David Shenk

At this point in my life, I'm comfortable with the idea that I'll be a patzer forever. I like chess a lot, but the idea of sitting down with a book of openings and studying it seriously, like it was for a test, somehow makes the game seem too much like work, even though it's impossible to become even a mediocre player without giving chess some real thought. This attitude probably says something about how I view games as a whole, and in fact maybe even about my view on life in general, and show more Shenk, who's descended from marginally famous 19th century master Samuel Rosenthal, would agree whole-heartedly that your attitude towards chess says a lot about you. Chess metaphors are nearly ubiquitous in many fields of life, and no other game has captured the enthusiasm as well as the imagination of people.

In fact, that's a constant theme of the book, which traces the history of chess as well as its role as a sort of mirror for many literary, artistic, or cultural movements. The title is a reference to one of the most famous chess games in history, which film buffs will recognize from its appearance in Blade Runner. Shenk describes the players' moves and strategies in short chunks of a few moves at a time, interweaving episodes from the development of the game with broader changes in society. Some of Shenk's connections are interesting, others seem like stretches; it's one thing to conjecture that a possible source of the transformation of the limited Minister piece into the modern Queen piece was the rise of powerful female monarchs like Isabella, and another to assert a connection between prodigy François-André Danican Philidor's novel use of pawn structure to John Locke's theories of natural rights. Yet chess has been a favorite pastime of so many influential people that he can write that the development of the Hypermodern style was "closely connected to the early twentieth-century intellectual ferment that spawned the fiction of Joyce, Proust, and Kafka, the theater of Brecht and Pirandello, the fabulist tales of Jorge Luis Borges, the slapstick of Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, the experimental music of John Cage, and the conceptual art of Marcel Duchamp" and not be exaggerating.

Interspersed with funny examples of chess in history, like Benjamin Franklin's chess diplomacy in London trying to prevent the Revolutionary War, are a few mini-biographies of some expected greats (I personally will never cease being fascinated with Bobby Fischer's saddening descent into ludicrous anti-Semitism), and also some really interesting stories I had never heard before. When discussing the nature-nurture question of whether chess genius can be taught or is merely an inborn endowment, Shenk relates the story of Laszlo Polgar:

"Perhaps the best-known example of mentored genius comes from Budapest, Hungary. There, in the late 1960s, psychologist Laszlo Polgar embarked on an unusual experiment in order to prove that any healthy baby can be nurtured into a genius: he publicly declared that he would do this with his own children, who were not yet born. He and his wife forged a plan to school their children at home and focus them intensely on a few favorite disciplines - among them chess. From a very early age, the three Polgar daughters, Zsuzsa, Zsófia, and Judit, studied chess for an average of eight to ten hours every day - perhaps a total of some 20,000 hours from age eight to eighteen.

Lo and behold, they all became chess "geniuses." In 1991, at age twenty-one, Zsuzsa (who later Westernized her name to Susan) became the first woman in history to earn a grandmaster title through qualifying tournaments. The second child, Zsófia, also became a world-class player. Judit, the youngest, became at age fifteen the youngest grandmaster in history (a record previously held by Bobby Fischer), and was considered a strong candidate to eventually become world chess champion."

That's fascinating. The later parts of the book concentrate on the relationship between chess programs and AI. From Alan Turing onwards, many of the most prominent AI researchers have used the problem of chess to focus on different aspects of artificial intelligence, and many now-fundamental techniques such as alpha-beta pruning were given test runs in chess programs. Shenk discusses the question of what exactly Deep Blue's victory over Kasparov means in terms of "true" AI - given the rise in Freestyle competition, which he doesn't mention, I personally don't see that the rise of computers means people are obsolete at all - but it's an interesting question to ponder. Games like checkers have been definitely solved to where AIs can't lose, but no one would argue that AI success in one domain means that it's "smarter" than people. That will take a lot more sophistication on a computer's part, and I don't expect there to be a bright line. Chess, as Shenk movingly and convincingly shows in this book, may be an excellent metaphor for all kinds of things, but it is also our tool, as are the computers that play it, even if our attitude towards it reveals more about us than we might like. Here's the second half of Borges' poem The Game of Chess:

"Slight king, oblique bishop, and a queen
Blood-lusting; upright tower, crafty pawn--
Over the black and the white of their path
They foray and deliver armed battle.

They do not know it is the artful hand
Of the player that rules their fate,
They do not know that an adamant rigor
Subdues their free will and their span.

But the player likewise is a prisoner
(The maxim is Omar's) on another board
Of dead-black nights and of white days.

God moves the player and he, the piece.
What god behind God originates the scheme
Of dust and time and dream and agony?" show less

It's not often that I take a chance on a book, despite tepid (at best) reviews, but this one was exactly the book I wanted. Perhaps it's because I'm an chess neophyte who tires easily with dry history and leans more towards the artistic bent of life than the merely formulaic, but overall this book is as satisfying a perspective of the game of the chess as I could hope for.

First off, dispense with the sub-titular segment "A History of Chess." Yes, it is a history of chess; it makes no qualms show more about being the history of chess--in fact, it makes clear the contested origins and development of the game--but it should not be approached as a history of chess in the rigorous academic sense. It should rather be approached as a journalist's fascination with the game, fueled by his famous chess master ancestor. I believe this fact is what divides the satisfaction from a chess aficionado and someone who is interested in a guided tour of a heavily anecdotal celebration of the game and some of its more notable players and enthusiasts. In the book, the author makes the point that he never really had the urge to become a great chess player, but he did have the drive to become a great chess writer.

The structure of the book is the selling point for me. Between the 12 chapters of quintessential journalistic volubility, we get a step-by-step breakdown and commentary of the so-called "immortal game," which took place in London in 1851. Having never heard of this game before (remember, I'm a novice at best), these interpolated developments kept the main text of the book fresh and the unfolding game intriguing. Delaying the game like this also set up the final move for maximal effect. I leaned back in my chair with a grin, saying, "Ahhhh!"

I also must say that I'm pleased the text didn't just turn into a fanboy homage to Bobby Fischer. Of course, Fischer has his time on the stage--how could he not?--but Marcel Duchamp shows up perhaps more than anyone else. It seems David Shenk made the right move (thank you, thank you) in leaving it to Frank Brady to offer the wanting public some Fischer fodder.

If you're an amateur chess player, looking to know a little more about the game you're learning, this is it. If you don't know anything about chess and are looking for a starting point, this is definitely the book (it even includes the rules of the game in the appendix). If you simply like anecdotal histories that cull quotes and interesting tableaux from famous figures, this is it. Entertaining, engaging, inspiring. having read the coda and written this review, I'm ready to play some chess! show less

The Immortal Game is an interesting and fascinating book. It is a beguiling mixture: bare-bones instructions on how chess pieces move (with some interesting history on how pieces and their powers developed), a history of the origins, the development and the spread in the popularity of chess, and an argument that sees chess as a reflection of broader social and historical developments. By 1565, Shenk argues:

"Chess's allegorical clout, its ability to symbolize a wide variety of social and show more political situations, was reaching a new summit. The game was now approaching the end of its first millennium. It had been an extension of sixth-century Indian warfare and mathematics, a seventh-century Persian cultural mainstay, a useful thought tool for the eighth-century Muslim warrior-philosophers, a favorite occupation of the ninth- and tenth-century Spanish Muslims, and a social mirror for the knights, kings, and clerics of medieval Europe in the eleventh through fourteenth centuries. Now, as society became more enlightened, the game's metamorphic use mushroomed, moving in several directions at once".

For Shenk, tracking the migration of chess is a way of tracking the larger transmission of knowledge through Europe up to 1200; for moralists of that time, chess stood for the new empowerment, the idea of making one's way in the world based on one's own efforts and ability, rather than dice, a game of chance that represented a consciousness resigned to a world dominated by fate. Shenk argues that the greatest paradox of chess over the many centuries is that it was, on the one hand, an icon of the status quo, a favorite of rulers and of traditional moralists seeking to reinforce social obligations and yet, at the same time, it was an agent of change: "Any tool that encourages new ways to think is inherently subversive because it challenges the intellectual status quo." In Shenk's view:

"Anyone in need of dynamic symbol to explore and convey elements of war, competition, hierarchy, political power, battle for resources, control by a higher power, meritocracy, the nature of thought, futility, abstract movement, complexity, or infinity had a choice vehicle standing by for metaphoric flight."

Shenk traces the influence, and use, of chess in the development of cognitive science, studies of memory, and the man-machine competition of artificial intelligence. And then, there are the absurdities of Freudian interpretations that saw chess as, "so well adapted to gratify at the same time the homosexual and the antagonistic aspects of the father-son contest." (I'm not making this up.)

Interspersed through the book is a very interesting analysis of what came to be known as the "Immortal Game" between Andolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky, June 21, 1851, in London. Both men were in London for a tournament, but this was a friendly, pick-up game, that came to be identified with the sheer brilliance of play by Anderssen to win despite the sacrifices of both rooks and his queen.

Part of the exquisite appeal of chess is that there are fixed and very clear rules for the movement of the pieces, but within these structures, the scope for innovation and movement and change are almost limitless. It is somewhat startling to learn that after three moves, the players have settled on one of approximately nine MILLION possible board positions. After four moves, the number is 315 BILLION. The total number of possible chess games is 10 to the 120th power. The total number of electrons in the universe is thought to be 10 to the 79th power. Amazing. show less

Data Smog (the concept) is an elegant and useful addition to the language of the Information Age. Data Smog (the book) is an intermittently useful but decidedly inelegant addition to the swelling ranks of books about the perils of the Information Age. David Shenk argues that, although data is good, more data is not necessarily better and too much data is definitely bad. The book works best when it develops parts of that argument in depth and tries to work out their social and cultural show more implications. It would have worked considerably better if that was all it tried to do in its 250-odd pages. Instead, Shenk seems determined to catalog every major ill of the Information Age: spam, identity theft, the erosion of privacy, the decline of online civility, the fragmentation of the common culture, and the reduction of news and politics to sound bites. Packing all that in 250 pages takes some doing, and inevitably means leaving something out. Among the things that fall by the wayside are historical context, supporting evidence, and any serious consideration of the benefits of the Information Age.

Shenk never seriously considers the possibility that the changes he is discussing were underway before the advent of computers and might be driven at least in part by other technological and social forces. The advent of cheap printing in the late 19th century made it possible for 1900 New York to have a dozen or more daily papers aimed at distinct audiences, and the newsstands of the 1930s to have scores of pulp fiction magazines on a dozen different themes (romance, sea stories, flying stories, horror stories, straight detective, true detective, sexy detective, and so on). Computers may have exacerbated market fragmentation, but they hardly created it. He is similarly sketchy in considering the ways that the Information Age and its superabundance of data have benefitted society: instant access to once-obscure information and the chance to form virtual communities organized around common interests, to name just two.

Ironically for a book about the problems created by a superabundance of data, Data Smog is surprisingly short on concrete supporting evidence. Shenk argues mostly from anecdotes, whether from his own life or the lives of friends or colleagues or people he interviewed. The anecdotes are generally relevant and frequently fascinating, but this style of argument works best in a one-page op-ed column than in a 250-page book. Shenk's preference for argument-by-anecdote (his anecdotage?) either reflects or reinforces his tendency to flit from one topic to another. He throws out one argument after another, sprinkles a few well-chosen anecdotes in its wake, and moves on. The reader is left (but not given the time) to work out whether there's anything to the argument.

Data Smog is, at this writing, nearly twenty years old: a technological eternity, given its subject. Readers interested in the social impact of the computer might want to check it out of the library or looked for it used, but its days as a must-read work have long since passed. show less