How a chess grandmaster tried to outwit the computer

On Sunday 23rd July 1972, the American grandmaster Bobby Fischer made the first move of the sixth game in the world chess championship—shunting his pawn two squares up the board.

Nothing, in itself, was unusual about that. Pushing either of the middle “d” or “e” pawns two squares forward is the most common way to begin a game. But this move involved neither of these pawns and took Fischer’s opponent—the reigning world champion Boris Spassky—by complete surprise. Moreover, because he had not expected it, he had not prepared for it.

Fischer began with square c2 to c4—the “English Opening” (so called because it was a favourite of a 19th-century English chess champion, Howard Staunton). To those who don’t follow chess, it might sound a comically small twist—the same move, just one or two spaces along. But it shook everything up, and shook Spassky up in particular. During the months he had been in training, the indolent Russian had pooh-poohed the notion that he had to be ready to respond to all of white’s opening options. Fischer almost unfailingly played e4. Surely he would not unleash a new opening in the most important match of his lifetime? It’s not easy to think of analogies, but imagine a fast bowler in cricket suddenly bamboozling the batsman with an over of leg-spin.

With both sides in unfamiliar territory, the game itself proved the most beautiful of the championship. After resigning, Spassky joined the spectators in applause at his opponent’s brilliance. Fischer was now ahead in the match; six weeks later he would be crowned the 11th world champion.

A quarter of a century on, Fischer called a shock press conference in Argentina. Since his headline-grabbing battle with Spassky, the American genius had become a recluse. In the past he’d been described as “troubled,” “turbulent,” “mercurial,” and had engaged in crude antisemitism despite being of Jewish descent; it was now clear that he’d tipped into paranoia. He’d resurfaced from isolation in 1992 to play a rematch against Spassky in war-torn former Yugoslavia, in defiance of US sanctions. After winning, Fischer disappeared yet again, this time as a wanted criminal.

The 1996 Buenos Aires press conference was packed. In his meandering remarks, Fischer denounced the arrest warrant against him and complained that he’d been denied payments from various books and films that supposedly exploited his name. But eventually, he got to his point: the promotion of a new type of chess, Fischer Random, which built-in far twistier twists than his celebrated opener in 1972.

This game would be like ordinary chess in most respects. Each side would have eight pawns, arrayed on the second (white) and seventh (black) ranks. Each side would have two rooks, two knights, two bishops, a king and a queen. The pieces would move as before, and the object of the game would still be to checkmate the other side. But there would be one radical -departure: the pieces on the back ranks would be ordered—or maybe that should be disordered—randomly.

For what reason? Well, four months earlier the IBM computer, Deep Blue, had taken on the world champion Garry Kasparov. Deep Blue had humiliated Kasparov in the first game, and although it lost the series, it was clear that the era of man’s superiority over the machine was approaching its end. In 1997, Kasparov would be crushed by a new and improved Deep Blue.

One might have expected Fischer to take some schadenfreude from Kasparov’s struggles against the chess supercomputer. Fischer was a child of the Cold War, and despite the collapse of the Soviet Union five years earlier, he retained an enduring conviction that the Russians were cheats, frauds and schemers. During the Argentine press conference, he defamed his two successors, Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov—their games against each other were fixed, he said. If supposed Russian rigging were the problem, then Fischer Random could have helped: when you have no idea what the set up of the pieces is in advance, collusion becomes impossible.

But the tilting of the scales against humans of all nations was even more of an affront to Fischer. Computers, he grumbled, had an unfair edge. No human could memorise the millions of opening variations that programmers could simply enter into Deep Blue’s database. Without that advantage, he insisted, human creativity could still vanquish any silicon wannabe. His aim, then, was to provide an answer of sorts to the creeping digital dominance of the game.

Twenty-four years on and Fischer Random, though still a minority pursuit, grows ever-more popular: you can buy chess clocks that double-up as gadgets that shuffle the starting order of the pieces around. For ordinary fans, the appeal is simple: the variant rescues the top-level game from what had increasingly become a struggle between human databases.

With the assistance of chess software engines, today’s top players can spend hours on openings each day, endlessly analysing innovations that have been made in games by others, becoming encyclopaedias of past play. “It’s a lot to keep up with,” says Britain’s leading player, Michael Adams. If that’s exhausting for them, it’s also deadening for those who watch—it can mean it takes 15 or 20 moves before any novel position appears. Indeed, some games now conclude before one or even both of the players are out of their rote-learned preparation. When the player on each side of the board is going through a drill, there is little drama, and the upshot, far too often, is a crowd-displeasing draw.

Look only at how many people are playing chess, and it seems as popular as ever—there have not been many winners from the Covid-19 pandemic, but with millions stuck at home the online game has boomed. On the website chess.com, there were 204m games between humans in February 2020, but 323m by June, growth of over 50 per cent in those few locked-down months. Still, there is a nagging sense that there is something missing in the spirit of the game, particularly at the top, which has sparked many different ideas to revive it. The AI company Deep Mind has been analysing various radical options, assessing the permutations and whether potential new laws could create a dynamic but balanced game. One mooted idea is that “castling,” the manoeuvre that allows you to shuffle around a king and a rook in a single move, should be abolished. Another—which opens up what to chess players would seem like almost psychedelic strategies—permits players to capture their own pieces. But among many weird variations, Fischer Random remains the front runner, because—by subjecting the starting position to the luck of the draw—it directly attacks the curse of over-preparation in the database age. The alien piece arrangement can flummox players from the very first move. The long years in which a grandmaster has deepened his (and it is usually “his”) knowledge of the Ruy Lopez, the Sicilian Najdorf, the Nimzo-Indian or any other openings for white and black suddenly count for nothing. All the cognitive sweat from memorising innumerable opening lines yields no advantage. The thousands of hours top players put into opening training and development are redundant: what matters is raw talent.

The first Fischer Random tournament was held the same year as Fischer’s press conference. In 2001, the Hungarian grandmaster Peter Leko defeated Michael Adams to become the first unofficial Fischer Random champion. Only last year, however, 11 years after Fischer died, did the game truly hit the big time: receiving the imprimatur of the International Chess Federation, which held a formal Fischer Random tournament featuring some of the world’s top players and a respectable prize fund ($375,000). The introduction of chance in the ultimate game of skill gave rise to a new little ritual: 15 minutes before each game begins, and with the players present, a computer runs software to generate and reveal the piece set up. The Federation President Arkady Dvorkovich described the tournament as an “unprecedented move.”

There are, however, still plenty of naysayers—and sometimes the critics have a point. In normal chess, learning from the mistakes made in previous openings is one of the main ways to improve; in the opening of Fischer Random, there’s virtually no scope for “learning by doing” and the satisfaction that comes with that. What’s more, depending on how the pieces are originally arranged, the first mover advantage of white (which is negligible in ordinary chess) may be greatly enhanced, creating an uneven contest.

But the most common objection to Fischer Random is less well grounded; namely, that “it’s not real chess.” This is a variant of a moan heard across many sports. Test cricket fans grumble that Twenty20—the fast-paced 20-overs-a-team game that has drawn huge interest and many new fans—is not “real” cricket. It’s as though there were an ideal, Platonic form of chess or cricket, against which every variation is merely a shadow approximation.

But it is of course a mistake to imagine that Test cricket or chess materialised fully formed into the world. Games evolve, and chess certainly has. Several hundred years ago, for example, the queen was a less potent piece than she is today. Rules are modified for a variety of reasons—to make the competition more tense and exciting, for example, or, as with the 1992 change to the back-pass-to-goalkeeper rule in football, to make the game more fluid and aesthetically pleasing.

If the rules diverge sufficiently, of course, the novel game may be too different from the original for the old label to be sensibly attached. One could imagine the rules of chess being adjusted bit by bit, until chess became draughts. But chess is not draughts—and it was important to Fischer that Fischer Random remained recognisable as the child of its parent. Constraints have been imposed on how the back pieces are to be shuffled: for example, the king has to sit between the two rooks, which allows for a rather baffling form of castling and, to retain another central feature of the game, the two bishops must occupy opposite coloured squares. Most fundamentally, just like the original white and black setups, the two shuffled back ranks have to mirror each other. Within these limitations, there are still 960 possible starting combinations—and so Fischer Random is now sometimes called Chess 960.

Fischer Random chess is radically different from ordinary chess, but not so radically different that it’s not chess. You could waste a lot of time on puzzles akin to the Ship of Theseus, and ask how many planks can be replaced before it ceases to be the same thing. It is, however, much more instructive simply to look at who plays the game well.

Some professional cricketers who excel in Twenty20 cricket may not thrive in quite the same way in sedate five-day Tests. Still, there’s an enormous overlap between the best Twenty20 cricketers and the best Test cricketers, and the same holds for Fischer Random. Last year’s official championship culminated in a final between Wesley So (a world top-ten player) and the current world champion in ordinary chess, the Norwegian Magnus Carlsen. On this occasion, Wesley So was victorious, but it seems likely, says Michael Adams, that if Fischer Random became the main version of chess, then “Carlsen would become the strongest player.”

For, disorientating though it feels, Fischer Random requires the same skills as ordinary chess: pattern recognition, insight and intuition, calculation and strategy. Or at least, the same skill set as was required before the technologies that catalogue and crunch openings and past games put such a premium on the retention of desiccated knowledge. For the first part of a Fischer Random game, it’s as though players are in a familiar but dark room, bumping around the furniture, trying to find the door out—but then they emerge blinking into the light. It can take quite a few moves, but once the players have reconfigured their forces, a position materialises that could have easily appeared in a game played with the usual rules, though perhaps with a stray bishop languishing in a corner somewhere.

It is not only in games but in many other areas of our lives that it is becoming necessary to modify rules and practices to check the might of technology from warping behaviour. What with our data protection regulations, advice on “digital detoxing” and laws to protect individuals against revenge porn, there are occasions when we admit that digital advances can also have damaging and unforeseen consequences for human interaction. The sapping, stifling dependence on software and searchable databases on the art of top-level chess may not be a harm of the same order, but it is another instance of a negative spillover from silicon processing power on the way that we rub along. Fischer Random is an ingeniously simple way to liberate us from these effects. But the irony is this. Fischer believed his invention was a clever means to befuddle silicon opposition, much the way his surprise move wrong-footed Spassky in 1972. He thought that a throw of the dice, the introduction of the random element into a game of pure skill, would readjust the odds in the human’s favour. The opposite is true. The exotic set-up disorientates humans and makes much of their training redundant. Judging the state of a position, at least in the early stages of a Fischer Random game, is difficult. But the new chess engines, built on powerful artificial intelligence, operate through reinforced learning and are indifferent to human assessment. They have long dispensed with the need for human opening theory. They aren’t discombobulated by peculiar piece configurations, or anything else. Far from improving humanity’s prospects vs the machine, Fischer Random stretches the gap, cutting off formidable human weapons—preparation and early-stage pattern recognition.

“I didn’t invent Fischer Random chess to destroy chess,” Fischer said in an interview in 1999, “I invented Fischer Random chess to keep chess going.” It was a noble sentiment, and his beautiful creation really does serve the cause of human vs human chess. But the human vs software chapter of chess history is over.