Guardian Chess

Past and Future History

Over the last two millennium the game of chess has undergone a number of rule changes which reflect the changing conditions and priorities of human intercourse. It's gone from being a four player partnership game to a two player head-to-head fight. And, in general, the power or mobility of the chess men has been enhanced so as to "speed up" the play action. Also since the middle of the 19th century (1850's)  "official" tournament and match play chess have become popular, making it a social affair as well as a private encounter between two individual players. Eventually tournament participants realized that a time limitation should be required for the completion of a game, and hence punch clocks were intimately incorporated into the play.

About a hundred years later attempts were begun to program computers to play chess. After four decades of time, and through the efforts of millions of computer software programmers, mathematicians, electrical engineers, materials scientists, physicists, chip and computer architecture developers, and others ---- in the year 1988 a computer running a chess program beat a top grandmaster (Bent Larson) at the American Open Chess Tournament in Los Angeles, California. Nine years later a chess program runninfg on Deep Blue, a powerful IBM computer, beat the world chess champion Gary Kasparov in a six game match. Since then programs which can defeat grandmasters have become available to the general public. They are inexpensive and can be run on a regular pc.

Mankind has seemingly lost his intellectual supremacy in the field of chess playing. Although the chess programs are based on the brute force computation of billions of contingencies and not on sentient, intelligent cognition ---- it is still deflating to the human ego that machines have become superior to man in an activity that he has always considered his forte. Chess is definitely not the game it once was.

Another negative impact on chess, I believe, is the prodigious amount of so called "opening theory" that has proliferated over time. Creative chess doesn't begin until the middle game is reached. The opening, which at one time was an interesting and important phase of the game, has now become a mechanical march through to the middle game.

The next stage of chess evolution should be vastly more complex than present day chess, so as to defeat the brute-force computational efforts of even the most powerful computers, yet be no more difficult for humans to play. It should be a creative experience from the first move to the last, without the necessity of routinely memorizing opening positions. It should possess the elasticity of breadth and depth so that over-the-board games lasting anywhere from ten minutes per player to ten hours per player can be satisfactorily and rewardingly accomplished. And finally it must possess both the substance and ineffable subtlety which makes chess the great game it is.

Guardian chess, I believe, meets the above conditions----and more. It greatly emphasizes the evaluation of the strategic potential of a position, as well as the performing of the required chess calculations and computations. Vastly complex dynamic patterns arise which can never be precisely resolved, but can only be made sense of in an intuitive or fuzzy way. The move "looks" or "feels" right to the experienced chess master. And I don't think there can ever be an algorithm written for human intuition. The human chess player, in order to succeed in this evolved state of chess, must be an artist, poet, scientist, and sportsman.