Luke McShane

Can ChatGPT play chess? A few weeks ago, when the AI chatbot was making headlines, someone had the cute idea of getting it to play a game against the popular chess engine Stockfish. At the start, it followed a standard line of the Ruy Lopez opening. But soon the illegal moves began – ChatGPT tried to castle before its bishop was out of the way. Later, it added pieces to the board from nowhere, queens jumped over knights, and rooks teleported magically around the board. I repeated this experiment myself, with similar phantasmagorical results, all while the bot supplied nonsensical explanations for its moves. Indeed, ChatGPT cannot play chess, and it was fun to watch its collapsing facade of cogency. Teehee, silly computer!

The Cambridge International Open, held last week in fine surroundings at the University Arms Hotel in the city centre, is a valuable addition to the UK tournament scene. Organised by the English Chess Federation, demand for this debut event was strong and registrations had to close early at around 120 participants, when the capacity of the playing hall was reached. Nine grandmasters took part in the open tournament, including England’s top player Michael Adams. Despite being a huge favourite in his first round game, he drifted into serious trouble in the early middlegame. Seeing the storm clouds gathering, he wisely ventured a draw offer, which was accepted – that being a tremendous achievement for his teenage opponent and namesake Henry Adams.

If a series of chess games is drawn, how do you split the tie? One answer is to play two more games (one of each colour) at a faster time limit, to boost the odds of a decisive result. But that might take a while. When the games get too brisk, the tiebreak feels divorced from the original contest. The drawbacks of playing just one game are obvious – the white player get an unfair edge, and the game might end up drawn anyway. So the Armageddon game was invented – the chess equivalent of a penalty shoot-out. In this, a drawn game results in a win for the black player. On its own, that’s a chunky advantage, so a time handicap is used to even out the chances. What time handicap yields a fair contest?

I picture a medieval priest, hunched over a desk with bells clanging in his ears. He is on a deadline – tomorrow is Sunday and his congregation have heard enough sermons about the spiritual value of threshing. The leatherbound book in front of him, Summa collationum, sive communiloquium, is his source of inspiration. It’s a recent edition of a book written some 200 years earlier by a Franciscan monk, John of Wales (Johannes Gallensis), who died c. 1285. One section, known as ‘The Innocent Morality’, presents chess as an extended allegory for life. The priest pores over the Latin: ‘The world resembles a chessboard, which is chequered white and black on account of the twofold state of life and death, of grace and sin.’ A stirring thought.

Two rounds before the end of this year’s Tata Steel Masters, Jorden Van Foreest, the Dutch no. 2, declared himself ‘excited to play the role of spoiler’. Van Foreest was placed near the bottom of the leaderboard, but had yet to face two of the leaders. His opponent in the penultimate round was Anish Giri. True to his word, Van Foreest attacked him with abandon, and had his compatriot on the ropes, but their game was finally drawn after more than six hours of play. In the final round, Van Foreest faced tournament debutant Nodirbek Abdusattorov, hitherto the star of the event. The 18-year-old from Uzbekistan had led almost from the start, beating Magnus Carlsen along the way.

Fide’s clock was ticking, and their position looked difficult. But at last they have made their move, announcing that the next world championship match will take place in Astana, Kazakhstan with a €2 million prize fund, beginning on 7 April. Two factors explain the delay. One was Magnus Carlsen’s abdication, announced in July last year. Ding Liren and Ian Nepomniachtchi, who qualified to contest the match, are first-rate players, but obviously less marketable than the Norwegian. The second snag was that Nepomniachtchi is Russian.

Internet bogeyman Andrew Tate, recently detained in Romania on trafficking and rape charges, is a chess fan. Disciples who visit his ‘The Real World’ website in search of the influencer’s insight will encounter a logo featuring a cobra entwined with a chess knight. ‘King Cobra’, as he was known during his days as a professional kickboxer, is a competent chess player, as he showed during a recent interview on Piers Morgan Uncensored. Their verbal sparring concluded with a game of chess, in which Morgan left his queen hanging and Tate didn’t hesitate to capitalise. Afterwards, Tate praised chess as a game which fosters absolute self-reliance, a lesson he learned from his father.

After a pause during the pandemic, the Hastings Chess Congress returned for its 96th edition in the days after Christmas, with renewed support from software company Caplin. A newly published book, The Chess Battles of Hastings by Jürgen Brustkern and Norbert Wallet (New in Chess, 2022), offers an enjoyable chronicle of the event’s rich history. Among the vignettes of congress luminaries, one anecdote caught my eye. One year in the 1980s, heavy snowfall caused the heating in the playing hall to fail, to which most players responded with an early draw offer. But grandmaster Murray Chandler persevered for five hours, he and his opponent ‘like two Eskimos, in woollen hats and winter coats’, and became joint winner thanks to his victory.

Doing your job, and not a jot more – ‘quiet quitting’ – became one of the buzzphrases of 2022. In The Spectator, Stephen Daisley lauded this as the philosophy of the clear-eyed pragmatist, not the layabout, and wondered when more young employees would cotton on. Was Magnus Carlsen thinking along the same lines? For the time being, he remains the world champion in classical chess, and many believe that his job, his grand duty, is to defend the title at all costs. So there was much consternation when he announced in July his intention to abdicate, leaving the title to be contested between Ian Nepomniachtchi and Ding Liren later in 2023. It seems to me that Carlsen sees his job differently.

1. Who tweeted, in answer to the question ‘Do you still play chess?’: ‘I did as a child, but found it to be too simple to be useful in real life: a mere 8 by 8 grid, no fog of war, no technology tree, no random map or spawn position, only 2 players, both sides exact same pieces, etc. Polytopia addresses these limitations.’ 2. Who was handed a six-month ban by the Fide Ethics commission for his cheerleading of the invasion of Ukraine, ruling out his participation in this year’s Candidates tournament? 3. Who came second behind Ian Nepomniachtchi, and will challenge ‘Nepo’ for the world title in 2023, in light of Magnus Carlsen’s abdication? 4. White to play and mate in two moves (diagram above left).