its only available
square on e6; a square

00:27:35.933 --> 00:27:39.266
he wouldn't have been able to go
to had the pawn been promoted to a queen.

00:27:40.000 --> 00:27:42.066
And now the next pawn is promoted.

00:27:42.066 --> 00:27:45.600
But it too is under promoted to a bishop,
driving

00:27:45.600 --> 00:27:48.500
the king to its one available
square on e5.

00:27:49.333 --> 00:27:53.333
Lastly,
White moves his white square bishop to d7:

00:27:54.333 --> 00:27:56.900
checkmate in three.

00:27:56.900 --> 00:27:58.866
It's not chess exactly,

00:27:58.866 --> 00:28:02.566
but it has a remarkable sense of chess
like beauty all the same.

00:28:03.600 --> 00:28:08.433
But the apex of chess is romantic
era was when an even greater chess talent

00:28:08.433 --> 00:28:12.066
than Philidor suddenly arrived on the scene
from America:

00:28:12.566 --> 00:28:16.700
The remarkable Paul Morphy,
who swept to victory at the first American

00:28:16.700 --> 00:28:21.033
Chess Congress in 1857,
before sailing across the Atlantic

00:28:21.166 --> 00:28:23.433
to sweep everyone else out of his way
as well.

00:28:24.033 --> 00:28:29.100
That this slight, well-spoken,
unfailingly polite 21 year old

00:28:29.333 --> 00:28:33.733
could so effortlessly dispatch
anyone he faced, at one point playing

00:28:33.733 --> 00:28:37.500
eight of the Café de la Régence’s
top players simultaneously

00:28:37.700 --> 00:28:42.033
without looking at the board
and emerging with six wins and two draws,

00:28:42.566 --> 00:28:45.600
seemed nothing less
than the clearest evidence imaginable

00:28:45.766 --> 00:28:50.700
of man's inexplicable capacity for genius.

00:28:50.700 --> 00:28:52.833
Morphy's dominance over the chessboard,

00:28:53.400 --> 00:28:56.533
combined with
the Indian Rebellion of the late 1850s,

00:28:56.833 --> 00:29:00.566
was an obvious opportunity
for gleeful French critics to capitalize

00:29:00.566 --> 00:29:05.266
on the dual meaning of “échec(s)”,
the French word for both chess and failure

00:29:06.033 --> 00:29:10.466
to invoke the now common
metaphor of politics as a form of chess.

00:29:11.433 --> 00:29:14.100
But it's worth
highlighting that other thoughtful voices

00:29:14.100 --> 00:29:18.300
had used chess in precisely
the opposite direction, emphatically

00:29:18.300 --> 00:29:22.666
rejecting the image of a successful ruler
as master chess player.

00:29:23.700 --> 00:29:25.966
Back in 1759,

00:29:25.966 --> 00:29:29.366
In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam

00:29:29.366 --> 00:29:33.800
Smith explicitly contrasts,
“the man of humanity and benevolence

00:29:34.200 --> 00:29:38.000
who uses reason and persuasion
to address societal concerns”

00:29:38.766 --> 00:29:41.366
and the deluded “man of the system,

00:29:42.033 --> 00:29:46.300
who imagines that he can arrange
the different members of a great society

00:29:46.566 --> 00:29:51.200
with as much ease as the hand arranges
the different pieces upon a chessboard,

00:29:51.766 --> 00:29:55.666
not realizing that
in the great chessboard of human society,

00:29:56.166 --> 00:30:00.066
every single piece
has a principle of motion of its own.”

00:30:01.400 --> 00:30:03.466
Slightly more than a hundred years later,

00:30:03.933 --> 00:30:07.466
George Eliot
explicitly invoked Smith's warning

00:30:07.466 --> 00:30:10.433
of the inappropriateness
of treating people like chess pieces

00:30:10.700 --> 00:30:13.233
in her book, Felix Holt The Radical:

00:30:14.333 --> 00:30:15.166
“Fancy what a

00:30:15.166 --> 00:30:18.233
game of chess would be
if all the chess men

00:30:18.233 --> 00:30:21.666
had passions and intellects,
more or less small and cunning.

00:30:22.566 --> 00:30:25.500
If you were not only uncertain
about your adversary's men,

00:30:26.033 --> 00:30:29.533
but a little uncertain
also about your own.

00:30:29.533 --> 00:30:34.666
If your knight could shuffle himself on
to a new square by the sly, if your bishop

00:30:34.800 --> 00:30:39.866
in disgust at your castling could wheedle
your pawns out of their places.

00:30:39.866 --> 00:30:43.700
And if your pawns, hating you
because they are pawns,

00:30:44.200 --> 00:30:47.533
could make away from their appointed posts
that you might get

00:30:47.533 --> 00:30:51.700
checkmated on a sudden.
You might be the longest headed of deductive

00:30:51.700 --> 00:30:55.800
reasoners, and yet
you might be beaten by your own pawns.

00:30:56.666 --> 00:30:58.900
You would be especially likely
to be beaten

00:30:59.366 --> 00:31:02.633
if you depended arrogantly
on your mathematical imagination

00:31:03.166 --> 00:31:05.800
and regarded your passionate
pieces with contempt.

00:31:06.866 --> 00:31:10.100
Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared
with the game

00:31:10.100 --> 00:31:13.766
a man has to play against his fellow men
with other fellow

00:31:13.766 --> 00:31:16.800
“

00:31:16.800 --> 00:31:21.300
Eliot's reiteration of Smith's chess
allegory represents

00:31:21.300 --> 00:31:24.700
more than simply one
great thinker tipping her hat to another.

00:31:25.366 --> 00:31:29.166
It also demonstrates tangible cracks
in the stereotypical

00:31:29.166 --> 00:31:32.400
Romantic - rationality dichotomy, with chess,

00:31:32.800 --> 00:31:35.100
as ever, a key weathervane.

00:31:35.900 --> 00:31:39.566
After all, what could such polarized
distinctions really mean

00:31:39.733 --> 00:31:43.766
when a leading Rousseau loving
figure of Victorian letters like Eliot

00:31:44.200 --> 00:31:47.966
could be in such lockstep
with an iconic standard-bearer

00:31:47.966 --> 00:31:50.400
of the Scottish Enlightenment,
like Smith?

00:31:51.466 --> 00:31:53.766
And as the domains of art,

00:31:53.766 --> 00:31:57.033
science and sport kept convergingc

00:31:57.833 --> 00:32:02.333
chess continued to supply tangible points
of contact between all three,

00:32:03.200 --> 00:32:05.933
with William Steinitz,
the world's best player,

00:32:06.266 --> 00:32:09.966
triumphantly unveiling his new,
more scientific approach to the game

00:32:10.533 --> 00:32:14.733
at roughly the same time that Lewis
Carroll, an Oxford mathematician,

00:32:15.366 --> 00:32:18.733
published a groundbreaking
chess inspired work of literature.

00:32:19.933 --> 00:32:22.466
By the
time the 20th century came into view,

00:32:23.233 --> 00:32:27.266
chess had established a demonstrable
record of strong cultural influence

00:32:27.266 --> 00:32:30.733
in art, literature, politics,

00:32:31.033 --> 00:32:33.566
sports, and even mathematics,

00:32:34.333 --> 00:32:37.866
all the while increasingly
stimulating the scientific imagination.

00:32:38.900 --> 00:32:42.033
All that was left was to directly impact

00:32:42.033 --> 00:32:44.800
science itself.

00:32:51.366 --> 00:32:55.400
The first direct application of chess
to scientific understanding happened

00:32:55.400 --> 00:32:58.266
through an empirical investigation
of blindfold chess,

00:32:59.200 --> 00:33:03.500
a subject that had long been associated
with both genius and madness.

00:33:04.666 --> 00:33:07.366
When Diderot
heard that his friend Philidor was engaged

00:33:07.366 --> 00:33:10.833
in exhibitions of three simultaneous
blindfold games in London,

00:33:11.833 --> 00:33:14.500
he sternly advised him
to go back to his music

00:33:14.933 --> 00:33:18.300
and stop indulging cheap Englishmen
who weren't even paying him

00:33:18.300 --> 00:33:20.400
for such a grave
risk to his mental health.

00:33:21.366 --> 00:33:24.000
And when rumors of Paul Morphy's
mental instability

00:33:24.000 --> 00:33:27.166
began to surface
long after he had retired from the game,

00:33:27.566 --> 00:33:31.200
many instinctively attributed it
to years of blindfold play

00:33:31.933 --> 00:33:35.366
rather than the more mundane reality
of a Southern pacifist

00:33:35.366 --> 00:33:39.766
whose life and career had been shattered
by the brutal American Civil War.

00:33:41.100 --> 00:33:42.800
In 1870,

00:33:42.800 --> 00:33:45.733
a more objective analysis of blindfold
chess was made

00:33:45.733 --> 00:33:49.566
by the French historian and philosopher
Hippolyte Taine,

00:33:49.733 --> 00:33:52.866
whose anecdotal conversations
with chess players convinced him

00:33:52.866 --> 00:33:56.633
that the blindfold player relies
upon an internal mirror

00:33:57.033 --> 00:34:02.233
to exactly replicate
all the pieces of the board in his mind.

00:34:02.666 --> 00:34:07.200
But it was left to Alfred Binet, later
the developer of the first IQ test,

00:34:07.200 --> 00:34:09.366
but at the time the associate director

00:34:09.366 --> 00:34:12.200
of the Sorbonne’s
Laboratory of Experimental Psychology

00:34:12.866 --> 00:34:14.400
to take the first steps of applying

00:34:14.400 --> 00:34:17.033
blindfold chess
to a detailed empirical setting

00:34:17.466 --> 00:34:20.900
through a series of questionnaires,
demonstrations

00:34:21.466 --> 00:34:23.966
and interviews with expert chess players.

00:34:25.100 --> 00:34:27.866
And what he found was quite surprising.

00:34:28.666 --> 00:34:32.900
While lower level players did indeed
construct faithful photographic-like

00:34:32.900 --> 00:34:36.533
internal mirror images of the pieces,
just as Taine had described

00:34:36.533 --> 00:34:37.800
over 20 years earlier,

00:34:38.933 --> 00:34:42.100
the more advanced players did not -

00:34:42.100 --> 00:34:46.300
instead, constructing highly abstract
representations of the positions

00:34:46.600 --> 00:34:50.166
that typically indicated lines of force
associated with the pieces.

00:34:51.433 --> 00:34:55.366
The book summarizing his findings released
just as Emanuel

00:34:55.366 --> 00:34:58.933
Lasker was dethroning William Steinitz
to begin his 27-year

00:34:58.933 --> 00:35:02.733
reign as world
chess champion, was hardly all about chess.

00:35:03.333 --> 00:35:07.066
Entitled The Psychology
of Great Calculators and Chess Players,

00:35:07.800 --> 00:35:11.966
the first 200 pages or so concerns
firsthand accounts of the great mental

00:35:11.966 --> 00:35:15.533
calculators of the age,
such as Giacomo Inaudi,

00:35:15.766 --> 00:35:19.833
an Italian shepherd
whose calculational powers were so great

00:35:20.033 --> 00:35:24.833
that they prompted the Nobel Prize
immunologist Ilya Mechnikov to suggest

00:35:24.833 --> 00:35:29.633
that he represented an evolutionary
mutation towards a new type of Superman.

00:35:30.533 --> 00:35:33.533
Right from the early days
of experimental psychology, then

00:35:34.100 --> 00:35:37.500
chess became one important way
to concretely probe

00:35:37.500 --> 00:35:40.366
a fundamental question
we still grapple with today:

00:35:41.000 --> 00:35:44.133
To what extent
can some exceptionally developed skill

00:35:44.166 --> 00:35:47.200
be used to understand
its normal human counterpart?

00:35:47.900 --> 00:35:50.666
Are musical prodigies or calculating

00:35:50.666 --> 00:35:53.466
savants or brilliant chess players

00:35:53.866 --> 00:35:56.566
Harnessing the same sorts of cognitive processes

00:35:56.566 --> 00:35:58.933
the rest of us use, only better?

00:35:59.800 --> 00:36:04.366
If so, then examining their cases
in detail will naturally provide

00:36:04.366 --> 00:36:07.566
a revealing window into those key
underlying mechanisms.

00:36:08.466 --> 00:36:10.800
But perhaps that's not the case.

00:36:10.800 --> 00:36:15.000
Maybe they’re doing something else
entirely, something superhuman.

00:36:15.666 --> 00:36:18.933
And if so, how did that come about, exactly?

00:36:18.933 --> 00:36:23.000
Can anyone with proper training
and effort learn to do that too?

00:36:24.800 --> 00:36:26.466
Meanwhile, chess

00:36:26.466 --> 00:36:30.033
began to make its presence
felt in a number of other research areas.

00:36:30.466 --> 00:36:35.833
The German mathematician Ernst Zermelo,
one of the pioneers of axiomatic set theory,

00:36:35.833 --> 00:36:39.466
gave a talk at the 1912
International Mathematics Congress

00:36:39.466 --> 00:36:43.466
in Cambridge on Chess and Mathematics,
which resulted in a paper

00:36:43.466 --> 00:36:47.133
the following year broadly viewed
as the origin of game theory.

00:36:47.433 --> 00:36:51.233
While it's true that Zermelo’s
Theorem, as it later came to be called,

00:36:51.600 --> 00:36:55.800
is a general claim about two person
zero sum games with perfect information

00:36:56.200 --> 00:36:58.700
and is thus not
particularly chess-specific,

00:36:59.100 --> 00:37:01.500
Zermelo was known
to be an avid chess player.

00:37:02.000 --> 00:37:05.866
And so it's not unreasonable
to regard chess, consciously

00:37:05.866 --> 00:37:09.000
or otherwise,
as influential to his thinking.

00:37:10.333 --> 00:37:14.266
A few years later,
however, a much more chess specific impact

00:37:14.266 --> 00:37:19.100
in a completely different field occurred
when Ferdinand de Saussure used several

00:37:19.100 --> 00:37:21.233
explicitly chess related metaphors

00:37:21.233 --> 00:37:23.966
to illustrate his views
on the nature of language.

00:37:24.266 --> 00:37:28.033
In his famous Cours de Linguistique Génerale,
his lecture notes

00:37:28.033 --> 00:37:31.966
published posthumously in 1916, de Saussure

00:37:31.966 --> 00:37:33.800
invokes chess several times.

00:37:34.400 --> 00:37:36.866
First, to highlight
the important distinction

00:37:36.866 --> 00:37:41.533
between the external elements
of a language, its particular historical

00:37:41.533 --> 00:37:45.700
and geographical trajectory,
and its internal grammatical structure.

00:37:46.200 --> 00:37:50.400
“It's just like chess,” de Saussure
tells us, “with the transmission

00:37:50.400 --> 00:37:54.333
of the game from Persia to Europe
associated with the external realm

00:37:54.466 --> 00:37:58.033
and the specific rules of the game
belonging to the internal one.”

00:37:58.500 --> 00:38:01.200
“If I replace wooden chess pieces with ivory,”

00:38:01.200 --> 00:38:04.833
he says, “I'm doing nothing
that affects the internal system.

00:38:05.300 --> 00:38:08.000
But if I change the number of pieces
themselves,

00:38:08.166 --> 00:38:11.033
I'm profoundly
altering the grammar of the game.”

00:38:11.700 --> 00:38:15.666
A notable allusion,
but one which effectively uses chess

00:38:15.866 --> 00:38:18.700
as just a convenient shorthand
for any formal game

00:38:18.700 --> 00:38:21.833
or system with a well-documented
historical trajectory.

00:38:22.300 --> 00:38:26.533
It's only when he turns his attention
to the details of that trajectory itself

00:38:26.900 --> 00:38:29.700
that de Saussure brings out
another chess metaphor

00:38:30.000 --> 00:38:32.933
that fully harnesses
the game's unique characteristic:

00:38:33.333 --> 00:38:37.300
the constant, subtly shifting
values of the different pieces

00:38:37.500 --> 00:38:40.333
depending on how they are arranged
with respect to each other.

00:38:41.100 --> 00:38:46.000
Because the dynamics of language, de Saussure
says, is exactly like that.

00:38:46.500 --> 00:38:50.700
It's all about understanding the values
of linguistic terms that are constantly

00:38:50.700 --> 00:38:55.200
in flux and naturally depend
on their complex interaction with others.

00:38:56.100 --> 00:38:58.800
Each chess position, he stresses, is

00:38:58.800 --> 00:39:01.233
just like the momentary state
of any language.

00:39:01.866 --> 00:39:06.166
And once a move is made
and a new position is reached, the values

00:39:06.166 --> 00:39:10.866
of all the individual pieces are altered
due to their profound interdependence,

00:39:11.300 --> 00:39:15.733
even though each new position is reached
through just moving one piece at a time -

00:39:16.366 --> 00:39:19.700
exactly like how changes in language
happen through particular

00:39:19.700 --> 00:39:22.500
modifications
of individual linguistic elements.

00:39:23.433 --> 00:39:26.000
In fact, he maintains

00:39:26.000 --> 00:39:29.566
the only real difference between chess
and language in this key respect

00:39:30.233 --> 00:39:33.900
is that, while the chess player moves
the pieces intentionally,

00:39:34.566 --> 00:39:39.000
changes to individual linguistic terms
happen spontaneously and randomly:

00:39:39.466 --> 00:39:42.866
a dropped umlaut here,
a new plural form there,

00:39:43.200 --> 00:39:46.966
and suddenly all the other terms
are consequently affected.

00:39:47.633 --> 00:39:52.433
While many famous thinkers before
and after de Saussure invoked chess analogies

00:39:52.833 --> 00:39:56.033
from Charles Sanders
Peirce to Gottlob Frege

00:39:56.566 --> 00:39:59.566
to Edmund Husserl to Ludwig Wittgenstein,

00:40:00.000 --> 00:40:02.400
in almost every case, “chess”

00:40:02.700 --> 00:40:06.666
was simply used as a shorthand for a game
with fixed rules

00:40:06.833 --> 00:40:11.766
in order to showcase their convictions
about formalism or logical implication

00:40:12.300 --> 00:40:15.100
or language games or what have you.

00:40:15.100 --> 00:40:19.433
De Saussure, on the other hand,
took the chess metaphor seriously,

00:40:19.966 --> 00:40:23.000
focusing his efforts
on what makes the game truly unique:

00:40:23.633 --> 00:40:26.866
its different pieces
and the notable complexities associated

00:40:26.866 --> 00:40:31.333
with their interactions, so as
to illuminate the essence of his argument.

00:40:32.666 --> 00:40:34.533
Away from the world of research

00:40:34.533 --> 00:40:37.333
Tthe game itself continued to develop,

00:40:37.333 --> 00:40:40.000
with more and more top
flight international tournaments

00:40:40.000 --> 00:40:42.666
occurring through the first decades
of the 20th century.

00:40:43.000 --> 00:40:46.433
By the time the Roaring Twenties arrived,
chess took its place

00:40:46.433 --> 00:40:50.533
as one of the passions that a war
weary world would enthusiastically turn to

00:40:50.933 --> 00:40:54.933
with the charismatic Cuban
Jose Capablanca, who'd finally toppled

00:40:54.933 --> 00:40:58.100
Emanuel Lasker, as its global rock star.

00:40:58.966 --> 00:41:01.666
For many,
chess became a veritable addiction.

00:41:02.000 --> 00:41:04.900
None more
so than the French artist Marcel Duchamp,

00:41:05.100 --> 00:41:08.866
who spent so much time studying, playing
and talking about the game,

00:41:09.066 --> 00:41:13.233
widely influencing others in his circle,
such as his friend and fellow artist

00:41:13.233 --> 00:41:14.300
Man Ray,

00:41:14.300 --> 00:41:18.100
that at one point he publicly declared
that he would abandon art for chess.

00:41:18.900 --> 00:41:21.200
But while perhaps its most celebrated
case,

00:41:21.566 --> 00:41:25.333
Duchamp was hardly
the only person succumbing to chess fever.

00:41:25.766 --> 00:41:30.233
Its unique combination of intense
competition and rigorous analysis

00:41:30.400 --> 00:41:34.500
had always had the power to provoke
obsessive behavior in its followers.

00:41:34.733 --> 00:41:38.333
But now that it was progressively viewed
as a psychological sport fit

00:41:38.333 --> 00:41:42.000
for the brightest minds,
growing numbers fell under its spell,

00:41:42.633 --> 00:41:46.900
particularly in places such as the newly
formed Soviet Union, where the game

00:41:46.900 --> 00:41:51.300
that Lenin himself felt so passionately
about was so actively promoted.

00:41:52.500 --> 00:41:54.600
Writers correspondingly

00:41:54.600 --> 00:41:58.066
increasingly turned to chess
as an ideal vehicle to address

00:41:58.066 --> 00:42:02.766
related themes of genius, madness
and the human capacity for obsession.

00:42:03.633 --> 00:42:08.466
For unlike other addictions that preyed
on our weaknesses and so obviously limited

00:42:08.466 --> 00:42:13.600
our personal development, becoming a chess
master was clearly very different.

00:42:13.600 --> 00:42:16.233
A hugely impressive
intellectual accomplishment,

00:42:16.766 --> 00:42:20.166
but one which seemed to require
a disproportionately large commitment

00:42:20.166 --> 00:42:24.900
of time and effort that might well
involve seriously negative consequences.

00:42:26.000 --> 00:42:28.833
In Vladimir Nabokov's
novel, The Luzhin Defense,

00:42:29.466 --> 00:42:32.700
he explores the inner turmoil of a chess
grandmaster

00:42:32.800 --> 00:42:36.466
in desperate search of mental stability
and perspective,

00:42:36.466 --> 00:42:41.366
while Stefan Zweig's Chess Story highlights
the universal potential of obsession

00:42:41.700 --> 00:42:45.066
through a Gestapo prisoner
who was forced to become a chess expert

00:42:45.066 --> 00:42:48.800
to preserve his sanity and ends up
being driven to the edge of madness

00:42:48.800 --> 00:42:52.833
by mentally
playing against himself over and over.

00:42:52.866 --> 00:42:56.700
And then there is Samuel Beckett's
novel, Murphy, with its climactic

00:42:56.700 --> 00:43:00.500
scene of a chess game between Murphy
and the insane Mr Endon,

00:43:00.500 --> 00:43:03.366
a patient at the mental institution
where Murphy is working -

00:43:03.633 --> 00:43:06.800
a suitably deranged affair,
where no pieces are taken

00:43:06.800 --> 00:43:09.700
and both players
effectively ignore each other throughout,

00:43:10.066 --> 00:43:12.833
annotated by Beckett
in a faux romantic style,

00:43:13.166 --> 00:43:17.066
that ends with Murphy's
sudden resignation after 43 moves.

00:43:20.166 --> 00:43:23.433
While other treatments of the genius
madness question seemed destined

00:43:23.433 --> 00:43:26.400
to culminate in
nothing more than simplistic stereotypes.

00:43:27.000 --> 00:43:29.033
Chess
offered something noticeably different.

00:43:30.233 --> 00:43:31.500
On the one hand,

00:43:31.500 --> 00:43:34.200
here was a highly demanding
intellectual challenge

00:43:34.200 --> 00:43:37.200
that virtually anyone
with the right amount of determination

00:43:37.200 --> 00:43:41.500
and effort could diligently study and
eventually achieve high level competency at.

00:43:42.666 --> 00:43:46.033
But on the other hand, every so often
someone would come along -

00:43:46.400 --> 00:43:50.333
A Philidor or a Morphy or a Sultan Khan,

00:43:50.866 --> 00:43:53.766
the Indian chess master
who came out of nowhere to win

00:43:53.766 --> 00:43:59.566
the British chess championship
in 1929, 1932, and 1933,

00:44:00.266 --> 00:44:03.866
who demonstrated such
a seemingly effortless mastery of the game

00:44:04.166 --> 00:44:06.666
that the only appropriate word
to describe them

00:44:07.200 --> 00:44:09.800
seemed to be genius.

00:44:14.433 --> 00:44:17.100
Chess, like no other activity,

00:44:17.700 --> 00:44:20.700
somehow managed
to simultaneously illustrate

00:44:20.766 --> 00:44:23.400
both the painstaking acquisition of skills

00:44:23.933 --> 00:44:26.033
and raw natural talent;

00:44:26.866 --> 00:44:29.400
the analytical and the gestalt;

00:44:30.000 --> 00:44:33.000
the didactic and the intuitive.

00:44:33.900 --> 00:44:36.200
And then, as always,

00:44:36.200 --> 00:44:39.433
there was the case of blindfold chess,
with its unique

00:44:39.433 --> 00:44:43.000
trifold incarnation of performance
art, sport,

00:44:43.433 --> 00:44:46.466
and finally,
thanks to Alfred Binet’s efforts,

00:44:47.000 --> 00:44:49.066
opportunity for scientific understanding,

00:44:49.800 --> 00:44:53.733
all three aspects of which
were represented by Alexander Alekhine,

00:44:54.300 --> 00:44:57.033
Capablanca’s successor
as world chess champion

00:44:57.366 --> 00:45:01.700
and a consummate blindfold chess expert
who explicitly cited the need

00:45:01.700 --> 00:45:05.466
for more scientific investigations
into the nature of blindfold chess

00:45:05.900 --> 00:45:09.900
In his 1932 memoir,
On the Road to the World Championship.

00:45:12.000 --> 00:45:14.400
with Alekhine's death in 1946,

00:45:14.800 --> 00:45:18.166
chess split into two separate streams
of cultural impact

00:45:18.300 --> 00:45:22.166
that would remain completely distinct
from one another for the next 50 years.

00:45:22.966 --> 00:45:26.700
On one side, there was the notion of chess
as the ultimate battle,

00:45:27.300 --> 00:45:28.866
an intense struggle of wills

00:45:28.866 --> 00:45:32.000
that brought with it
a fistful of symbolic interpretations,

00:45:32.900 --> 00:45:36.533
from our irrepressible human determination
to somehow defeat death,

00:45:37.400 --> 00:45:40.666
to a Freudian
unmasking of the chess player’s psyche,

00:45:40.666 --> 00:45:44.400
featuring sexual repression,
the Oedipus complex

00:45:44.766 --> 00:45:48.433
and checkmate as castration.

00:45:48.600 --> 00:45:51.800
Meanwhile, back on planet Earth,
there was little doubt

00:45:51.800 --> 00:45:54.566
that chess was rapidly
becoming a bona fide sport.

00:45:55.066 --> 00:45:58.566
In 1960,
the United States Chess Federation adopted

00:45:58.566 --> 00:46:02.700
a new rating system designed by the chess
playing physicist Arpad Elo,

00:46:02.800 --> 00:46:06.833
that could swiftly assess everyone
from a rank novice to a top professional,

00:46:07.200 --> 00:46:10.700
while chess tournaments
proliferated everywhere at all levels.

00:46:11.233 --> 00:46:14.000
And then in 1972, chess

00:46:14.000 --> 00:46:18.900
suddenly became much, much
more than a sport and nothing than a proxy

00:46:18.900 --> 00:46:22.766
for geopolitical warfare,
galvanizing international attention

00:46:22.766 --> 00:46:26.700
in a way that forever transformed
the image of a once sedate pastime.

00:46:27.300 --> 00:46:31.166
But always, always within the single

00:46:31.200 --> 00:46:36.333
overriding motif
of competition, conflict and conquest.

00:46:37.533 --> 00:46:38.333
And while all of

00:46:38.333 --> 00:46:41.166
that was going on, chess was quietly,

00:46:41.533 --> 00:46:45.133
steadily, playing a seminal role
in helping to develop

00:46:45.133 --> 00:46:48.700
a new scientific understanding
that would change everything.

00:46:49.900 --> 00:46:54.633
In 1946, the Dutch psychologist
Adriaan de Groot published his Ph.D.

00:46:54.633 --> 00:46:59.533
thesis on chess and decision making based
on a series of pre-war experiments

00:46:59.533 --> 00:47:02.700
he conducted with chess players
of widely different skill levels,

00:47:03.200 --> 00:47:05.500
from amateurs to top grandmasters,

00:47:05.800 --> 00:47:08.566
to better understand what exactly

00:47:08.700 --> 00:47:10.866
makes an expert an expert.

00:47:11.766 --> 00:47:14.966
All participants were presented
with identical chess problems,

00:47:15.466 --> 00:47:16.800
and he asked them to describe

00:47:16.800 --> 00:47:19.833
their thought processes
as they searched for the best move.

00:47:20.700 --> 00:47:23.333
The results were shocking.

00:47:23.333 --> 00:47:26.366
Unsurprisingly, grandmasters
and master level

00:47:26.366 --> 00:47:29.966
players were much, much better at spotting
the best moves than the others.

00:47:30.400 --> 00:47:33.233
But what was unexpected
was how they did so.

00:47:33.866 --> 00:47:37.400
It wasn't as many had imagined
that they probed deeper

00:47:37.400 --> 00:47:41.466
in their searches than others,
contemplating many more moves in advance.

00:47:42.200 --> 00:47:43.500
And it certainly wasn't

00:47:43.500 --> 00:47:46.800
that they investigated
many more possibilities from the outset.

00:47:47.333 --> 00:47:50.333
In fact, on the whole, the better
the player,

00:47:50.633 --> 00:47:52.900
the fewer
the possibilities were considered.

00:47:53.600 --> 00:47:57.866
It was as if the top grandmasters
could somehow immediately perceive

00:47:57.900 --> 00:48:01.800
which options were more promising
than others, enabling them

00:48:01.800 --> 00:48:04.900
to narrow down their investigations
with amazing speed.

00:48:05.566 --> 00:48:09.866
But what exactly were they
perceiving? And how?

00:48:10.666 --> 00:48:13.733
And then there was the question
of how top chess players were dealing

00:48:13.733 --> 00:48:16.800
with this mysterious information
that they had somehow perceived.

00:48:17.533 --> 00:48:21.600
In describing their decision mechanisms,
de Grrot developed  something he called

00:48:21.933 --> 00:48:25.000
“progressive deepening” -  cycles of analysis

00:48:25.000 --> 00:48:28.966
associated with breaking a problem
into its various constituent parts,

00:48:29.166 --> 00:48:32.600
that bears a striking resemblance
to Charles Babbage's convictions

00:48:32.600 --> 00:48:36.700
of more than a century earlier
of how any complex calculation

00:48:36.700 --> 00:48:40.600
could be represented as a hierarchy
of more elementary sub problems.

00:48:41.333 --> 00:48:44.466
The psychology of decision
making was rapidly

00:48:44.466 --> 00:48:47.533
overlapping
with the new field of computer science.

00:48:48.366 --> 00:48:53.466
Two years later, in 1948,
Alan Turing and David Champernowne

00:48:53.466 --> 00:48:56.366
developed the chess-playing algorithm “Turochamp”

00:48:56.900 --> 00:48:59.666
but it was too complex
to be run by computers at the time.

00:49:00.300 --> 00:49:03.600
The following year, Claude
Shannon wrote his landmark paper

00:49:03.833 --> 00:49:06.066
“Programing a Computer for Playing Chess”,

00:49:06.666 --> 00:49:10.400
detailing different approaches
to the development of suitable evaluation

00:49:10.400 --> 00:49:13.766
functions that could be used
to objectively assess chess positions

00:49:14.233 --> 00:49:17.833
and some of the corresponding chess
playing strategies associated with them,

00:49:18.566 --> 00:49:23.433
explicitly incorporating some of
de Groot’s findings in his analysis.

00:49:25.300 --> 00:49:29.000
But the ultimate representative
of the growing convergence of computer

00:49:29.000 --> 00:49:34.466
science and psychology was Herbert
Simon, who was quite simply

00:49:34.766 --> 00:49:38.933
one of the most diverse and influential
thinkers of the 20th century -

00:49:39.633 --> 00:49:42.866
a political scientist
who made groundbreaking contributions

00:49:42.866 --> 00:49:46.200
to psychology,
computer science and economics.

00:49:46.533 --> 00:49:51.200
In 1957, as part of his pioneering efforts
in artificial intelligence,

00:49:51.666 --> 00:49:56.266
Simon and his colleagues Alan Newell
and Cliff Shaw, developed a chess program

00:49:56.500 --> 00:50:01.133
run on the so-called “JOHNNIAC” computer
that was the first ever to beat a human,

00:50:01.466 --> 00:50:04.866
a secretary who was taught
the rules of the game an hour beforehand.

00:50:05.566 --> 00:50:09.500
Simon continued to work on
chess algorithms, among other things,

00:50:09.700 --> 00:50:13.100
throughout the 1960s; and in 1973,

00:50:13.500 --> 00:50:17.900
roughly, when Bobby Fischer was teaching
Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos chess

00:50:17.933 --> 00:50:20.133
shortly after the imposition of martial law,

00:50:20.833 --> 00:50:23.900
he partnered with fellow Carnegie
Mellon professor William Chase

00:50:23.900 --> 00:50:28.033
to penetratingly interpret de Groot’s
intriguing results of 30 years earlier,

00:50:28.666 --> 00:50:31.200
buttressed by additional experiments
that harnessed

00:50:31.233 --> 00:50:35.366
the new technology of tracking the eye
movements of expert chess players.

00:50:36.900 --> 00:50:39.533
What these
expert players were actually perceiving

00:50:39.533 --> 00:50:41.233
when they looked at a chess board

00:50:41.233 --> 00:50:44.100
or simply when they visualized a game
in their mind's eye,

00:50:44.400 --> 00:50:48.733
Simon and Chase deduced, were large scale
chunks of information

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encoded in the particular arrangements
of the pieces,

00:50:52.333 --> 00:50:56.500
with stronger players seeing much larger
chunks and weaker players

00:50:56.500 --> 00:51:00.566
that enabled them to glimpse the
informational essence of chess positions

00:51:00.600 --> 00:51:02.400
much faster.

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These chunks, they claimed,

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represented the very vocabulary
of chess players, with expert players

00:51:09.166 --> 00:51:13.533
possessing roughly 50,000
or so in their long term memory, developed

00:51:13.833 --> 00:51:17.966
from an estimated 10 to 15000 hours
spent studying chess positions.

00:51:18.633 --> 00:51:21.000
The expert players’ 50,000 chunks,

00:51:21.000 --> 00:51:24.900
they wrote, were roughly equivalent
to the 50,000 words

00:51:24.933 --> 00:51:28.633
known by a highly literate adult.

00:51:29.433 --> 00:51:34.466
Yet again, chess proved the ideal framework to investigate a fundamental idea.

00:51:35.733 --> 00:51:38.800
If Simon and Chase were correct
and “chunking theory”

00:51:38.800 --> 00:51:42.900
was a core aspect of perception,
information processing and memory,

00:51:43.300 --> 00:51:47.400
then it must be somehow present
throughout virtually all human tasks.

00:51:47.900 --> 00:51:52.033
But chess, with its characteristic
combinations of different pieces,

00:51:52.033 --> 00:51:54.100
producing a spectrum of distinct

00:51:54.100 --> 00:51:56.833
interdependent evaluations
that could be objectively

00:51:56.833 --> 00:52:00.766
measured, was an obvious choice
to rigorously probe matters -

00:52:01.500 --> 00:52:03.966
“psychology’s drosophila”, as they put it.

00:52:05.500 --> 00:52:07.000
And as psychology continued

00:52:07.000 --> 00:52:09.633
to harness chess to examine human decision
making,

00:52:10.333 --> 00:52:14.266
computer scientists were building
increasingly sophisticated machines

00:52:14.266 --> 00:52:18.166
that could rigorously simulate
such behavior - with chess

00:52:18.300 --> 00:52:21.266
once more,
providing the optimal testing ground.

00:52:22.033 --> 00:52:24.133
In 1974,

00:52:24.133 --> 00:52:27.533
the first World Computer Chess Championship
was held in Stockholm,

00:52:28.066 --> 00:52:32.366
and as chess programs rapidly improved
throughout the 1970s and 1980s,

00:52:32.866 --> 00:52:36.966
it became obvious to everyone
that it would only be a matter of time

00:52:36.966 --> 00:52:41.833
before the best chess player on
the planet would be a computer.

00:52:43.266 --> 00:52:46.033
Well, obvious to anyone who had paid

00:52:46.033 --> 00:52:48.900
any attention
to what was actually happening, that is.

00:52:50.000 --> 00:52:53.833
But most people, both inside and outside
the chess world,

00:52:54.600 --> 00:52:57.333
were somehow taken very much by surprise.

00:52:58.866 --> 00:53:00.466
In 1989,

00:53:00.466 --> 00:53:03.900
after grandmasters began
to lose to chess computers in increasing

00:53:03.900 --> 00:53:08.733
numbers, reigning world chess champion
Garry Kasparov airily declared,

00:53:09.066 --> 00:53:11.300
“Never shall I be beaten by a machine!”

00:53:11.766 --> 00:53:13.266
And when never arrived

00:53:13.266 --> 00:53:17.500
a scant eight years later, the world's
media had once again shoehorned

00:53:17.500 --> 00:53:20.700
what should have been regarded
as one of the greatest scientific

00:53:20.700 --> 00:53:26.300
accomplishments of the age into the standard
zero-sum framework of a primeval battle,

00:53:26.466 --> 00:53:29.400
with Garry Kasparov
representing nothing less

00:53:29.400 --> 00:53:33.433
than the hopes of humanity itself.

00:53:33.900 --> 00:53:36.033
Meanwhile, back on planet Earth,

00:53:37.066 --> 00:53:41.900
communications
technology was rapidly revolutionizing everything

00:53:41.900 --> 00:53:44.100
and chess was no exception.

00:53:44.700 --> 00:53:48.166
Suddenly,
there were unlimited occasions to play

00:53:48.933 --> 00:53:52.033
thousands
of freely available resources to improve

00:53:53.400 --> 00:53:54.100
and countless

00:53:54.100 --> 00:53:57.066
opportunities to analyze the moves
of leading players,

00:53:57.633 --> 00:54:00.766
both past and present, in vivid detail.

00:54:01.833 --> 00:54:04.000
As ever, chess found itself

00:54:04.000 --> 00:54:06.933
on the cutting edge
of contemporary societal concerns,

00:54:07.800 --> 00:54:10.800
now concretely
offering a way that our modern sports

00:54:10.800 --> 00:54:12.000
and entertainment culture

00:54:12.000 --> 00:54:15.100
could be strongly enhanced
by science and technology

00:54:15.600 --> 00:54:19.533
rather than the stereotypical view of the
two being in opposition to each other.

00:54:20.300 --> 00:54:23.733
So when the entire planet effectively
shut down in 2020

00:54:23.733 --> 00:54:27.966
due to the coronavirus pandemic, chess,
whose public image

00:54:27.966 --> 00:54:32.200
had been strongly boosted by Netflix's
recent adaptation of Walter Tevis’

00:54:32.200 --> 00:54:34.733
1983 book, The Queen's Gambit,

00:54:34.733 --> 00:54:37.500
simply moved online and thrived.

00:54:38.866 --> 00:54:42.300
There are also,
of course, major new challenges.

00:54:42.866 --> 00:54:46.633
Now that everyone has easy access
to a superhuman chess engine,

00:54:47.100 --> 00:54:50.933
accusations of cheating at chess
have moved from inconceivable

00:54:51.266 --> 00:54:55.033
to inevitable, with a steadily
increasing string of incidents

00:54:55.033 --> 00:54:59.533
since 2010, most notably
involving Magnus Carlsen,

00:54:59.800 --> 00:55:04.033
the current world champion,
and the American grandmaster Hans Niemann.

00:55:05.400 --> 00:55:06.333
Developing a way to

00:55:06.333 --> 00:55:09.600
accurately detect
cheating at chess is obviously important

00:55:09.600 --> 00:55:13.500
to preserving the integrity of the sport,
but more significantly

00:55:13.700 --> 00:55:17.966
will almost certainly have much broader
implications, providing us

00:55:17.966 --> 00:55:22.266
with a vastly more detailed understanding
of human behavior and decision making.

00:55:23.533 --> 00:55:25.966
As will, almost certainly,

00:55:26.533 --> 00:55:28.533
the next generation of chess programs.

00:55:29.566 --> 00:55:33.900
In 2017, AlphaZero
suddenly burst onto the scene -

00:55:34.200 --> 00:55:38.700
an entirely different type of program
without any type of built-in mechanism

00:55:38.700 --> 00:55:40.966
to evaluate positions, whatsoever.

00:55:41.433 --> 00:55:45.966
It simply began with the rules of chess
and learned the most successful approaches

00:55:45.966 --> 00:55:50.633
by playing against itself
over and over again in a sort of positive

00:55:50.633 --> 00:55:55.066
computer version of the human anguish
so vividly described by Stefan Zweig.

00:55:56.400 --> 00:55:59.366
AlphaZero quickly established itself
as the world's best

00:55:59.366 --> 00:56:02.766
chess-playing program,
and hence the world's best player,

00:56:03.600 --> 00:56:06.900
but even more remarkable than that
was how it did so,

00:56:07.466 --> 00:56:11.800
playing in its own intriguing style
that reflected its unique road

00:56:11.800 --> 00:56:17.166
to understanding - completely independent
of 1500 years of human experience;

00:56:17.700 --> 00:56:20.366
providing us with a fascinating window
on both

00:56:20.366 --> 00:56:22.966
the future and the past.

00:56:23.666 --> 00:56:27.566
And you simply can't ask
for much more cultural impact

00:56:27.566 --> 00:56:28.833
than that.