Speaking Of Chess

I received an e-mail from an old college chum today. Though I haven't seen Chris in person for at least 20 years, he includes me in a list of friends and relatives to whom he sends out jokes, canonical lists and family updates over the internet.

Our mutual interest in chess brought us together as freshmen. We played dozens of games during our next four years of college at Central Michigan. After graduation, when we were footloose and unencumbered with responsibility, we occasionally challenged the patzers in Michigan's Upper Peninsula at chess tourneys there.

Eventually, we went our own ways. For a little while, we played correspondence chess by U.S. mail. Computers back then were dinosaurs compared to today. And chess-playing programs were crude and played poorly. When computer chess-playing programs improved, we stopped playing by mail. Cheating would be too tempting, I think.

I still have the second chess-playing computer game I bought. The packaging brags that it carried a United States Chess Federation of 1771, roughly where Chris and I were at (over 1800 is a Class A player, over 2000 is an expert, over 2200 is a master, over 2600 is a grandmaster, etc.)

Not that long after I bought that, somebody gave me a free shareware program simply called Ed’s Chess that performed even better. In fact, I had an extremely difficult time trying to beat it. That was when I started losing interest. Who wants to play a game where machines dominate?

My friend also has not played seriously in 25 years, he says. But recently he installed the Chessmaster 9000 on his computer. Here are his comments:

"I played 3 or 4 games in which I started out okay, but somewhere around the middle of each game things started to get challenging and then in a rush I would find myself having my ass handed to me. I then took a moment to look at the instructions and see what I could do about various settings and so on, and discovered the computer opponent I had been playing against was set for a 2879 rating level."

A 2879 rating level is roughly the equivalent of an international grandmaster in chess. It would be like an ordinary golfer taking on Tiger Woods, or an everyday tennis player suddenly finding himself playing against Roger Federer.

Shows you how far computers and artificial intelligence has come since we played in college. Remember movie "Searching for Bobby Fischer", which describes the a quest to find the next champion caliber chess player in the United States? Who would have thought to search in the computer games section of the local Best Buy.