The Immortal Game Read Online Free Page A

weapon” proclaims the ancient Persian poem
Chatrang-namak
(The book of
chatrang
), one of the oldest books mentioning the game. “Victory is obtained by the intellect.”
    This was a war game, in other words, where ideas were more important and more powerful than luck or brute force. In a world that had been forever defined by chaos and violence, this seemed to be a significant turn.
    It is clearly no coincidence that
chaturanga
’s emergence happened around the same time as India’s revolutionary new numeral system, rooted in the invention of the number zero. Zero as a concept had been used on and off for centuries, but it was the Indians who formally adopted zero both as a number (as in 5–5=0 or 5×0=0) and as a placeholder (as in “an army of 10,500 men”), and who explored it deeply enough to allow for the development of negative numbers and other important abstractions. India’s decimal arithmetic was the foundation of the modern numeral system, which served as a critical building block for the advancement of civilization.
    The new numeral system was a great breakthrough. But who or what could effectively convey it, in all of its nuance, to others? In the centuries to follow, chess carried the new math across the world. “Chess was the companion and catalyst for the cultural transfer of a new method of calculation,” writes Viennese historian Ernst Strouhal. The early Islamic chess master al-Adli mentioned using a chessboard as an abacus—that is, as a tool to perform calculations based on the new Indian numerals. The Chinese and Europeans later used the chessboard in exactly the same way. In medieval England, accounts were settled on tables resembling chessboards, and the minister of finance was given the playful title “Chancellor of the Exchequer.” A twelfth-century text explains how the reference was doubly apt:
             
    Just as, in a game of chess, there are certain grades of combatants and they proceed or stand still by certain laws or limitations, some presiding and others advancing: so, in this, some preside, some assist by reason of their office, and no one is free to exceed the fixed laws; as will be manifest from what is to follow.
    Moreover, as in chess the battle is fought between Kings, so in this it is chiefly between two that the conflict takes place and the war is waged,—the treasurer, namely, and the sheriff who sits there to render account…
             
    Chess also turned up in a late-twelfth-century Cambridge manuscript as a game that “thrives in the practice of geometry,” and in Dante’s
Paradiso
(“And they so many were, their number makes / More millions than the doubling of the chess”). Chess, like any great teaching tool, didn’t
create
these sublime notions and complex systems, but helped make them
visible
. Math and other abstractions were just slippery notions floating in the air; chess, with its simple squares and finite borders, could represent them in a visual narrative played out on a tiny, accessible stage. Chess could bring difficult notions to life. Understanding, just as the ancient text said, was the essential weapon.

THE IMMORTAL GAME
Move 1
    T HERE WAS NO CHESS at all in my childhood home or school life. Growing up in the 1970s, we played cards, checkers, Monopoly, Atari—
games
. To the extent that I ever thought about chess, which was very little, it seemed like an absurd amount of effort—much more exertion than the pleasure it would give back. “I hate it and avoid it because it is not play enough,” Montaigne complained about chess in the sixteenth century. “It is too grave and serious a diversion; and I am ashamed to lay out as much thought and study upon that as would serve to much better uses.” Replace “ashamed” with “too lazy,” and you have, in a nutshell, my attitude toward chess for my first seventeen years.
    Later, in high school, I developed a taste for more complexity, risk, confrontation. I fancied