The Immortal Game Read Online Free

more or less rapid movements of troops.”
    King Balhait’s wide-ranging list of the game’s uses has a connecting thread: chess as a demonstration device, a touchstone for abstract ideas. The reference to “mathematical calculations” is particularly noteworthy, as math comes up over and over again in many of the oldest chess legends. One tale, known as “The Doubling of the Squares,” tells of a king presented with an intriguing new sixty-four-square board game by his court philosopher. The king is so delighted by chess that he invites the inventor to name his own reward.
    Oh, I don’t want much
, replies the philosopher, pointing to the chess-board.
Just give me one grain of wheat for the first square of the board, two grains for the second square, four grains for the third square, and so on, doubling the number of grains for each successive square, up to the sixty-fourth square
.
    The king is shocked, and even insulted, by what seems like such a modest request. He doesn’t realize that through the hidden power of geometric progression, his court philosopher has just requested 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 (eighteen
quintillion
) grains of wheat—more than exists on the entire planet. The king has not only just been given a fascinating new game; he’s also been treated to a powerful numbers lesson.
    This widely repeated story is obviously apocryphal, but the facts of geometric progression are real. Such mathematical concepts were crucial to the advancement of technology and civilization—but were useless unless they could be understood. The advancement of big ideas required not just clever inventors, but also great teachers and vivid presentation vehicles.
    That’s apparently where chess came in: it used the highly accessible idea of war to convey far less concrete ideas. Chess was, in a sense, medieval presentation software—the PowerPoint of the Middle Ages. It was a customizable platform for poets, philosophers, and other intellectuals to explore and present a wide array of complex ideas in a visual and compelling way.
    The game, in reality, was not invented all at once, in a fit of inspiration by a single king, general, philosopher, or court wizard. Rather, it was almost certainly (like the Bible and the Internet) the result of years of tinkering by a large, decentralized group, a slow achievement of collective intelligence. After what might have been centuries of tinkering,
chatrang
, the first true version of what we now call chess, finally emerged in Persia sometime during the fifth or sixth century. It was a two-player war game with thirty-two pieces on a sixty-four-square board: sixteen emerald men on one end and sixteen ruby-red men on the other. Each army was equipped with one King, one Minister (where the Queen now sits), two Elephants (where the Bishops now sit), two Horses, two
Ruhks
(Persian for “chariot”), and eight Foot Soldiers. The object was to capture, trap, or isolate the opponent’s King. *1
    Chatrang
was a modified import from neighboring India, where an older, four-player version of the game was known as
chaturanga
—which itself may have been a much older import from neighboring China. The game probably evolved along the famous Silk Road trading routes, which for centuries carried materials, information, and ideas between Delhi, Tehran, Baghdad, Kabul, Kandahar, and China’s Xinjiang Province. On the Silk Road, merchants transported cinnamon, pepper, horses, porcelain, gold, silver, silk, and other useful and exotic goods; they also inevitably blended customs picked up from various locales. It was the information highway of the age. No doubt many other games were invented and transported by the same roving merchants. But there was something different about
chaturanga
and
chatrang
. In a critical departure from previous board games from the region, these games contained no dice or other instruments of chance. Skill alone determined the outcome. “Understanding [is] the essential