December 26, 2019 • 36 mins
Will and Mango go deep into their chess cave to determine: what's the most dangerous styles of chess, why did the game move from the battlefield to the royal court, and if a billion people to play chess, can that stop an alien invasion?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Part Time Genius, the production of I Heart Radio.
I guess, well, well, what's that mango? So I was
reading the story about the chess player Bobby Fisher this week.
This is when he was young, and I guess he'd
won a US championship at the time, so he was famous,
but he was also just a kid, and he didn't
(00:24):
have that much money, and you know, he's kind of
a recluse, right. Actually, I had read that he used
to play secretly online like later in his life, and
there was always so much buzz when somebody thought they
noticed his style of play and and and thought they
were onto and that they discovered that it was him. Yeah,
if I feel like you'd see that pop up from
like Japan or Malaysia or wherever. There's these people who
(00:45):
were just like so excited to have played Bobby Fisher.
I think they've played Bobby Fisher. But so, anyway, he's
young at this time. He wants to go see a
movie and he doesn't have money for it, so he
walks into the Chess and Checker Club of New York
just to pick up a few extra bucks. I guess
to hustle it, right, And I guess at the time
it was this, uh, this large, smoke filled, crowded pool
hall type place but for chess, and Bobby's totally in disguise.
(01:08):
He's got a rainco, he's got his collar off, sunglasses
and a hat. He looks ridiculous, but he does not
want to be noticed. So he asked a friend, like,
do you think he can just get me into a game?
And a friend asked the owner across the bar. And
remember it's smoke filled and like, Bobby's in disguise, so
the owner goes tell him, no, he's just a kid.
The hustlers will eat him alive. And so like, Bobby
(01:30):
Fisher is furious and he just stomps out. And this
is all reported. This is a real story. But when
his friend tells the owner who it was, that it
was Bobby Fisher who wanted a game, like, apparently the
whole crowd at the place has this audible grown and
this one guy goes, oh, man, I would have paid
hundreds of dollars just to sit across from Bobby Fisher
(01:50):
on a chess board. Anyway, So I don't know much
about chess, but I do love stories about it. And
we're gonna get into the most dangerous styles of chess,
how the game moved from the battlefield to the royal court,
and even why getting a billion people to play chess
might be our best hope to keep away aliens. Let's
dig in the their podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius.
(02:33):
I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my
good friend man Guess Ticketer and on the other side
of the soundproof class writing down a list of chess
openings he's trying to master. Actually, can you read what
he's got on the white board over there, Mango, Yeah,
he's got the hillbilly attack, the monkeys burn, Hippopotamus defense,
does something called the toilet variation He's written definitely, Yeah,
(02:55):
it definitely says toilet variation. Well, those are all real
chess opening moves. But that's our friend and producer Tristan McNeil,
who also happens to be a future chess master, not
a current chess master, but I'm confident of future chester. Yeah.
He can do anything he puts his mind too. But
you know, chess is one of those things I used
to love as a kid, Like I played it on
my computer. We used to play it with relatives, but
(03:18):
I never got good at it, Like I'm probably as
good as I was in second grade. But I do
love like movies and books that involved it. I I
read this great book last year. It's really slim. It's
called The Chess Game and it's by the same author
that wrote The Hotel Budapest. And you know, I don't
understand any of the chess strategy, but I was totally
(03:39):
enamored with how the main character plays these games of
chess in his head. Yeah, I mean, like that's a
real skill. I had heard about these two Silicon Vallet
guys who met for the first time. I want to
say it was Peter thiel And and somebody equally famous.
And any way, the first time they met, they sat
down at a restaurant and one of them said, I
heard you like chess, and then all about an opening
(04:00):
play and they actually played a full game on an
imaginary board in their heads. Like just these two chess savants.
That would be the weirdest conversation to like, wait a
table on just hearing people call out letters and numbers.
But you know what's crazy to me is, you know,
one of our friends dads was a chess champ in Ecuador,
(04:23):
and they're these photos of him playing like twelve matches
at a time, just moving from board to board to
board and making moves super quick. And and then there's
like blindfold chest, which is kind of like what you're
talking about. But you know what's weird is that a
lot of people used to think that playing chess while
blindfolded can actually lead to brain damage, brain dam So
so why do they think that. Apparently it's just so
(04:45):
exhausting to keep track of all those pieces while also
planning out your next moves. And in fact, the Soviet
Union completely banned blindfold chess in because of that perceived danger.
And and actually one Russian player died during his attempt
to break the world record for a number of opponents
played wild blindfolded. What you're saying, people combine those things
like they blindfold themselves then play multiple games simultaneously. Do
(05:09):
people still do this? Yeah? And actually a new world
record was set less than two years ago. So this
chess grandmaster, his name's Timore Garyev, and he played forty
eight games of blindfold chess simultaneously over the course of
the three hours. Yeah, he actually won eight percent of
those games, and it's ridiculous. Along the way, he was
(05:32):
actually riding an exercise bike the whole time, and in
the end he peddled apparently about fifty miles. Good lord,
I mean, I love that they just added the exercise
bike because they're playing forty eight simultaneous blindfold games. Wasn't enough.
I'm thinking though, maybe after Tristan masters the Hippopotamus defense,
that he's going to get on this blindfold chess train.
(05:54):
We'll see. Well, anyway, for today's show, we're going to
cover chess, so we'll we'll take a deep die into
the history of the game, how the rules developed, and
why the iconic pieces look the way they do. I
think I've always been curious about this. And then a
little later we'll try to figure out why Russians are
so good at chess, as well as why computers might
be the best players of all. Now, of course, we'll
(06:15):
take a look at how playing chess can affect your
brain and just what kind of smart it actually makes you. Anyway,
that's right, So let's jump right in and talk about
the history of chess, because it actually goes quite a
ways back. So most historians believe in early version of
the game was invented in India about fift undred years ago,
and the first known mention of anything involving chess appears
(06:35):
in a text from five and then about a century later,
the game made its way to Persia, where a few
different variations evolved. So the exact rules of the game
and the appearances of the pieces hadn't been formalized at
that time, but the pieces did have these established identities
that aren't that dissimilar from what we're used today. So
one of the main differences was that the game didn't
(06:56):
lay out a royal court like it does. It was
more of a battlefield back then, with the king being
the only piece shared between the ancient version and the
modern version. I'm curiously, do you know what the other
pieces were in the old battlefield version? Yeah, so instead
of ponds, you had these infantry pieces. Nights were cavalry,
and and bishops were elephants. I think our rooks were
(07:16):
actually chariots as well. And what about the what about
the queen? Was the queen part of the game at
that point. That's a different story. I mean, well, we'll
get to that in a minute. But the short answer
is that the piece would later become the Queen. It
was actually called the vizier or or the advisor. So
if you think about Jaffar, the villain from Aladdin, like,
that's basically what the piece was, and he was the
(07:37):
top counselor to the ruler. But you've got to remember
the rules of the game hadn't solidified, so most of
the pieces didn't move exactly like they do now. So
the Advisor, for instance, could only move one square diagonally,
which made it this much weaker piece than today's Queen,
which can obviously, you know, move any number of squares
in any direction she wants. Yeah, that's interesting. So how
(07:58):
did the weakest piece in the game pretty much to
become the strongest because the queen has you know, better
moves than the king, right, I mean, I know the
King can move in any direction just like the Queen can,
but he only moves one square at a time, which
is just I don't know that must that would piss
me off if I Yeah, but he's probably got gout
overrese you know. So the upset and power didn't actually
(08:20):
happen until after the game had spread west to Europe
in the early eleventh century, and once the game hit Europe,
that's when it shifted from that army on the battlefield
to members of the royal court. And for a while
most of the pieces still moved more or less according
to the original rules, but that changed sometime in the
fourteen hundreds or so when this unknown inventor, I think
it was either in Italy or Spain, introduced the rules
(08:43):
we know today, and the most important revisions he made
were to the Bishop and the Queen, which until then
had been sort of the weakest pieces on the board
except for the ponds and something. These pieces were less
restricted in their movement and a whole lot stronger, and
it was one of those changes that just made the
game so much faster and more interesting to play. And
that makes sense, and I could see how those would
(09:03):
go over well in terms of the actual game play.
But it's a little bit surprising because if you think
about it making the queen the most powerful piece on
the board, it it feels pretty progressive for you know,
think about this was medieval times you're talking about. That's true,
and there were tons of sexist players that did kind
of excuse the change there and said that the strength
was only in her defense of the King. That's when
(09:26):
her power came up. But but the reality is that
queens were getting more powerful on the chessboard at the
same time they were getting more powerful in real life.
So so you think back to the fourteenth and fifteen centuries,
the ladies that were coming to power all over Europe,
where people like Elizabeth the First and Mary Tudor and
Queen Isabella. That's pretty cool to see that that would
you know, be mirrored on the chessboard. But so I
(09:47):
actually want to stick with the chess pieces for just
a minute and talk about how they got these iconic
designs that we're all used to seeing at this point.
I mean, you know, you think about the horsehead knights
and the castle shaped brooks, because obviously, during those sin
trees of innovation and development that you were talking about,
the game was really spreading through all different regions and cultures,
and there was actually no standard chess set to play with.
(10:10):
I mean, the basic setup was there. You had a
board with sixty four squares and thirty two pieces, and
you know, I guess they made pretty similar moves, but
what those pieces actually looked like, or how they felt,
or even what they were made of. I mean all
of that very dramatically depending on where you were playing
the game. And so all of these countless varieties of
styles worked well enough for a while. But you come
(10:33):
upon the nineteenth century and the game has become so
popular that chess clubs and competitions began cropping up all
over the world. So you can imagine it actually got
pretty confusing when players from different cultures would sit down
for a match and then realized that none of the
opponent's pieces looked familiar to them. Would be so weird
and very strange. But and it's still just so strange
(10:55):
that the game evolved somewhat similarly in so many places,
and that this was really the big difference. But you
asked forward a bit to eighteen forty nine, and there
was a British architect named Nathan Cook who built this
standardized set that was called the Staunton Chess set, and
its pieces are actually the ones that we still know today.
So I'm curious, like, if Nathan Cook made the set,
(11:17):
why is it called the Staunton set? Like who is Stunton? Yeah,
what you'd think it might be called the Cook Chess set,
But he actually decided to forego that fame and in
favor of practicality. So there was a guy named Howard
Staunton who was a major player in the London chess
scene at the time, and he'd organized these tournaments and
clubs and was really considered one of the best players
(11:38):
in the world. And so Cook knew how respected Staunton
was in this chess community, and so he approached him
and asked if Staunton's name could be used to market
his new designs, And of course Staunton was flattered and
agreed as soon as he saw the pieces, and so
the set was a huge hit with the public, and
really since the nineteen twenties it's actually been the required
(11:58):
set for all world chess organizations. I didn't realize that.
So what was the revolutionary about the Stunt set? Like
I I get that it became the standard, but why
is that exactly? Well, the set had a few things
going for it, so for starters it it wasn't wholly
unfamiliar because Cook had studied a bunch of different popular
chess sets that were in use at the time and
(12:19):
use those common traits really as starting points for his
own set, and then from there he would look to
inspiration in the architecture of Victorian London, which was the
city around him at the time, and also for some reason,
from the ruins of ancient Greece and Rome. And so
take the Night for example, The Night and the Staunton
set is a great example of that influence. Like it's
(12:40):
the only piece in the set that isn't an abstract
representation of something, and instead it looks like a pretty
realistic horse head. And that's because it's pretty clearly inspired
by a sculpture on the east pediment of the Parthenon.
So that carving depicts horses pulling the chariot of the moon,
goddess of Greek mythology, and so that supposedly what the
(13:01):
Staunton Night is based on, like this horse that drew
the moon across the sky each night, which is such
a weird mishmash of things, right, like Victorian London, you've
got like Greece and Rome because the culture is like,
so what else was Cook doing? All right? Well? I
actually found this breakdown in the Smithsonian of the Staunton set,
(13:23):
and here are a few of the key features. According
to the article, it says, um, while some variation is tolerated,
there are several key distinguishing characteristics that define a set
as a stunt. The King is topped with a cross,
and as the tallest piece, it serves as a metric
for the height of the other ones. The Queen is
topped by a crown and a ball, the Bishop has
(13:44):
a split top, and the rook is a squat castle turret.
And so with all of this, Cook really established this
clear and simple language with the forms that he was choosing,
which not only made them easy to recognize, but pretty
cheap to produce as well. And so I'm betting that
all of that together is probably why the Staunton said,
is still, you know, really the global standard today. All right, well,
(14:07):
I know we want to jump ahead in the timeline
and talk a little bit about the rise of chess
in Russia, but before we do that, I do want
to run quickly through a little of its history in
the US. And as you might imagine, the game made
its way stateside thanks to European columnists, but despite the
fact that Ben Franklin was a huge chess fan, the
game really didn't catch on until the mid nineteenth century.
(14:27):
And what turned the tide was that this American chess
player his name was Paul Morphy. He managed to beat
all of Europe's chess champions in this international tournament. It
was the first time this had ever happened. So people's
patriotism just kind of kicked in at that point and
it did its thing, and from then on chess became
super popular in the US. Of course, not everyone was
(14:48):
happy to see the game takeoff. And why is that?
I mean, I read this hilarious old article from this
eighteen fifty nine edition of Scientific American, and the author
basically treats chess like the sinis de corrupting influence, almost
like it's the fortnight of its time. And so this
is how the author describes this very real danger of chess.
(15:09):
A pernicious excitement to learn and play chess has spread
all over the country, and numerous clubs for practicing this
game have been formed in cities and villages. Why should
we regret this, it may be asked. We answer, Chess
is a mirror amusement of a very inferior character, which
robs the mind a valuable time and might be devoted
to nobler requirements, while it affords no benefits whatever to
(15:31):
the body. A game of chess does not add a
single new fact to the mind. It does not excite
a single beautiful thought, nor does it serve a single
purpose for polishing and improving the nobler faculties. You know,
those were really the good old days when the greatest
threat facing the youth of America with the pressure to
join a chess club when you talk about it. Alright, well,
(15:52):
now that we've heard from the critics, let's talk a
little bit about some of the game's biggest proponents, which
of course are the Russians. So but before we get
to them, let's take a quick break. You're listening to
(16:17):
part time Genius and we're talking about the enduring appeal
of one of the world's oldest games, chess. So well,
one thing I noticed this week is that it's suspiciously
large number of top ranking chess players all hail from
Russia or some other Soviet republic, and that includes chess
grandmasters like Anthelie Karpov Gary Kasparov, And it really made
me wonder, like, why do the Russians have such a
(16:39):
dominance for chess. Well, it's interesting, and so of course
was digging into this in our research for this week.
But chess first spread the Russia along the Persian and
Indian trade routes. And that was way back in the
seventh century or so, and it was popular from the start,
but it didn't really become a national pastime until much later.
More we're talking like the nineteenth century or so. Now,
(16:59):
this was during the Russian Revolution when Lenin and the
Bolsheviks took power, and Lennon was a big player. I mean,
he really loved the game, and Stalin would be after him.
But the real mastermind behind the country's chess movement was
Lennon's commander of the Soviet Army, this guy named Nikola Krelenko. Now,
he opened these dedicated chess schools, he organized competitions and
(17:22):
really paved the way for these first state sponsored chess tournaments.
And this was back in So you fast forward a
decade and you've got roughly half a million amateur players
that have signed up for these state chess programs. It's
pretty remarkable how quickly it grew. Yeah, so it sounds
like there's this big push from the state and that's
what sort of kick started Russia's love affair with chess.
(17:44):
But why were all those Soviet leaders and think are
so into chess in the first place, Like, was it
just because it's a strategic game, and and they were
kind of seen as great schemers. You know, I'm guessing
the strategy involved was a big part of the appeal
for them, so that that's probably true. But I also
read this article in Slate that suggested there might have
been a little bit more to it, so I just
(18:05):
will read a little bit of this. The author of
the piece was Chris Beam, and he was describing the
appeal of chess. So he writes, the Soviets saw chess
as embodying their revolutionary ideals. It was a game of skill,
and the USSR prided itself on intellectual talents. It was
also cheap, which meant anyone could play it, and it's
back and forth dynamic reflected that dialectical concept of history
(18:28):
espouse by Marxism. You know, never mind the irony of
playing with imperialist symbols like kings and queens. That is funny,
you know. I I and thought about that. But I
know chess is hugely popular in Russia, even if it
no longer has state money behind it. And there's actually
this one famous chess supporter in particularly who I want
to talk about not only because he's done a lot
(18:49):
to keep the game relevant for Russian citizens, but also
because he's just a super weird guy. His name is
kirsn uh illiams in Off, which I know I mispronouncing.
He was president of the World Chess Federation from all
the way up until just last year, and that's when
he was finally ousted in favor of a new president.
It's a pretty impressive run those of what makes him
(19:12):
such a weird guy. So there are actually a bunch
of things, but honestly, they all kind of hinge on
one in particular, which is that Kirsen claims that he
was abducted by aliens, and I'm just gonna let him
explain what happened. And this is what he said an
interview about a decade after the abduction. It happened on
September sevent I was taken from my apartment in Moscow
(19:33):
and taken to the spaceship and we went to some
star and after that I asked, please bring me back
because the next day I should be back and go
to the Ukraine. They said, no problem, Kirson, you have time.
Oh no, no problems, I guess he got napped by
some considerate aliens. I mean, not every abductee is so lucky,
is that? Yeah? Usually there's more provings. These weren't just
(19:56):
any aliens. They were the sophisticates that invented che us.
Apparently that's true. You know, I didn't realize that this
was even a theory. So do people really think chess
was created by aliens? Well, at least one guy does,
because in that same interview, Kerson went on to say,
I am not a crazy man. My theory is that
chess comes from space. Why because the same rules sixty
(20:17):
four squares black and white, and the same rules in
Japan and China and Qatar and Mongolia and Africa. The
rules are the same. Why I think maybe it is
from space. I mean, I don't want to challenge somebody
that was in power for that long, but I have
to say his evidence feels a little bit thin to me.
I mean, we just tracked the spread of chess across
(20:38):
different continents, so I feel like jumping straight to the
aliens theory it feels a little off to me for
some reason. So Kirson did leave the door open for
at least one other possibility, and in this interview with
The Observer, he admitted that there were actually two options,
and this is how he put it. Each year archaeologists
find evidence of chess in America, India, Japan, or China
played under the same rules from a time without playing
(21:00):
or the internet. Look, the chess board has sixty four squares,
and ourselves are made of sixty four pieces. All the
shows that chess comes either from God or from UFOs.
So yeah, it's basically a toss off. Like, the only
thing we know for certain is that chess wasn't invented
by humans. Is such a strange story. I mean, why
even tell people about this? I mean, the aliens just
(21:21):
kind of took him on this joy ride through the
Solar System and then dropped him off in time for
a meeting. It seems pretty uneventful for what it could
have been. Yeah, but you've got to remember he remained
president of the Chess Federation for another twenty years after
the incident, So I guess the story really didn't bother people.
And as for the trip being uneventful, there was at
least one part that had some real and lasting consequences.
(21:42):
Oh yeah, what what what's that? At some point during
the journey, the alien suggested to Carson that it would
be a really good idea for him to build this
extravagant city dedicated to all things chess. And so he
went home and did that. But he built an actual
chess city. Yeah. So at the time Kierson had the
second job, he was president of the Republic of Calmakia,
(22:04):
which I guess it is a subject of the Russian Federation,
and using his cloud as leader, Kierson was able to
build his chess city on the east side of this
Buddhist town called Alista, and he went all out right, like,
the city has a chess museum, this huge open air
chess board, it's got a swimming pool, enough chess sets
to host year round tournaments. It's actually hosted several championships
(22:27):
in the year was built, I guess in But Kirson's
real goal was to use Chess City to boost the
popularity of the game so that the total number of
chess players in the world would rise from six hundred million,
which I guess is where it is approximately now, to
a full billion. Wow, I mean, that seems like a
big goal. So what was so important about hitting a
billion players? Apparently that's the number of players needed to
(22:49):
stop aliens from destroying the planet. I mean, it just
gets weirder and weird. So how did this guy stay
in office for multiple decades? I know, oh, I I
guess he was just really serious about it, And like,
I don't know. I found this interview that he did
with Independent This is back in two thousand and ten,
and he kind of just flat out says that playing
(23:11):
chess is the key to preventing this alien attack. And
he writes, above us, they're all looking at us, and
maybe they will get tired of us. And suddenly he
tails off, making dramatic gesture of destruction. How can we
save ourselves from them only through intellect, concentration, and spiritual energy.
If a billion people are in these chess centers playing chess,
the world will still have positive energy. All right, Well
(23:35):
I meant it. I mean, I'm invested in this now
if the fate of the world is at stake on
all this. But I have to know, did Krison get
to a billion players? Like, did the Chess city work?
It did not, so, and the whole thing is mostly
vacant today and it barely gets any use. And what's
particularly sad about it is that Kirrison actually cut the
town's food subsidies to help pay for this fifty million
(23:56):
dollar complex. So now Chess City is is really just
a monument to the local government's disregard for its citizens. Yeah,
that's kind of a bummer, But you know, I don't
want to dwell on all these neglectful politicians or even
the alien invasions. As weird as that story was, and
I feel like we should talk about a few chess
stories that are a little more upbeat. What do you
think I'm for it? First? A quick break? Okay, Well,
(24:34):
so chess may not be your best hope for a
stemming off this alien invasion, but the game still has
a whole lot going for it. Like plenty of studies
have shown that playing chess can improve your focus, it
can help you hone your decision making skills, and of
course it's a great way to strengthen your memory, especially
if you play it blindfolded. But before we get to
the mental benefits, let's talk about some of the more
(24:54):
surprising things we found out about the game, and and
maybe we've never noticed before. You know, one thing that's
stood out to me is how resilient the game is.
Like it stands up to scrutiny more than just about
any other game out there. You know, people over the
years have tried to, I guess like solve chess for
for decades and decades, but the game always seems to
elude them. I mean, there's always another move you never
(25:17):
considered a new way to win or even lose at chess.
And remember that's true even after we built computers specifically
designed to decode the game and really select the best
possible move for millions and millions of different scenarios. Isn't
that exactly what it means to solve chess? Like, if
we're able to compute every possible sequence of moves and
(25:37):
counter moves and all these different forms of match can take,
then isn't the game effectively solved? Well, I mean that's
actually the thing, because even if you had the most
powerful computer in the world, it still wouldn't be able
to calculate all the unique games that could be played.
And this just seems unimaginable, but the possibilities just scale
up way too quickly. So for example, after both players
(25:59):
have moved one time in a game of chess, there
are four hundred possible boards setups, but after the second
of the turns, the number of possible games shoots up
to just under two hundred thousand. Now after three moves
there are one hundred and twenty one million possible outcomes,
and so on and so on until you get to
(26:19):
the current best estimate for the total possible number of
chess games, which is a staggering ten to the one
hundred and twentieth power. So to put that number in
perspective just a little bit, there was a great breakdown
that I found from Popular Science, and here's what it says.
There are only ten to the fifteen total hairs on
all the human heads in the world, ten to the
(26:41):
twenty third grains of sand on Earth, and about ten
to the eighty one atoms in the universe. The number
of typical chess games is many times as great as
all those numbers multiplied together. An impressive feat for thirty
two wooden pieces lined up on a board. That is unbelievable.
You know, uh, when you look back at the kind
(27:03):
of like endless complexity of the game, you know, it's
really no wonder that it gives our brains such a workout.
And I actually read the study from a while back
that found the experts who played chess actually used both
sides of the brain while solving chess problems, and not
just the analytical right side. Oh wow, but this only
happens and I'm guessing like really experienced players, that's right.
(27:24):
So the researchers gathered eight international chess players and then
eight novice players, and then they took fm r I
brain scans while the subjects worked their way through two
different tests. And first they had to identify geometrical shapes
and then they had to determine whether or not the
pieces on the chessboard were in a check situation. And
the result from these tests were really unexpected because they
showed that while the novice players had only used the
(27:46):
left side of the brain to process this task, the
expert players had used both sides of the brain. So
this is what the lead researcher explained. Quote. Once the
usual brain structures were engaged, the experts utilized additional complementary
structures and the other have to execute processes in parallel. Wow.
So did this dual processing improve the expert's performance at all? Yeah,
(28:07):
it actually made them much quicker at solving the chess
problems than novices were, But it is worth noting that
the parallel processing only occurred during the chess problems and
not during that geometry test. So it really seems like
all the extra practice that the experts had given their
brains was this nice boost, but only when it came
to chess. You know, it's interesting to hear that, because
I was actually reading about how playing a lot of
(28:29):
chess can actually be a detriment to players sometimes, like
rather than being beneficial to them. And how's that. Well,
it's because of something called the einste Long effect, which
Scientific American describes as the brain's tendency to stick with
solutions it already knows, rather than look for potentially superior ones.
So scientists researching this effect really love using chess players
(28:51):
as subjects, and that's because they provide a really clear
way to see the effect in action. So as an
example of this, some studies present master chess players with
a chessboard that has two possible solutions. You've got this
well known maneuver that can win the game in five
moves and a less common but actually much faster, three
step solution. So the players were told to win the
(29:13):
match in as few moves as possible, but once they
had spotted this familiar five steps strategy, they actually seemed
unable to recognize the much quicker solution. And it wasn't
that the three step move was really obscure or anything
like that, but because those same players were actually presented
with a similar setup where the three step move was
the only way to win, and then in that scenario,
(29:35):
the players recognized the strategy right away. So in that
first experiment, it really was the Einstellung effect at work.
And you know, the players weren't able to see any
of the other options because they had this cognitive bias
for the move they knew best. That's really fascinating. But
also like that even chess masters can learn something to
do better the next time around, because like, there are
that many possibilities, Like I actually think that's why so
(29:58):
many schools invest in their own chess pro ramsay it's
one of those rare hobbies that can boost your cognitive
ability well also teaching you these coping skills like how
to win or lose gracefully. Although I do have to
say the one time my son got hit at school,
it was in his first grade chess club. He came
home with dirt on his face, and I was like, Henry,
how that happened? And he kind of gleefully said, oh,
(30:20):
I took the second grader as queen, so he kicked
me in the face. For Henry, it seems like he
was okay with that. He'd rather win and take the face. Oh.
You know, And there are so many places where they're
teaching it really young to kids, like in Armenia, for instance,
Chess is actually a required subject for every kid who's
six years and older. And that's kind of awesome, even
(30:41):
though it probably means the poor matth teachers wind up
pulling double duty and teaching chess as well. Right, yeah,
but I have a feeling it's worth it to them anyway, because,
you know, as one Armenian teacher explained, chess trains logical thinking.
It teaches how to make decisions, trains memories, strengthens willpower,
motivates children to win, and teaches them how to deal
with defeat. It's the only school subject that can do
(31:03):
all of this. Oh, I really love that idea. Well,
how about we knock out this fact off and then
get Tristan the show. As some of his opening moves
he's been perfecting. Yeah, so for a while now, we've
known that elite athletes tend to live longer than the
rest of us, and that's really not the big of
(31:25):
a surprise. But research now shows that elite chess players
also have a survival advantage over the general population. A
team of Australian researchers looked at players from twenty eight
countries and specifically over a thousand players who reached international
chess grandmaster status over a period of nearly seven years,
and then they compared the survival data of those people
(31:45):
to fifteen thousand Olympic medalists, and not only did they
find that both groups had significant survival advantages over the
general population, but that the difference between the two was
not even statistically significant. Oh wow, that's pretty interesting. All
well years ago, iron remember reading about how, you know,
before the age of the Internet, people used to play
chess by mail or what's called correspondence chess. So you'd
(32:07):
make a move, put that move in the mail, and
then your opponent would do the same, and you'd go
back and forth and games could take years to play.
And actually this kind of sounds fun to be able
to do this with a friend who lives, you know,
across the country or whatever. But what surprising is that
even today, the US Chess Federation estimates they have about
three thousand members still playing correspondence chess. Don't now for
(32:28):
some play by email, and there are even tournaments for
correspondence chess with rules like each player is given thirty
days of reflection time over ten moves, you know, to
really speed things up. I guess. So I was reading
recently about how chess became popular among captured or wounded
soldiers during World War Two, and you know, the rules
of war is so interesting to me sometimes you remember
(32:50):
learning about the Geneva Conventions, which are often thought of
today is sort of the way war crimes are defined.
But the Third Convention set out how prisoners of war
would be treated, so in addition to how prisoners would
be treated physically, it also had sections on recreation and
stated that the captors should encourage the intellectual diversions and
sports organized by prisoners of war, which makes it not
(33:14):
that surprising that a quiet game that could take hours
of days to play and was understood around the world
could take off at a time like this. So organizations
like the Red Cross would even send chess sets around
the world to prisoners where there were even organized chess
tournaments and were so weird. But I do think that
one aspect is pretty cool. Yeah, all right, we mentioned
earlier the similarities between elite athletes and chess players. Well,
(33:37):
did you know that the World Chess Federation actually conducts
drug tests and they do this pretty routinely, and this
is because there's a push for it to be part
of the Olympics and so this is actually required by
the IOC. But there's some interesting studies around the effects
of you know, so called smart drugs on the ability
to play chess. Now specifically drugs like modafinil and riddling.
(34:01):
So Madefanil is a drug we've talked about actually in
an episode. I guess it's been quite a while, but
it's commonly used to help with sleep disorders, and riddling
is commonly used to treat things like a d h D.
And the findings from some of the studies on these
players was really interesting because weirdly, players on these smart
drugs were often losing more games than those who were
(34:22):
not taking these but this was actually because the players
on them, We're taking more time per move and just
running out of time. So once they took the time
out as a factor, they found that these players were
actually playing better. So it's one of the researchers put it,
these substances may be able to convert fast and shallow
thinkers into deeper, but somewhat slower thinkers. Huh, that's really interesting. Well,
(34:46):
we talked about how long chess has been around, and
I was reading about some of the oldest strategy books
on chess, and this one from way back in one
had some pretty awesome advice. The book suggests strategies such
as playing with your back to the sun. Why because
that could blind your opponent. It also suggests that if
you're playing by a fire at night, you should use
your hand to create a shadow over the board so
(35:08):
that your opponent won't be able to see his pieces clearly. Wow.
You know, I had a couple of facts about weird
chess tournaments and a couple of other things. But looking
over there at Tristan and seeing the size of the
smirk on his face, I've never seen him smirk that
big because I know he loves this fact, because he
loves to play dirty. Whenever he competes, he plays so dirty,
(35:28):
such a dirty guy. But anyway, I'm gonna have to
stop us there and give you today's trophy, Mango, thank
you so much. Well all right, well, if you've got
any great stories about chess or any facts about chess
that we may have left out today, we always love
to hear those from you. If you can email us
part Time Genius and How Stuff Works dot com, or
you can always hit us up on Facebook or Twitter.
But from Gabe, Tristan, Mango and me, thanks so much
(35:49):
for listening. Thanks again for listening. Part Time Genius is
a production of How Stuff Works and wouldn't be possible
without several brilliant people who do the important things we
(36:10):
couldn't even begin to understand. Tristan McNeil does the editing thing.
Noel Brown made the theme song and does the MIXI
mixy sound thing. Jerry Rowland does the exact producer thing.
Gave Bluesier is our lead researcher, with support from the
research Army including Austin Thompson, Nolan Brown and Lucas Adams
and Eve. Jeff Cook gets the show to your ears.
Good job, Eves. If you like what you heard, we
hope you'll subscribe, and if you really really like what
(36:32):
you've heard, maybe you could leave a good review for us.
We did. We forget Jason, Jason who
Welcome to Part Time Genius, the production of I Heart Radio.
I guess, well, well, what's that mango? So I was
reading the story about the chess player Bobby Fisher this week.
This is when he was young, and I guess he'd
won a US championship at the time, so he was famous,
but he was also just a kid, and he didn't
(00:24):
have that much money, and you know, he's kind of
a recluse, right. Actually, I had read that he used
to play secretly online like later in his life, and
there was always so much buzz when somebody thought they
noticed his style of play and and and thought they
were onto and that they discovered that it was him. Yeah,
if I feel like you'd see that pop up from
like Japan or Malaysia or wherever. There's these people who
(00:45):
were just like so excited to have played Bobby Fisher.
I think they've played Bobby Fisher. But so, anyway, he's
young at this time. He wants to go see a
movie and he doesn't have money for it, so he
walks into the Chess and Checker Club of New York
just to pick up a few extra bucks. I guess
to hustle it, right, And I guess at the time
it was this, uh, this large, smoke filled, crowded pool
hall type place but for chess, and Bobby's totally in disguise.
(01:08):
He's got a rainco, he's got his collar off, sunglasses
and a hat. He looks ridiculous, but he does not
want to be noticed. So he asked a friend, like,
do you think he can just get me into a game?
And a friend asked the owner across the bar. And
remember it's smoke filled and like, Bobby's in disguise, so
the owner goes tell him, no, he's just a kid.
The hustlers will eat him alive. And so like, Bobby
(01:30):
Fisher is furious and he just stomps out. And this
is all reported. This is a real story. But when
his friend tells the owner who it was, that it
was Bobby Fisher who wanted a game, like, apparently the
whole crowd at the place has this audible grown and
this one guy goes, oh, man, I would have paid
hundreds of dollars just to sit across from Bobby Fisher
(01:50):
on a chess board. Anyway, So I don't know much
about chess, but I do love stories about it. And
we're gonna get into the most dangerous styles of chess,
how the game moved from the battlefield to the royal court,
and even why getting a billion people to play chess
might be our best hope to keep away aliens. Let's
dig in the their podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius.
(02:33):
I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my
good friend man Guess Ticketer and on the other side
of the soundproof class writing down a list of chess
openings he's trying to master. Actually, can you read what
he's got on the white board over there, Mango, Yeah,
he's got the hillbilly attack, the monkeys burn, Hippopotamus defense,
does something called the toilet variation He's written definitely, Yeah,
(02:55):
it definitely says toilet variation. Well, those are all real
chess opening moves. But that's our friend and producer Tristan McNeil,
who also happens to be a future chess master, not
a current chess master, but I'm confident of future chester. Yeah.
He can do anything he puts his mind too. But
you know, chess is one of those things I used
to love as a kid, Like I played it on
my computer. We used to play it with relatives, but
(03:18):
I never got good at it, Like I'm probably as
good as I was in second grade. But I do
love like movies and books that involved it. I I
read this great book last year. It's really slim. It's
called The Chess Game and it's by the same author
that wrote The Hotel Budapest. And you know, I don't
understand any of the chess strategy, but I was totally
(03:39):
enamored with how the main character plays these games of
chess in his head. Yeah, I mean, like that's a
real skill. I had heard about these two Silicon Vallet
guys who met for the first time. I want to
say it was Peter thiel And and somebody equally famous.
And any way, the first time they met, they sat
down at a restaurant and one of them said, I
heard you like chess, and then all about an opening
(04:00):
play and they actually played a full game on an
imaginary board in their heads. Like just these two chess savants.
That would be the weirdest conversation to like, wait a
table on just hearing people call out letters and numbers.
But you know what's crazy to me is, you know,
one of our friends dads was a chess champ in Ecuador,
(04:23):
and they're these photos of him playing like twelve matches
at a time, just moving from board to board to
board and making moves super quick. And and then there's
like blindfold chest, which is kind of like what you're
talking about. But you know what's weird is that a
lot of people used to think that playing chess while
blindfolded can actually lead to brain damage, brain dam So
so why do they think that. Apparently it's just so
(04:45):
exhausting to keep track of all those pieces while also
planning out your next moves. And in fact, the Soviet
Union completely banned blindfold chess in because of that perceived danger.
And and actually one Russian player died during his attempt
to break the world record for a number of opponents
played wild blindfolded. What you're saying, people combine those things
like they blindfold themselves then play multiple games simultaneously. Do
(05:09):
people still do this? Yeah? And actually a new world
record was set less than two years ago. So this
chess grandmaster, his name's Timore Garyev, and he played forty
eight games of blindfold chess simultaneously over the course of
the three hours. Yeah, he actually won eight percent of
those games, and it's ridiculous. Along the way, he was
(05:32):
actually riding an exercise bike the whole time, and in
the end he peddled apparently about fifty miles. Good lord,
I mean, I love that they just added the exercise
bike because they're playing forty eight simultaneous blindfold games. Wasn't enough.
I'm thinking though, maybe after Tristan masters the Hippopotamus defense,
that he's going to get on this blindfold chess train.
(05:54):
We'll see. Well, anyway, for today's show, we're going to
cover chess, so we'll we'll take a deep die into
the history of the game, how the rules developed, and
why the iconic pieces look the way they do. I
think I've always been curious about this. And then a
little later we'll try to figure out why Russians are
so good at chess, as well as why computers might
be the best players of all. Now, of course, we'll
(06:15):
take a look at how playing chess can affect your
brain and just what kind of smart it actually makes you. Anyway,
that's right, So let's jump right in and talk about
the history of chess, because it actually goes quite a
ways back. So most historians believe in early version of
the game was invented in India about fift undred years ago,
and the first known mention of anything involving chess appears
(06:35):
in a text from five and then about a century later,
the game made its way to Persia, where a few
different variations evolved. So the exact rules of the game
and the appearances of the pieces hadn't been formalized at
that time, but the pieces did have these established identities
that aren't that dissimilar from what we're used today. So
one of the main differences was that the game didn't
(06:56):
lay out a royal court like it does. It was
more of a battlefield back then, with the king being
the only piece shared between the ancient version and the
modern version. I'm curiously, do you know what the other
pieces were in the old battlefield version? Yeah, so instead
of ponds, you had these infantry pieces. Nights were cavalry,
and and bishops were elephants. I think our rooks were
(07:16):
actually chariots as well. And what about the what about
the queen? Was the queen part of the game at
that point. That's a different story. I mean, well, we'll
get to that in a minute. But the short answer
is that the piece would later become the Queen. It
was actually called the vizier or or the advisor. So
if you think about Jaffar, the villain from Aladdin, like,
that's basically what the piece was, and he was the
(07:37):
top counselor to the ruler. But you've got to remember
the rules of the game hadn't solidified, so most of
the pieces didn't move exactly like they do now. So
the Advisor, for instance, could only move one square diagonally,
which made it this much weaker piece than today's Queen,
which can obviously, you know, move any number of squares
in any direction she wants. Yeah, that's interesting. So how
(07:58):
did the weakest piece in the game pretty much to
become the strongest because the queen has you know, better
moves than the king, right, I mean, I know the
King can move in any direction just like the Queen can,
but he only moves one square at a time, which
is just I don't know that must that would piss
me off if I Yeah, but he's probably got gout
overrese you know. So the upset and power didn't actually
(08:20):
happen until after the game had spread west to Europe
in the early eleventh century, and once the game hit Europe,
that's when it shifted from that army on the battlefield
to members of the royal court. And for a while
most of the pieces still moved more or less according
to the original rules, but that changed sometime in the
fourteen hundreds or so when this unknown inventor, I think
it was either in Italy or Spain, introduced the rules
(08:43):
we know today, and the most important revisions he made
were to the Bishop and the Queen, which until then
had been sort of the weakest pieces on the board
except for the ponds and something. These pieces were less
restricted in their movement and a whole lot stronger, and
it was one of those changes that just made the
game so much faster and more interesting to play. And
that makes sense, and I could see how those would
(09:03):
go over well in terms of the actual game play.
But it's a little bit surprising because if you think
about it making the queen the most powerful piece on
the board, it it feels pretty progressive for you know,
think about this was medieval times you're talking about. That's true,
and there were tons of sexist players that did kind
of excuse the change there and said that the strength
was only in her defense of the King. That's when
(09:26):
her power came up. But but the reality is that
queens were getting more powerful on the chessboard at the
same time they were getting more powerful in real life.
So so you think back to the fourteenth and fifteen centuries,
the ladies that were coming to power all over Europe,
where people like Elizabeth the First and Mary Tudor and
Queen Isabella. That's pretty cool to see that that would
you know, be mirrored on the chessboard. But so I
(09:47):
actually want to stick with the chess pieces for just
a minute and talk about how they got these iconic
designs that we're all used to seeing at this point.
I mean, you know, you think about the horsehead knights
and the castle shaped brooks, because obviously, during those sin
trees of innovation and development that you were talking about,
the game was really spreading through all different regions and cultures,
and there was actually no standard chess set to play with.
(10:10):
I mean, the basic setup was there. You had a
board with sixty four squares and thirty two pieces, and
you know, I guess they made pretty similar moves, but
what those pieces actually looked like, or how they felt,
or even what they were made of. I mean all
of that very dramatically depending on where you were playing
the game. And so all of these countless varieties of
styles worked well enough for a while. But you come
(10:33):
upon the nineteenth century and the game has become so
popular that chess clubs and competitions began cropping up all
over the world. So you can imagine it actually got
pretty confusing when players from different cultures would sit down
for a match and then realized that none of the
opponent's pieces looked familiar to them. Would be so weird
and very strange. But and it's still just so strange
(10:55):
that the game evolved somewhat similarly in so many places,
and that this was really the big difference. But you
asked forward a bit to eighteen forty nine, and there
was a British architect named Nathan Cook who built this
standardized set that was called the Staunton Chess set, and
its pieces are actually the ones that we still know today.
So I'm curious, like, if Nathan Cook made the set,
(11:17):
why is it called the Staunton set? Like who is Stunton? Yeah,
what you'd think it might be called the Cook Chess set,
But he actually decided to forego that fame and in
favor of practicality. So there was a guy named Howard
Staunton who was a major player in the London chess
scene at the time, and he'd organized these tournaments and
clubs and was really considered one of the best players
(11:38):
in the world. And so Cook knew how respected Staunton
was in this chess community, and so he approached him
and asked if Staunton's name could be used to market
his new designs, And of course Staunton was flattered and
agreed as soon as he saw the pieces, and so
the set was a huge hit with the public, and
really since the nineteen twenties it's actually been the required
(11:58):
set for all world chess organizations. I didn't realize that.
So what was the revolutionary about the Stunt set? Like
I I get that it became the standard, but why
is that exactly? Well, the set had a few things
going for it, so for starters it it wasn't wholly
unfamiliar because Cook had studied a bunch of different popular
chess sets that were in use at the time and
(12:19):
use those common traits really as starting points for his
own set, and then from there he would look to
inspiration in the architecture of Victorian London, which was the
city around him at the time, and also for some reason,
from the ruins of ancient Greece and Rome. And so
take the Night for example, The Night and the Staunton
set is a great example of that influence. Like it's
(12:40):
the only piece in the set that isn't an abstract
representation of something, and instead it looks like a pretty
realistic horse head. And that's because it's pretty clearly inspired
by a sculpture on the east pediment of the Parthenon.
So that carving depicts horses pulling the chariot of the moon,
goddess of Greek mythology, and so that supposedly what the
(13:01):
Staunton Night is based on, like this horse that drew
the moon across the sky each night, which is such
a weird mishmash of things, right, like Victorian London, you've
got like Greece and Rome because the culture is like,
so what else was Cook doing? All right? Well? I
actually found this breakdown in the Smithsonian of the Staunton set,
(13:23):
and here are a few of the key features. According
to the article, it says, um, while some variation is tolerated,
there are several key distinguishing characteristics that define a set
as a stunt. The King is topped with a cross,
and as the tallest piece, it serves as a metric
for the height of the other ones. The Queen is
topped by a crown and a ball, the Bishop has
(13:44):
a split top, and the rook is a squat castle turret.
And so with all of this, Cook really established this
clear and simple language with the forms that he was choosing,
which not only made them easy to recognize, but pretty
cheap to produce as well. And so I'm betting that
all of that together is probably why the Staunton said,
is still, you know, really the global standard today. All right, well,
(14:07):
I know we want to jump ahead in the timeline
and talk a little bit about the rise of chess
in Russia, but before we do that, I do want
to run quickly through a little of its history in
the US. And as you might imagine, the game made
its way stateside thanks to European columnists, but despite the
fact that Ben Franklin was a huge chess fan, the
game really didn't catch on until the mid nineteenth century.
(14:27):
And what turned the tide was that this American chess
player his name was Paul Morphy. He managed to beat
all of Europe's chess champions in this international tournament. It
was the first time this had ever happened. So people's
patriotism just kind of kicked in at that point and
it did its thing, and from then on chess became
super popular in the US. Of course, not everyone was
(14:48):
happy to see the game takeoff. And why is that?
I mean, I read this hilarious old article from this
eighteen fifty nine edition of Scientific American, and the author
basically treats chess like the sinis de corrupting influence, almost
like it's the fortnight of its time. And so this
is how the author describes this very real danger of chess.
(15:09):
A pernicious excitement to learn and play chess has spread
all over the country, and numerous clubs for practicing this
game have been formed in cities and villages. Why should
we regret this, it may be asked. We answer, Chess
is a mirror amusement of a very inferior character, which
robs the mind a valuable time and might be devoted
to nobler requirements, while it affords no benefits whatever to
(15:31):
the body. A game of chess does not add a
single new fact to the mind. It does not excite
a single beautiful thought, nor does it serve a single
purpose for polishing and improving the nobler faculties. You know,
those were really the good old days when the greatest
threat facing the youth of America with the pressure to
join a chess club when you talk about it. Alright, well,
(15:52):
now that we've heard from the critics, let's talk a
little bit about some of the game's biggest proponents, which
of course are the Russians. So but before we get
to them, let's take a quick break. You're listening to
(16:17):
part time Genius and we're talking about the enduring appeal
of one of the world's oldest games, chess. So well,
one thing I noticed this week is that it's suspiciously
large number of top ranking chess players all hail from
Russia or some other Soviet republic, and that includes chess
grandmasters like Anthelie Karpov Gary Kasparov, And it really made
me wonder, like, why do the Russians have such a
(16:39):
dominance for chess. Well, it's interesting, and so of course
was digging into this in our research for this week.
But chess first spread the Russia along the Persian and
Indian trade routes. And that was way back in the
seventh century or so, and it was popular from the start,
but it didn't really become a national pastime until much later.
More we're talking like the nineteenth century or so. Now,
(16:59):
this was during the Russian Revolution when Lenin and the
Bolsheviks took power, and Lennon was a big player. I mean,
he really loved the game, and Stalin would be after him.
But the real mastermind behind the country's chess movement was
Lennon's commander of the Soviet Army, this guy named Nikola Krelenko. Now,
he opened these dedicated chess schools, he organized competitions and
(17:22):
really paved the way for these first state sponsored chess tournaments.
And this was back in So you fast forward a
decade and you've got roughly half a million amateur players
that have signed up for these state chess programs. It's
pretty remarkable how quickly it grew. Yeah, so it sounds
like there's this big push from the state and that's
what sort of kick started Russia's love affair with chess.
(17:44):
But why were all those Soviet leaders and think are
so into chess in the first place, Like, was it
just because it's a strategic game, and and they were
kind of seen as great schemers. You know, I'm guessing
the strategy involved was a big part of the appeal
for them, so that that's probably true. But I also
read this article in Slate that suggested there might have
been a little bit more to it, so I just
(18:05):
will read a little bit of this. The author of
the piece was Chris Beam, and he was describing the
appeal of chess. So he writes, the Soviets saw chess
as embodying their revolutionary ideals. It was a game of skill,
and the USSR prided itself on intellectual talents. It was
also cheap, which meant anyone could play it, and it's
back and forth dynamic reflected that dialectical concept of history
(18:28):
espouse by Marxism. You know, never mind the irony of
playing with imperialist symbols like kings and queens. That is funny,
you know. I I and thought about that. But I
know chess is hugely popular in Russia, even if it
no longer has state money behind it. And there's actually
this one famous chess supporter in particularly who I want
to talk about not only because he's done a lot
(18:49):
to keep the game relevant for Russian citizens, but also
because he's just a super weird guy. His name is
kirsn uh illiams in Off, which I know I mispronouncing.
He was president of the World Chess Federation from all
the way up until just last year, and that's when
he was finally ousted in favor of a new president.
It's a pretty impressive run those of what makes him
(19:12):
such a weird guy. So there are actually a bunch
of things, but honestly, they all kind of hinge on
one in particular, which is that Kirsen claims that he
was abducted by aliens, and I'm just gonna let him
explain what happened. And this is what he said an
interview about a decade after the abduction. It happened on
September sevent I was taken from my apartment in Moscow
(19:33):
and taken to the spaceship and we went to some
star and after that I asked, please bring me back
because the next day I should be back and go
to the Ukraine. They said, no problem, Kirson, you have time.
Oh no, no problems, I guess he got napped by
some considerate aliens. I mean, not every abductee is so lucky,
is that? Yeah? Usually there's more provings. These weren't just
(19:56):
any aliens. They were the sophisticates that invented che us.
Apparently that's true. You know, I didn't realize that this
was even a theory. So do people really think chess
was created by aliens? Well, at least one guy does,
because in that same interview, Kerson went on to say,
I am not a crazy man. My theory is that
chess comes from space. Why because the same rules sixty
(20:17):
four squares black and white, and the same rules in
Japan and China and Qatar and Mongolia and Africa. The
rules are the same. Why I think maybe it is
from space. I mean, I don't want to challenge somebody
that was in power for that long, but I have
to say his evidence feels a little bit thin to me.
I mean, we just tracked the spread of chess across
(20:38):
different continents, so I feel like jumping straight to the
aliens theory it feels a little off to me for
some reason. So Kirson did leave the door open for
at least one other possibility, and in this interview with
The Observer, he admitted that there were actually two options,
and this is how he put it. Each year archaeologists
find evidence of chess in America, India, Japan, or China
played under the same rules from a time without playing
(21:00):
or the internet. Look, the chess board has sixty four squares,
and ourselves are made of sixty four pieces. All the
shows that chess comes either from God or from UFOs.
So yeah, it's basically a toss off. Like, the only
thing we know for certain is that chess wasn't invented
by humans. Is such a strange story. I mean, why
even tell people about this? I mean, the aliens just
(21:21):
kind of took him on this joy ride through the
Solar System and then dropped him off in time for
a meeting. It seems pretty uneventful for what it could
have been. Yeah, but you've got to remember he remained
president of the Chess Federation for another twenty years after
the incident, So I guess the story really didn't bother people.
And as for the trip being uneventful, there was at
least one part that had some real and lasting consequences.
(21:42):
Oh yeah, what what what's that? At some point during
the journey, the alien suggested to Carson that it would
be a really good idea for him to build this
extravagant city dedicated to all things chess. And so he
went home and did that. But he built an actual
chess city. Yeah. So at the time Kierson had the
second job, he was president of the Republic of Calmakia,
(22:04):
which I guess it is a subject of the Russian Federation,
and using his cloud as leader, Kierson was able to
build his chess city on the east side of this
Buddhist town called Alista, and he went all out right, like,
the city has a chess museum, this huge open air
chess board, it's got a swimming pool, enough chess sets
to host year round tournaments. It's actually hosted several championships
(22:27):
in the year was built, I guess in But Kirson's
real goal was to use Chess City to boost the
popularity of the game so that the total number of
chess players in the world would rise from six hundred million,
which I guess is where it is approximately now, to
a full billion. Wow, I mean, that seems like a
big goal. So what was so important about hitting a
billion players? Apparently that's the number of players needed to
(22:49):
stop aliens from destroying the planet. I mean, it just
gets weirder and weird. So how did this guy stay
in office for multiple decades? I know, oh, I I
guess he was just really serious about it, And like,
I don't know. I found this interview that he did
with Independent This is back in two thousand and ten,
and he kind of just flat out says that playing
(23:11):
chess is the key to preventing this alien attack. And
he writes, above us, they're all looking at us, and
maybe they will get tired of us. And suddenly he
tails off, making dramatic gesture of destruction. How can we
save ourselves from them only through intellect, concentration, and spiritual energy.
If a billion people are in these chess centers playing chess,
the world will still have positive energy. All right, Well
(23:35):
I meant it. I mean, I'm invested in this now
if the fate of the world is at stake on
all this. But I have to know, did Krison get
to a billion players? Like, did the Chess city work?
It did not, so, and the whole thing is mostly
vacant today and it barely gets any use. And what's
particularly sad about it is that Kirrison actually cut the
town's food subsidies to help pay for this fifty million
(23:56):
dollar complex. So now Chess City is is really just
a monument to the local government's disregard for its citizens. Yeah,
that's kind of a bummer, But you know, I don't
want to dwell on all these neglectful politicians or even
the alien invasions. As weird as that story was, and
I feel like we should talk about a few chess
stories that are a little more upbeat. What do you
think I'm for it? First? A quick break? Okay, Well,
(24:34):
so chess may not be your best hope for a
stemming off this alien invasion, but the game still has
a whole lot going for it. Like plenty of studies
have shown that playing chess can improve your focus, it
can help you hone your decision making skills, and of
course it's a great way to strengthen your memory, especially
if you play it blindfolded. But before we get to
the mental benefits, let's talk about some of the more
(24:54):
surprising things we found out about the game, and and
maybe we've never noticed before. You know, one thing that's
stood out to me is how resilient the game is.
Like it stands up to scrutiny more than just about
any other game out there. You know, people over the
years have tried to, I guess like solve chess for
for decades and decades, but the game always seems to
elude them. I mean, there's always another move you never
(25:17):
considered a new way to win or even lose at chess.
And remember that's true even after we built computers specifically
designed to decode the game and really select the best
possible move for millions and millions of different scenarios. Isn't
that exactly what it means to solve chess? Like, if
we're able to compute every possible sequence of moves and
(25:37):
counter moves and all these different forms of match can take,
then isn't the game effectively solved? Well, I mean that's
actually the thing, because even if you had the most
powerful computer in the world, it still wouldn't be able
to calculate all the unique games that could be played.
And this just seems unimaginable, but the possibilities just scale
up way too quickly. So for example, after both players
(25:59):
have moved one time in a game of chess, there
are four hundred possible boards setups, but after the second
of the turns, the number of possible games shoots up
to just under two hundred thousand. Now after three moves
there are one hundred and twenty one million possible outcomes,
and so on and so on until you get to
(26:19):
the current best estimate for the total possible number of
chess games, which is a staggering ten to the one
hundred and twentieth power. So to put that number in
perspective just a little bit, there was a great breakdown
that I found from Popular Science, and here's what it says.
There are only ten to the fifteen total hairs on
all the human heads in the world, ten to the
(26:41):
twenty third grains of sand on Earth, and about ten
to the eighty one atoms in the universe. The number
of typical chess games is many times as great as
all those numbers multiplied together. An impressive feat for thirty
two wooden pieces lined up on a board. That is unbelievable.
You know, uh, when you look back at the kind
(27:03):
of like endless complexity of the game, you know, it's
really no wonder that it gives our brains such a workout.
And I actually read the study from a while back
that found the experts who played chess actually used both
sides of the brain while solving chess problems, and not
just the analytical right side. Oh wow, but this only
happens and I'm guessing like really experienced players, that's right.
(27:24):
So the researchers gathered eight international chess players and then
eight novice players, and then they took fm r I
brain scans while the subjects worked their way through two
different tests. And first they had to identify geometrical shapes
and then they had to determine whether or not the
pieces on the chessboard were in a check situation. And
the result from these tests were really unexpected because they
showed that while the novice players had only used the
(27:46):
left side of the brain to process this task, the
expert players had used both sides of the brain. So
this is what the lead researcher explained. Quote. Once the
usual brain structures were engaged, the experts utilized additional complementary
structures and the other have to execute processes in parallel. Wow.
So did this dual processing improve the expert's performance at all? Yeah,
(28:07):
it actually made them much quicker at solving the chess
problems than novices were, But it is worth noting that
the parallel processing only occurred during the chess problems and
not during that geometry test. So it really seems like
all the extra practice that the experts had given their
brains was this nice boost, but only when it came
to chess. You know, it's interesting to hear that, because
I was actually reading about how playing a lot of
(28:29):
chess can actually be a detriment to players sometimes, like
rather than being beneficial to them. And how's that. Well,
it's because of something called the einste Long effect, which
Scientific American describes as the brain's tendency to stick with
solutions it already knows, rather than look for potentially superior ones.
So scientists researching this effect really love using chess players
(28:51):
as subjects, and that's because they provide a really clear
way to see the effect in action. So as an
example of this, some studies present master chess players with
a chessboard that has two possible solutions. You've got this
well known maneuver that can win the game in five
moves and a less common but actually much faster, three
step solution. So the players were told to win the
(29:13):
match in as few moves as possible, but once they
had spotted this familiar five steps strategy, they actually seemed
unable to recognize the much quicker solution. And it wasn't
that the three step move was really obscure or anything
like that, but because those same players were actually presented
with a similar setup where the three step move was
the only way to win, and then in that scenario,
(29:35):
the players recognized the strategy right away. So in that
first experiment, it really was the Einstellung effect at work.
And you know, the players weren't able to see any
of the other options because they had this cognitive bias
for the move they knew best. That's really fascinating. But
also like that even chess masters can learn something to
do better the next time around, because like, there are
that many possibilities, Like I actually think that's why so
(29:58):
many schools invest in their own chess pro ramsay it's
one of those rare hobbies that can boost your cognitive
ability well also teaching you these coping skills like how
to win or lose gracefully. Although I do have to
say the one time my son got hit at school,
it was in his first grade chess club. He came
home with dirt on his face, and I was like, Henry,
how that happened? And he kind of gleefully said, oh,
(30:20):
I took the second grader as queen, so he kicked
me in the face. For Henry, it seems like he
was okay with that. He'd rather win and take the face. Oh.
You know, And there are so many places where they're
teaching it really young to kids, like in Armenia, for instance,
Chess is actually a required subject for every kid who's
six years and older. And that's kind of awesome, even
(30:41):
though it probably means the poor matth teachers wind up
pulling double duty and teaching chess as well. Right, yeah,
but I have a feeling it's worth it to them anyway, because,
you know, as one Armenian teacher explained, chess trains logical thinking.
It teaches how to make decisions, trains memories, strengthens willpower,
motivates children to win, and teaches them how to deal
with defeat. It's the only school subject that can do
(31:03):
all of this. Oh, I really love that idea. Well,
how about we knock out this fact off and then
get Tristan the show. As some of his opening moves
he's been perfecting. Yeah, so for a while now, we've
known that elite athletes tend to live longer than the
rest of us, and that's really not the big of
(31:25):
a surprise. But research now shows that elite chess players
also have a survival advantage over the general population. A
team of Australian researchers looked at players from twenty eight
countries and specifically over a thousand players who reached international
chess grandmaster status over a period of nearly seven years,
and then they compared the survival data of those people
(31:45):
to fifteen thousand Olympic medalists, and not only did they
find that both groups had significant survival advantages over the
general population, but that the difference between the two was
not even statistically significant. Oh wow, that's pretty interesting. All
well years ago, iron remember reading about how, you know,
before the age of the Internet, people used to play
chess by mail or what's called correspondence chess. So you'd
(32:07):
make a move, put that move in the mail, and
then your opponent would do the same, and you'd go
back and forth and games could take years to play.
And actually this kind of sounds fun to be able
to do this with a friend who lives, you know,
across the country or whatever. But what surprising is that
even today, the US Chess Federation estimates they have about
three thousand members still playing correspondence chess. Don't now for
(32:28):
some play by email, and there are even tournaments for
correspondence chess with rules like each player is given thirty
days of reflection time over ten moves, you know, to
really speed things up. I guess. So I was reading
recently about how chess became popular among captured or wounded
soldiers during World War Two, and you know, the rules
of war is so interesting to me sometimes you remember
(32:50):
learning about the Geneva Conventions, which are often thought of
today is sort of the way war crimes are defined.
But the Third Convention set out how prisoners of war
would be treated, so in addition to how prisoners would
be treated physically, it also had sections on recreation and
stated that the captors should encourage the intellectual diversions and
sports organized by prisoners of war, which makes it not
(33:14):
that surprising that a quiet game that could take hours
of days to play and was understood around the world
could take off at a time like this. So organizations
like the Red Cross would even send chess sets around
the world to prisoners where there were even organized chess
tournaments and were so weird. But I do think that
one aspect is pretty cool. Yeah, all right, we mentioned
earlier the similarities between elite athletes and chess players. Well,
(33:37):
did you know that the World Chess Federation actually conducts
drug tests and they do this pretty routinely, and this
is because there's a push for it to be part
of the Olympics and so this is actually required by
the IOC. But there's some interesting studies around the effects
of you know, so called smart drugs on the ability
to play chess. Now specifically drugs like modafinil and riddling.
(34:01):
So Madefanil is a drug we've talked about actually in
an episode. I guess it's been quite a while, but
it's commonly used to help with sleep disorders, and riddling
is commonly used to treat things like a d h D.
And the findings from some of the studies on these
players was really interesting because weirdly, players on these smart
drugs were often losing more games than those who were
(34:22):
not taking these but this was actually because the players
on them, We're taking more time per move and just
running out of time. So once they took the time
out as a factor, they found that these players were
actually playing better. So it's one of the researchers put it,
these substances may be able to convert fast and shallow
thinkers into deeper, but somewhat slower thinkers. Huh, that's really interesting. Well,
(34:46):
we talked about how long chess has been around, and
I was reading about some of the oldest strategy books
on chess, and this one from way back in one
had some pretty awesome advice. The book suggests strategies such
as playing with your back to the sun. Why because
that could blind your opponent. It also suggests that if
you're playing by a fire at night, you should use
your hand to create a shadow over the board so
(35:08):
that your opponent won't be able to see his pieces clearly. Wow.
You know, I had a couple of facts about weird
chess tournaments and a couple of other things. But looking
over there at Tristan and seeing the size of the
smirk on his face, I've never seen him smirk that
big because I know he loves this fact, because he
loves to play dirty. Whenever he competes, he plays so dirty,
(35:28):
such a dirty guy. But anyway, I'm gonna have to
stop us there and give you today's trophy, Mango, thank
you so much. Well all right, well, if you've got
any great stories about chess or any facts about chess
that we may have left out today, we always love
to hear those from you. If you can email us
part Time Genius and How Stuff Works dot com, or
you can always hit us up on Facebook or Twitter.
But from Gabe, Tristan, Mango and me, thanks so much
(35:49):
for listening. Thanks again for listening. Part Time Genius is
a production of How Stuff Works and wouldn't be possible
without several brilliant people who do the important things we
(36:10):
couldn't even begin to understand. Tristan McNeil does the editing thing.
Noel Brown made the theme song and does the MIXI
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Gave Bluesier is our lead researcher, with support from the
research Army including Austin Thompson, Nolan Brown and Lucas Adams
and Eve. Jeff Cook gets the show to your ears.
Good job, Eves. If you like what you heard, we
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