The Blackberry Walk

Both chess and war are played out today like they were in years past. Yet as we'll uncover, their histories have understandably strong parallels - chess is after all a game of war. And despite the game of chess' restricted move set unlike the game of war's unlimited possibilities, both over time have been pushed to their technological extreme. From romantic noble beginnings, both chess and war began, with our story starting in the mid-19th century, ending in the domination of machines over man today. The Romantic Era The first chess era of note is the romantic era, which is how chess was played since records began, up until the late 19th century. The romantic era was punctuated by daring play, gambitting pieces for brilliant attacks to win "the beautiful game". Chess wasn't so much about victory, but rather about victory with style, and often style made a big difference; when choosing between the better position by ignoring a gambitted piece and taking the gambit to your loss, the romantic player would take the gambit - it'd be dishonourable not to. Take a look at this 1858 game played by Paul Morphy and Adolf Anderssen - two of the heavy hitters of their day - to get a taste for what romantic games could be like at its sharpest. In warfare also, there was a certain honour involved. Soldiers didn't where camouflage, hiding in the terrain so they could not be seen - a soldier war bright red like the British, or deep blue like the Prussians - piercing colours which could be spotted from a distance. These outfits surely would've made the you an easy target for fire; a Prussian soldier could've easily spotted a British redcoat with a bearskin hat amongst the verdant hills. But however important success in war was, a war without prestige and honour was no victory at all. The early chess player also saw the virtue of honour as being the point rather than the lower glee of victory. The Era of Positional Play A little known player named Wilhelm Steinitz changed the chess scene in the 1880s with a new positional style of play. Instead of daring gambits and ferocious attacks, Steinitz opted for tinkering his pieces around the board slowly, maneuvering pieces to their best locations, slowly grinding down the opponent until his position was lost. Commentators at the time labeled Steinitz "a coward" for not partaking in the lavish daring attacks of the romantics, but it's important to note this more positional style of play was not toothless - if the opponent showed any sign of weakness, Steinitz's well positioned pieces could leap into action, penetrating the chink in the opponent's armour. The king of this era of play was the Cuban-born genius Capablanca who from an exceptionally young age mastered positional play, becoming a king of chess for much of his life. Comparing opening strategies between Morphy and Capablanca we see a great shift, from Morphy's risky King's gambits and Evan's gambits to Capablanca's calm and collected Ruy Lopez and Queen's gambits. In Capablanca's day, I'm certain the King's gambit was never seen in top level play - it was too easily crushed by smart methodical positional play. For a game by Capablanca, check out this game and watch as his king dances across the board as if he were in peril from a devastating attack, only for Capablanca to launch a calm counterattack on the flank and, through his well positioned pieces, take the win. Is this kind of positional play dishonorable? Is it placing victory over elegance? This positional play, calmly dancing your pieces around the board, has a kind of cleanliness to it, much in the same way that Bauhaus architecture has a certain simplicity without the flair of the neo-Gothic architecture which preceded it. Positional chess possessed a swift elegance, but it's hard to comment whether it had retained the soulfulness of the romantic era In the 2nd Boer war, khakis were a necessary. The South African veld had no place for red-coated Poms who could be easily picked off by Boer bullets; the coats had to go, and dust coloured fabric was in. Practicality and efficiency was paramount, and in modernist warfare they were prioritised. Boer gold is what the British wanted far more above prestige. If prestige were what the British were after, they wouldn't have sent the poorest of the poor off to war, many of whom were not physically fit enough, into battle. Sure, there was prestige in empire building, but was there in war, in primitive slaughtering, like Lord Kitchener did to the Whirling Dervishes? Kitchener's massacre of the Dervishes is a good example of the modernisation and mechanicalisation of warfare. As his troops marched down from Egypt in the Sudan, they laid track as they went, which acted as both supply lines for goods and guns. Railroading giant Maxim guns to battle, Lord Kitchener's army gunned down the Dervishes, armed only with sticks. Weapons like the Maxim gun and modern artillery gave European powers incredible firepower, but were quite unwieldy and difficult to move around. No wonder then that at first it was only used to conquest Africa; should both sides possess Maxim guns, chaos would ensue. Without easy maneuvering, position became everything in battle. If you managed to lug your artillery to the top of a hill, you had free reign to rain fire down on those who weren't as fortunate to share your position. Just like in chess, having pieces in good positions - the mere threat of their attacks - is usually enough to win you the game. However, once European powers decided not to attack weak African tribesmen and instead go for each other in WW1, they quickly found the best position was in the ground. Hypermodernism Aron Nimzowitsch was the next great innovator in chess, with the 'Hypermodern' movement which he laid out in his book My System in the 1920s. Traditional chess opening play revolved around occupying the centre - attacking and sitting your pieces in central squares in order to have more space on the board under your control. Hypermodern openings, on the other hand, involved waiting at the start, positioning your pieces neatly, letting your opponent occupy the centre as much as they want, and then you apply pressure from your cramped position on the opponents over-extended centre until it crumbles. A key notion in Nimzowitsch's system is "Zugzwang" - a position where your opponent is forced to weaken their position because they have no choice but to move. Think of it as the logical apotheosis of positional play, where your pieces are in such a good position that anything your opponent does will lose the game for him. As an example, here's Nimzo's "Immortal Zugzwang" game, where you can see both a hypermodern opening approach at the start, and fully Zugzwanged position at the end. You can start to see why the term "hypermodern" was used; hypermodern strategies take the elegance of modernist positional play to its extreme, playing purely positionally without any central conflict to speak of. Is this kind of chess not the height of cowardice? This Fabian strategy of the chessboard however worked; new innovations were quickly changing the chess world for good. Just before the hypermodern revolution in chess, was the dawn of WW1. WW1 truly changed warfare forever, one of the most notable changes being trench warfare. Instead of soldiers marching into battle, both sides hid entrenched waiting for the enemy to go over the top into No Man's Land. The soldiers in the trenches, through their cramped position, developed all kinds of diseases like trench foot, where their feet began to decay from the moistness of already being six foot under. Trench warfare was also exceptionally slow, taking many months to make any real progress. Neither side wanted to go over the top, since it was never advantageous to do so. Both sides had powerful artillery to gun down foes without the mobility to get to their foes, resulting in a stalemate of the battle ground. Trench warfare was very much the hypermodern strategy of war: you entrench your position, playing a defensive war of attrition, waiting for your opponent to make a mistake, all the while making your position exceptionally cramped, unable to play freely. There is a risk, after all, in playing a hypermodern opening: you can cramp yourself so much that your pieces get trench foot and are steamrolled by your foe's attack. Either way, WW1 was the true Immortal Zugzwang, with neither side wanting to make a move and go over the top. The Soviet Block Once hypermodern strategies were no longer novel, they became formalised, and reams of opening theory was written. The strategy was always a risky one: you can blow away someone using a hypermodern strategy in an instant if they show weakness in their position since they've yielded so much ground, whilst the player occupying the centre has to worry about counterattacks also, making these positions unexpectedly sharp. Theory was beginning to became more and more necessary for exceptionally sharp lines of openings, like say the Sicilian Defence, which needed to be memorised 30 moves deep, in some cases. Chess theory was expanding - small variations in known lines were being tested and introduced, but most of the revolutionary ideas of chess had now been established. A game with a limited rule set has only so many ways it can be played. However the Soviet dominated era of chess, beginning in 1927, ending in 2006, certainly saw a variety of styles. Alekhine, the first of these powerful Soviets, was a more positional strategic player (his famous 'Alekhine's Gun' match); Botvinnik was along similar lines, playing positional chess; Petrosian was known for his iron-walled defence and positional understanding; so too was Karpov. In short, the Soviet school of chess had a deep positional understanding of the game... But despite being renowned for their deep positional understanding, the Soviet school was also dynamic. Long past was the generation where powerful positional play without tension and aggression could bring victory - matches were both sides played for small edges in balanced positions now always ended up as draws, since the level of play had risen over time. Hypermodern openings, which had now been integrated into the opening corpus, were also hyper-aggressive it had turned out, since there were lines being established which lead to very sharp games, like the Grunfeld, the King's Indian, or the Alekhine's Defence. Dynamism and complex positions became essential to edge the win, since the Soviet's were so talented at positional play. But amongst the methodical history of the Soviets, one man stands out: the magician from Riga, Mikhail Tal. Tal has always stood out amongst other chess players. His aggressive tactical play can bring the best to their knees. See this game where Tal sacrifices his queen for equal material, giving his opponent connected passed pawns, just so he gets some dynamism in the position, leading to a winning attack. Despite having a great understanding of positional play like many of his contemporaries, Tal stands out in chess history as the only player to really bring back the 'magic' of the romantic age of grand sacrifices whilst still managing to become world champion. In the cold war era, fighting between the two major powers usually went on through proxy wars - the US and USSR supply money and guns to guerilla's, attempting revolution in each other's sphere of influence. Yet with the notable exception of Bobby Fisher, no American could trump the prolonged Soviet triumph in chess. Chess was a great source of national pride for the Soviets - they poured money into the game, picking out kids from a young age to train them into chess superstars. Much like the space race, the Soviets saw chess as one of these proxy wars, albeit through a culture victory instead of a domination victory. The Computer Age Kasparov was the king of chess over the 80s and 90s. A natural genius for the game who fought with an often dynamic and ferocious style, specialising in the Najdorf Sicilian and the King's Indian, two very fierce openings. Few could touch him - in the end he lost his title in part by getting angry at FIDE, the organisation who hosted chess world championships, creating a parallel organisation, but eventually losing to Vladimir Kramnik who brought out an insane amount of preparation for the insanely boring and positional Berlin Defence. However, there was another challenger who defeated Garry Kasparov: Deep Blue. Deep Blue was a supercomputer made by IBM specially designed to play chess by predicting and calculating thousands of positions many moves ahead, and in a rematch in 1996, Kasparov lost. The era of man was over; the millennium of the computer had begun. Today, the free chess engine Stockfish, can run on any old computer, even your phone, and play better than Deep Blue or any other Grandmaster today. The influence of computers in warfare cannot be understated. Computers won us WW2 with Alan Turing's work on the Bombe in Bletchley Park, decrypting the Nazi code; the first programmable computer, ENIAC, was used to calculate ballistic trajectories; the internet, or Arpanet as it was then known, was first invented by the US Department of Defense to send military data across the country which couldn't be sent by phone or radio. War is often the nebula of invention, so it's no wonder that the military create and use bleeding edge computer technology. Today, tactical drone strikes, piloted from afar, are a popular choice to suppress Afghani villages - a completely technological solution which doesn't require boots on the ground. And in parallel to how chess engines are used to prepare lines, military simulations are a good way to figure out battle strategies without the risk of loss of personnel. The Future What does the future hold for us then? 2018 saw the rise of AlphaZero - Google's DeepMind division's neural network software which can learn board games without knowing the rules, and then with a handful of examples become really good at them. AlphaZero blew Stockfish out the water in competitive play without an opening repertoire or endgame handbook like Stockfish which Stockfish refers to in highly abstract or formulaic positions. In technology for chess as on the battlefield, AI is certainly the future; there's only so much an algorithm can do. An algorithm cannot learn on its own, only regurgitate methods a person has taught it. AlphaZero can learn from it's mistakes, teaching itself algorithms more powerful and optimised than a any player could possess. The uses of AI for warfare are also endless; check out DARPA's massive investment in AI industries, attempting to make AI practical and workable for the military. We're not too far off, after all, arming the AIs and making them fight on our behalf in a droid war. But according to the article linked, DARPA are much more interested on augmenting human capacity with the powers of AI rather than replacing man with machine. Chess is much the same. No one wants to see a game of football played by robots - it's the strife, overcoming, and brilliance of man, of the body, of the mind, which excites us. Chess engines exist to reference lines against, to see how good a position is, and aid the player in studying chess and preparing for a match. And I hope in both fields, of chess and war, that the human-centred trend continues. As a prologue, even if you haven't really been interested in chess before, or know the rules, played a few times, but never got into it, I hope I managed to get across the stylistic and artistic side of the sport. Chess is commonly seen as a sterile mental activity when in reality it's imaginative and creative in the same way painting or poetry is. Fads and styles change across the eras, often paralleling artistic movements of the time. Each player as well has there own style of play, in the same way each artist has a style, or each director has a feel to their shows, and like with directors, you can learn a lot about the man from their works. Kasparov's aggressive play is very much seen in his aggressive personality - he was known for staring down his opponents over the board, scaring them shitless. Now, he writes books in Croatia about Russian corruption living in fear of the Russian secret police. The natural, Capablanca, who was a master of chess from such a young age, spent his time lazily playing tennis in Cuba instead of practicing for matches which he'd inevitably win. The man who beat him, Alekhine, was an obsessive tight-laced man who calculated long complex tactical lines. Watching Kramnik in interviews, he speaks with the enthusiasm and passion of someone who plays the Berlin Defence (outside of the icy relations with Topalov surrounding Toiletgate). All in all the world of chess is plenty fun so give it a go.