When I’m not writing the Sir Anthony Standen Adventures, marketing, or attending to chores, I amuse myself in a number of ways. Golf, sailing, dancing, and walking are my active pursuits. Wordle and Sudoku are ways to limber up the mind, and I’ve also recently been trying to improve my chess. I play against the computer. I can now beat all of the AI opponents in the beginner league, and Emir is no longer a match for me in the intermediate league. Sven and I are fairly well matched, but Nelson’s chess is better than mine most of the time.
I’ve written several times about AI, and I suppose computer chess players were quite an early form of artificial intelligence. In 1956 a computer developed at Los Alamos called MANIAC was the first chess computer to beat a human being. I remember Deep Thought beating several chess grandmasters in 1988 before being defeated by Garry Kasparov twice in 1989. In 1996 IBM’s Deep Blue lost to Garry Kasparov by four games to two. Then in 1997 an updated version of Deep Blue beat Kasparov 3½ to 2½.
Wikipedia tells me that the history of chess can be traced back around 1500 years to India and a game called chaturanga. The game of chess as we know it spread via Persia and the Muslim invasion of Spain (Al Andalus) to Europe. It was played in its current form from around 1500, so if Sir Anthony Standen takes an interest in the game, it will be perfectly plausible. I can’t see it happening in The Favourite Murder, he’s far too busy. I’m now just over 42,000 words into the first draft. It’s taken a little while to get writing again after our holiday, but I am back in the saddle again now. There’s a meeting of MilkTown Writers tonight. We are having a talk on sharing our work, so I look forward to hearing about that. The writing prompt this month is Hedgerow, so I’ve written a very short poem.
I used ChatGBT to create the image again. I asked it to paint Garry Kasparov playing chess against a computer, not himself!