Major Acid's E-Rag
What Else Is There?
Volume 1, Number 8
Chess Life
Chess Life doesn’t leap at you from the magazine stands. J Lo and Depp
(Ben who?) don’t mug for the cover shot. Or the insides, for that matter
– do J Lo and Depp play chess? That’s a question that Mary Hart and her
spawn are unlikely ever to ask. Chess Life is not oversized either, or
crafted from paper thick enough to hold the garish splashes of colour
that other magazines might. In fact, the magazine fades into the
background, noticeable if you look for it, otherwise invisible. In that
way, it is perfectly reflective of the place of chess in North American
life today.
If anything, the February cover reinforces that invisible, embedded
feel. The human face on the cover belongs to Gary Kasparov, a Kasparov
embedded in lines of green 1s and 0s – the cypheric symbols of the
computer age.
Kasparov is a holdover, the last remnant of that brief cultural
ascendancy that chess enjoyed not that long ago. Reykjavik and Fischer
and Spaasky started that ascendancy; Kasparov, facing off against IBM’s
Deep Blue, ended it. Like so much we live with today, computers
steam-rolled the world of chess. Yet Chess Life, and chess itself, isn’t
about to disappear completely. Neither is Kasparov.
The greatest player alive, perhaps ever, is on the cover buried in
computer imagery because he is at it again. At the computer, that is.
Recently Kasparov played another match against another computer program,
pitted his prodigious, darkly human ego and self-discipline against
mindless, remorseless lines of code dubbed X3D Fritz.
This confrontation is the centerpiece of Chess Life’s February 2004
issue and the subject of a long article by Kalev Pehme, and Pehme sees
that battle as a reason to whine about the ascendancy of the machine,
the death of all that is good and true – of all that is human. Pehme
consigns humanity to the junk heap and along with it such expressions of
humanity as Chess Life itself. Consider this passage:
“For not only does this amazing technology create a new chess order, but
it effectively puts an end to all chess magazines, and, by extension,
all magazines and newspapers as well. For there is no possible way that
mere printed words … can compete with virtual reality. This morning a
grandmaster can write an article on an opening line, post it on the
Internet immediately … and by day’s end thousands of people can be
playing a thematic tournament in that line all over the world at the
same time. Such a website is the end of Chess Life, and it is the end of
everything from fashion to car magazines … Against that, what is the
printed word’s appeal to human imagination?”
There is much to chew on in that quote and more in Pehme’s article, not
the least of which is the irony inherent in the fact that Kalev Pehme is
the editor of the very magazine he consigns to the garbage dump of human
history.
The February 2004 issue is Pehme’s second as its editor, and irony seems
to be his curse. In his first issue he wrote a “From the Editor” piece
that included this gem reflecting on the level of writing that Chess
Life had endured: “Oftentimes, the articles are replete with bad
English, and that will stop as much as possible.”
I’d like to think he was being funny, and it’s possible, but even if he
was, he still had to contend with the curious discontinuity that his
promise to raise the literary quality of the magazine was printed in the
same issue that announced the “Chess Journalists of America Awards for
2003.” Chess Life, it turns out, was chosen as the Most Improved
Magazine – under the direction of one Peter Kurzdorfer, Editor.
Pehme has a tough act to follow, but irony notwithstanding, follow it he
does with the X3D Fritz articles, his own and others; with Kasparov’s
dissection of Tal, excerpted from a book by Kasparov; with the usual
suspects such as columns on solitaire chess and seemingly endless
dissections of recent notable games.
Because the usual suspects are still there for readers to look forward
to, perhaps Pehme can be forgiven his peccadilloes. He’s just grumpy
because the man/machine Kasparov proved wanting even though he drew his
match with X3D Fritz. Pehme may worry that Kasparov has turned himself
into a bloodless, second-rate – in other words, human – version of a
computer program, but ultimately it is Pehme himself, and all his
contributors that put the lie to his own grumpiness.
Chess is the ultimate expression of humanity, and Kasparov’s
determination to beat a computer program is a purely human endeavour no
matter the outcome. Computers may be able to compute the “best” line of
play, unfazed by time pressure or ego or fear, but computers will never
be human, and, Kasparov aside, chess is a contest of human on human. For
as long as the game is played that way, played by those who are
antithetical in their very nature to the perfection of the lifeless
machine, played by those who are defined by their essential
imperfection, so then Chess Life or some analog of it will survive.
J Lo and Depp and Mary Hart’s telegenic legs notwithstanding.
Chess Life is published monthly by the United States Chess Federation
and sells for $3.75 USD or $4.95 CAD.
