the timboucher experience

I recently discovered in the “games” folder of my computer a program called “Chess Titans.” It’s not that fun compared to playing against real live humans beings who are sitting right in front of you. You just gain so much more from the actual lived experience of a game with another person… But I have been enjoying the “undo” function. I never let people take back moves in real games. That’s just the rules. When your finger is off the piece after a move, you’ve committed to it – even if you immediately realize how stupid a move it was. But playing against a computer presents different challenges and opportunities. Powerful computers regularly beat the best human chess champions. But the easiest level is so easy that it’s annoying. The computer makes moves that simply don’t make any sense. They don’t exhibit human-style decision-making processes. They are simply random moves of pieces on a board. No life, no art, no joy in the movements. On the next levels up, I am routinely beaten in short order. And on the most difficult levels, the computer plays so incredibly slow (running through all possible moves, presumably) that I simply can’t finish a game. So I’ve resorted to using the undo function. Not so much for when I make a stupid move (because I’m certain to lose), but so that I can play out forks in games, as though they were programs. That is, I can go back from a particular board position three moves, four moves, six, seven – whatever. And then play through the same game but valuing different pieces and playing in a different style and then seeing where I end up, what the differences in outcome are.

Just re-watched Terminator 2 after several years. Great movie, so much better than T4 (why Skynet couldn’t intercept simple radio signals from a sub, I have no idea…). But it strikes me that, through sending these figures back in time, Skynet was sort of doing the same thing: seeking cause and effect relationships within events, hitting the “undo” button enough times that it could fork back to another board position and have the game end differently.

I’ve heard it said somewhere that the reason the Soviets lost the Cold War was that they were playing chess while American strategists were playing poker. In chess, the whole “game state” is available to both players at all times. There’s no hidden information, and so the computer can perform its calculations to perfection – even if it takes a while for it to crunch the numbers. As a poker player you never know exactly what the situation looks like. You cannot see the opponent’s cards, and you don’t know what cards are about to come on the table. (Ben Mack talked about this in my interview with him) and this hidden information changes everything. Or that’s the theory anyway. The 2009 World Series of Poker apparently featured a 2009 Poker Bot Competition with contenders from the University of Alberta winning first and second place. Where were the Russians on this one?

• Play Chess Against Yourself
• Hampden Chess Club
• He Looked Like Me
• Poker & I Ching: Gambling, Divination & The Traveler’s Trades
• Learn to Play Championship Chess In Baltimore