Of Christmas, chess, and psychopathology

Pat has always been serious about chess. As a kid he bought every book by chess historian Fred Reinfeld. He studied the careers of such twisted geniuses as Paul Morphy, Emanuel Lasker, and Jose Capablanca, and he subscribed to magazines regaling the checkered exploits of contemporaries like Boris Bogulubov and Bobby Fischer.

I think I used to brag that he was a "junior grandmaster," an official status, but in truth he was just very good. My mom used to take him down to the Slovenian club by the U.S. Steel plant in Lorain, Ohio, and he would play the old European men in the back room, often losing, but playing well enough to earn their respect.

Pat just bought a home computer, so I am wondering if Extreme Chess, a CD-ROM game, will kindle the flame, or put it out. Extreme Chess ($50, Davidson, 800-457-8357) is a computer chess program based on Fritz, the algorithm so powerful it not only knocked out World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov, but also torpedoed cyber-grandmaster Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer that, much like the Titanic, was thought to be unsinkable.

How can a PC CD-ROM beat a supercomputer? I'm probably not the best person to ask. I was my brother's sparring partner for many years, and I calculate that I lost some 3,000 consecutive games, sitting on the bed we shared. One's strategic philosophy following that many uninterrupted defeats becomes something like "Not the face."

Chess-playing automata have been with us since 1809 when con man impresario Johann Nepomuk Maelzel beat the grand strategist Napoleon himself with his notorious mechanical chess player, called The Turk. The Turk looked sort of like a foosball table, with lots of knobs, belts, and gears. It not only plotted moves, it actually moved the pieces. Maelzel did have two advantage over Napoleon, in that a small, very human chess wizard was stashed away inside The Turk, making it work. The other advantage was that Napoleon was a legendarily bad chess player.

Chess machines took a great step toward respectability when American mathematician Claude Shannon explained in 1949 how computers could be programmed to play chess. In 1957 MIT unveiled a chess program that worked by selecting the seven best moves, the seven best replies, and the seven best replies to each of these replies -- a tree of 2,401 variations.

As memory, chip speed, and programming have grown more powerful, so has the computer chess tree branched out. In 1988, IBM's Deep Thought became the first computer to defeat a grandmaster under tournament conditions. Deep Blue came along a couple of years later, and then Fritz, the engine undergirding Extreme Chess.

Extreme Chess in its simplest form looks like chess programs occupying 1/1,000th of the disk space -- an iconic chessboard, with pieces you move by clicking the mouse.

But it goes much deeper. The iconic board can be replaced by a customizable 3-D board in which the chesspieces can be made to stand in gloomy light like an immense shadowy Stonehenge. The disk also includes a knowledge database of 50,000 annotated champion-level games, which you can expand by downloading other games from the Internet and elsewhere.

The knowledge base isn't for you, though -- it's for Fritz. When you move your pawn to King's Bishop 4 to start a game, you see the computer zip through a score or more of possible responses, picking the one that has most reliably led to previous opponents' extermination. On my slowish Pentium, the calculations were blindingly quick. Needless to say, the computer uniformly made better decisions than I did.

You can choose your preferred level of brutality. The open-ended suggestion, for skilled players, might be: "Are you sure you want to do that?" The intermediate-level suggestion might be: "If you do that, you will place a major piece in immediate jeopardy." The advanced suggestion level, for chess imbeciles like me, might be: "If you do that, I will abscond with your queen and pin the king to the mat." If you feel lucky or you are just very good, you can ignore Fritz's suggestions altogether.

Now, I have to wonder if Pat will like Extreme Chess as a holiday gift. For decades he has scribbled his own mental games into spiral notepads, which he has stockpiled in boxes in his bedroom closet. He usually uses no board. It all occurs in his mind. Extreme Chess may seem a bit, um, physical.

And then there's the question of Fritz itself. If chess is as psychologically depraved as Pat's book suggested, what am I doing by pitting my own brother against the machine that clipped Garry Kasparov's ears? I couldn't topple the King myself, so I've contracted with a robotic hired gun to take him out instead? And all under the aegis of "happy holidays"? Disgusting.

I swear on a stack of Fred Reinfeld books that it isn't so. My heartfelt wish this yuletide season is that my big brother take on the indefatigable Fritz and clean his digital clock.

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