(Leonardo
da Vinci’s Saper Vedere is very much applicable to the art of chess. It
is well known that a prodigious memory is a must in learning and remembering
thousands of opening variations, where the player needs to act with a virtually
automatic precision, otherwise risking to fall into a standard trap, or to lose
on time.
But
an even more necessary attribute of a great chess player is that sense of
intuitive vision, not just of the board, and so many moves ahead, but of the
whole game, where it is, and where it is going. In other words, the chess
artist, like the artist described by Leonardo Da Vinci, must possess the sense
of Saper Vedere, to know how to see, and without this sense there can be
no greatness in chess. And, even worse, without the artist’s saper vedere, the future of chess may be
bleak in our age of ruthless and heartless electronics…)
Here
is a neat variation on the Frankenstein Monster theme with some Beauty
and the Beast undertones, applied to the subject of chess. The apocryphal
Muse of chess, Kaissa, is terrorized by the Terminator-like
electronic beast, the chess computer, with all appropriate metaphor and allegory
running loose and wild in this comprehensive analysis of the current explosive
situation in the world of chess, as certifiably mediocre masters of the game
drive their ratings of success through the roof by surreptitiously carrying an
electronic genie-slave up their sleeve into the tournament halls and restrooms,
to the dismay of the judges, and to the utter shame of the despicable chess
police, whose invasive monitoring has turned the nice gentlemen’s game into
a hell of obligatory searches, electronic sweeps, persecution, and paranoia.
What
does the future hold for chess? Will Kaissa, failing to destroy the Beast, end
up marrying him, and in this marriage assume the distorted features of her lord
and conqueror?
…Or
will the Beast utterly destroy our lovely Kaissa? After all, in the fairytale,
the Beast was in fact a very old-fashioned prince, restored to his lovely
old-fashionness by the Beauty’s love. In real life, the Computer Beast is
anything but old-fashioned. He does not understand or react to love or to any
other human emotions, and, in the final analysis, it is either his inhuman way,
or the end of Kaissa…
Is
it possible that, whatever happens, we are witnessing the end of Kaissa the
classic Beauty as we used to know her, and that no Magnus Carlsens in the
world, from the northern tip of Norway to the southern tip of Chile, can do
anything about it?
…Having
done with the pessimistic part, is there any hope for optimism, except for the
aforesaid marriage? Isn’t it possible that the machine may be ultimately
defeated by the human development of the irrationality antidote, that is, by
learning not how to preclude the machine from sneaking into the chess halls, or
how to strike an artificial deal with the machine, effectively recognizing its
supremacy, but how to overwhelm that selfsame machine by human ingenuity. It is
well-known, for instance, that the machine has very little, if any,
understanding of the endgame. After all, computer programs have their own
limitations, too… Therefore, we can see the future of world-class chess in
rising up to this kind of fascinating challenge: fighting logic with illogic,
program with anti-program, machine dumb “reason” with human enlightened reason
and incomparable intuition. Certain efforts to lead the machine “astray” are
already being made at the highest human level even in the opening stages of the
game… Perhaps, it is not all doom and gloom for our Kaissa?...
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