Short Fiction · The 64-Square Madhouse (2/6) (1/2)

I

Silently, so as not to shock anyone with illusions about well dressed young women, Sandra Lea Grayling cursed the day she had persuaded the Chicago Space Mirror that there would be all sorts of human interest stories to be picked up at the first international grandmaster chess tournament in which an electronic computing machine was entered.

Not that there weren’t enough humans around, it was the interest that was in doubt. The large hall was crammed with energetic dark-suited men of whom a disproportionately large number were bald, wore glasses, were faintly untidy and indefinably shabby, had Slavic or Scandinavian features, and talked foreign languages.

They yakked interminably. The only ones who didn’t were scurrying individuals with the eager-zombie look of officials.

Chess sets were everywhere⁠—big ones on tables, still bigger diagram-type electric ones on walls, small peg-in sets dragged from side pockets and manipulated rapidly as part of the conversational ritual and still smaller folding sets in which the pieces were the tiny magnetized disks used for playing in free-fall.

There were signs featuring largely mysterious combinations of letters: F.I.D.E., W.B.M., U.S.C.F., U.S.S.F., U.S.S.R. and U.N.E.S.C.O. Sandra felt fairly sure about the last three.

The many clocks, bedside table size, would have struck a familiar note except that they had little red flags and wheels sprinkled over their faces and they were all in pairs, two clocks to a case. That Siamese-twin clocks should be essential to a chess tournament struck Sandra as a particularly maddening circumstance.

Her last assignment had been to interview the pilot pair riding the first American manned circum-lunar satellite⁠—and the five alternate pairs who hadn’t made the flight. This tournament hall seemed to Sandra much further out of the world.

Overheard scraps of conversation in reasonably intelligible English were not particularly helpful. Samples:

“They say the Machine has been programmed to play nothing but pure Barcza System and Indian Defenses⁠—and the Dragon Formation if anyone pushes the King Pawn.”

“Hah! In that case⁠ ⁠…”

“The Russians have come with ten trunkfuls of prepared variations and they’ll gang up on the Machine at adjournments. What can one New Jersey computer do against four Russian grandmasters?”

“I heard the Russians have been programmed⁠—with hypnotic cramming and somno-briefing. Votbinnik had a nervous breakdown.”

“Why, the Machine hasn’t even a Haupturnier or an intercollegiate won. It’ll over its head be playing.”

“Yes, but maybe like Capa at San Sebastian or Morphy or Willie Angler at New York. The Russians will look like potzers.”

“Have you studied the scores of the match between Moon Base and Circum-Terra?”

“Not worth the trouble. The play was feeble. Barely Expert Rating.”

Sandra’s chief difficulty was that she knew absolutely nothing about the game of chess⁠—a point that she had slid over in conferring with the powers at the Space Mirror, but that now had begun to weigh on her. How wonderful it would be, she dreamed, to walk out this minute, find a quiet bar and get pie-eyed in an evil, ladylike way.

“Perhaps mademoiselle would welcome a drink?”

“You’re durn tootin’ she would!” Sandra replied in a rush, and then looked down apprehensively at the person who had read her thoughts.

It was a small sprightly elderly man who looked like a somewhat thinned down Peter Lorre⁠—there was that same impression of the happy Slavic elf. What was left of his white hair was cut very short, making a silvery nap. His pince-nez had quite thick lenses. But in sharp contrast to the somberly clad men around them, he was wearing a pearl-gray suit of almost exactly the same shade as Sandra’s⁠—a circumstance that created for her the illusion that they were fellow conspirators.

“Hey, wait a minute,” she protested just the same. He had already taken her arm and was piloting her toward the nearest flight of low wide stairs. “How did you know I wanted a drink?”

“I could see that mademoiselle was having difficulty swallowing,” he replied, keeping them moving. “Pardon me for feasting my eyes on your lovely throat.”

“I didn’t suppose they’d serve drinks here.”

“But of course.” They were already mounting the stairs. “What would chess be without coffee or schnapps?”

“Okay, lead on,” Sandra said. “You’re the doctor.”

“Doctor?” He smiled widely. “You know, I like being called that.”

“Then the name is yours as long as you want it⁠—Doc.”

Meanwhile the happy little man had edged them into the first of a small cluster of tables, where a dark-suited jabbering trio was just rising. He snapped his fingers and hissed through his teeth. A white-aproned waiter materialized.

“For myself black coffee,” he said. “For mademoiselle rhine wine and seltzer?”

“That’d go fine.” Sandra leaned back. “Confidentially, Doc, I was having trouble swallowing⁠ ⁠… well, just about everything here.”

He nodded. “You are not the first to be shocked and horrified by chess,” he assured her. “It is a curse of the intellect. It is a game for lunatics⁠—or else it creates them. But what brings a sane and beautiful young lady to this 64-square madhouse?”

Sandra briefly told him her story and her predicament. By the time they were served, Doc had absorbed the one and assessed the other.

“You have one great advantage,” he told her. “You know nothing whatsoever of chess⁠—so you will be able to write about it understandably for your readers.” He swallowed half his demitasse and smacked his lips. “As for the Machine⁠—you do know, I suppose, that it is not a humanoid metal robot, walking about clanking and squeaking like a late medieval knight in armor?”

“Yes, Doc, but⁠ ⁠…” Sandra found difficulty in phrasing the question.

“Wait.” He lifted a finger. “I think I know what you’re going to ask. You want to know why, if the Machine works at all, it doesn’t work perfectly, so that it always wins and there is no contest. Right?”

Sandra grinned and nodded. Doc’s ability to interpret her mind was as comforting as the bubbly, mildly astringent mixture she was sipping.

He removed his pince-nez, massaged the bridge of his nose and replaced them.

“If you had,” he said, “a billion computers all as fast as the Machine, it would take them all the time there ever will be in the universe just to play through all the possible games of chess, not to mention the time needed to classify those games into branching families of wins for White, wins for Black and draws, and the additional time required to trace out chains of key-moves leading always to wins. So the Machine can’t play chess like God. What the Machine can do is examine all the likely lines of play for about eight moves ahead⁠—that is, four moves each for White and Black⁠—and then decide which is the best move on the basis of capturing enemy pieces, working toward checkmate, establishing a powerful central position and so on.”

“That sounds like the way a man would play a game,” Sandra observed. “Look ahead a little way and try to make a plan. You know, like getting out trumps in bridge or setting up a finesse.”

“Exactly!” Doc beamed at her approvingly. “The Machine is like a man. A rather peculiar and not exactly pleasant man. A man who always abides by sound principles, who is utterly incapable of flights of genius, but who never makes a mistake. You see, you are finding human interest already, even in the Machine.”

Sandra nodded. “Does a human chess player⁠—a grandmaster, I mean⁠—ever look eight moves ahead in a game?”

“Most assuredly he does! In crucial situations, say where there’s a chance of winning at once by trapping the enemy king, he examines many more moves ahead than that⁠—thirty or forty even. The Machine is probably programmed to recognize such situations and do something of the same sort, though we can’t be sure from the information World Business Machines has released. But in most chess positions the possibilities are so very nearly unlimited that even a grandmaster can only look a very few moves ahead and must rely on his judgment and experience and artistry. The equivalent of those in the Machine is the directions fed into it before it plays a game.”

“You mean the programming?”

“Indeed yes! The programming is the crux of the problem of the chess-playing computer. The first practical model, reported by Bernstein and Roberts of I.B.M. in 1958 and which looked four moves ahead, was programmed so that it had a greedy worried tendency to grab at enemy pieces and to retreat its own whenever they were attacked. It had a personality like that of a certain kind of chess-playing dub⁠—a dull-brained woodpusher afraid to take the slightest risk of losing material⁠—but a dub who could almost always beat an utter novice. The W.B.M. machine here in the hall operates about a million times as fast. Don’t ask me how, I’m no physicist, but it depends on the new transistors and something they call hypervelocity, which in turn depends on keeping parts of the Machine at a temperature near absolute zero. However, the result is that the Machine can see eight moves ahead and is capable of being programmed much more craftily.”

“A million times as fast as the first machine, you say, Doc? And yet it only sees twice as many moves ahead?” Sandra objected.

“There is a geometrical progression involved there,” he told her with a smile. “Believe me, eight moves ahead is a lot of moves when you remember that the Machine is errorlessly examining every one of thousands of variations. Flesh-and-blood chess masters have lost games by blunders they could have avoided by looking only one or two moves ahead. The Machine will make no such oversights. Once again, you see, you have the human factor, in this case working for the Machine.”

“Savilly, I have been looking all over the place for you!”

A stocky, bull-faced man with a great bristling shock of black, gray-flecked hair had halted abruptly by their table. He bent over Doc and began to whisper explosively in a guttural foreign tongue.

Sandra’s gaze traveled beyond the balustrade. Now that she could look down at it, the central hall seemed less confusedly crowded. In the middle, toward the far end, were five small tables spaced rather widely apart and with a chessboard and men and one of the Siamese clocks set out on each. To either side of the hall were tiers of temporary seats, about half of them occupied. There were at least as many more people still wandering about.

On the far wall was a big electric scoreboard and also, above the corresponding tables, five large dully glassy chessboards, the White squares in light gray, the Black squares in dark.

One of the five wall chessboards was considerably larger than the other four⁠—the one above the Machine.

Sandra looked with quickening interest at the console of the Machine⁠—a bank of keys and some half-dozen panels of rows and rows of tiny telltale lights, all dark at the moment. A thick red velvet cord on little brass standards ran around the Machine at a distance of about ten feet. Inside the cord were only a few gray-smocked men. Two of them had just laid a black cable to the nearest chess table and were attaching it to the Siamese clock.

Sandra tried to think of a being who always checked everything, but only within limits beyond which his thoughts never ventured, and who never made a mistake⁠ ⁠…

“Miss Grayling! May I present to you Igor Jandorf.”

She turned back quickly with a smile and a nod.

“I should tell you, Igor,” Doc continued, “that Miss Grayling represents a large and influential Midwestern newspaper. Perhaps you have a message for her readers.”

The shock-headed man’s eyes flashed. “I most certainly do!” At that moment the waiter arrived with a second coffee and wine-and-seltzer. Jandorf seized Doc’s new demitasse, drained it, set it back on the tray with a flourish and drew himself up.

“Tell your readers, Miss Grayling,” he proclaimed, fiercely arching his eyebrows at her and actually slapping his chest, “that I, Igor Jandorf, will defeat the Machine by the living force of my human personality! Already I have offered to play it an informal game blindfold⁠—I, who have played 50 blindfold games simultaneously! Its owners refuse me. I have challenged it also to a few games of rapid-transit⁠—an offer no true grandmaster would dare ignore. Again they refuse me. I predict that the Machine will play like a great oaf⁠—at least against me. Repeat: I, Igor Jandorf, by the living force of my human personality, will defeat the Machine. Do you have that? You can remember it?”

“Oh yes,” Sandra assured him, “but there are some other questions I very much want to ask you, Mr. Jandorf.”

“I am sorry, Miss Grayling, but I must clear my mind now. In ten minutes they start the clocks.”

While Sandra arranged for an interview with Jandorf after the day’s playing session, Doc reordered his coffee.

“One expects it of Jandorf,” he explained to Sandra with a philosophic shrug when the shock-headed man was gone. “At least he didn’t take your wine-and-seltzer. Or did he? One tip I have for you: don’t call a chess master Mister, call him Master. They all eat it up.”

“Gee, Doc, I don’t know how to thank you for everything. I hope I haven’t offended Mis⁠—Master Jandorf so that he doesn’t⁠—”

“Don’t worry about that. Wild horses couldn’t keep Jandorf away from a press interview. You know, his rapid-transit challenge was cunning. That’s a minor variety of chess where each player gets only ten seconds to make a move. Which I don’t suppose would give the Machine time to look three moves ahead. Chess players would say that the Machine has a very slow sight of the board. This tournament is being played at the usual international rate of 15 moves an hour, and⁠—”

“Is that why they’ve got all those crazy clocks?” Sandra interrupted.

“Oh, yes. Chess clocks measure the time each player takes in making his moves. When a player makes a move he presses a button that shuts his clock off and turns his opponent’s on. If a player uses too much time, he loses as surely as if he were checkmated. Now since the Machine will almost certainly be programmed to take an equal amount of time on successive moves, a rate of 15 moves an hour means it will have 4 minutes a move⁠—and it will need every second of them! Incidentally it was typical Jandorf bravado to make a point of a blindfold challenge⁠—just as if the Machine weren’t playing blindfold itself. Or is the Machine blindfold? How do you think of it?”

“Gosh, I don’t know. Say, Doc, is it really true that Master Jandorf has played 50 games at once blindfolded? I can’t believe that.”

“Of course not!” Doc assured her. “It was only 49 and he lost two of those and drew five. Jandorf always exaggerates. It’s in his blood.”

“He’s one of the Russians, isn’t he?” Sandra asked. “Igor?”

Doc chuckled. “Not exactly,” he said gently. “He is originally a Pole and now he has Argentinian citizenship. You have a program, don’t you?”

Sandra started to hunt through her pocketbook, but just then two lists of names lit up on the big electric scoreboard.

William Angler, U.S.A.
Bela Grabo, Hungary
Ivan Jal, U.S.S.R.
Igor Jandorf, Argentina
Dr. S. Krakatower, France
Vassily Lysmov, U.S.S.R.
The Machine, U.S.A. (programmed by Simon Great)
Maxim Serek, U.S.S.R.
Moses Sherevsky, U.S.A.
Mikhail Votbinnik, U.S.S.R.
Tournament Director: Dr. Jan Vanderhoef

Sherevsky vs. Serek
Jal vs. Angler
Jandorf vs. Votbinnik
Lysmov vs. Krakatower
Grabo vs. Machine

“Cripes, Doc, they all sound like they were Russians,” Sandra said after a bit. “Except this Willie Angler. Oh, he’s the boy wonder, isn’t he?”