Two dozen programmers from around the world have signed up to compete in Germany next month in the first computer chess tournament devoted to Chess960, a game variant invented by fugitive chess genius Bobby Fischer that's slowly gaining rank among grandmasters.
The rules of Chess960 are mostly the same as orthodox chess -- but the setup incorporates something once considered anathema to the game: chance. Pawns begin where they always do. However, the pieces behind them on the white side are arranged at random, with the proviso that bishops must end up on opposite colors, and the king dwell somewhere between the two rooks. The black pieces are lined up to mirror the white.
That makes for 960 different starting positions in the game, instead of just one. The point of Chess960 is to free chess from the yoke of memorization.
The opening phase of a chess game as currently played has been subject to a hundred years of scholarship and play, and today players are hard pressed to find so much as a viable pawn push within the first 20 moves that hasn't been thoroughly analyzed.
As a result, serious players spend considerable time memorizing published openings as played by masters and grandmasters, so they know the correct, time-tested response to every move an opponent makes. One standard text on the subject, Modern Chess Openings, is 750 pages long, and will tell you, for example, that the proper answer to white's pawn advance on the 12th move of the Soltis Variation of the Yugoslav Attack, a variant of the Sicilian Defense, is to move your king's rook pawn.
"Bobby Fischer felt that this is not really what chess should be all about," said Mark Vogelgesang with Chess Tigers, a German nonprofit group organizing next month's tournament. "It should be about creativity."
Fischer unveiled the new chess at a 1996 press conference in Buenos Aires. The idea was simple: With so many possible starting positions, Chess960 -- or "Fischer Random Chess" -- takes rote memorization off the board. Opening books are obsolete, and competitors live and die by skill alone from the very first move.
The game makes room for casual players with day jobs to play at a serious level, because they no longer have to devote hours of preparatory time to studying opening variations.
Fischer captured the public's imagination in 1972 when he defeated Boris Spassky in a match in Reykjavk, Iceland, to become the world chess champion -- the first (and still only) American to hold the title, which had long been dominated by Soviet players.
He lost the championship three years later when he refused to play challenger Anatoly Karpov. Fischer then vanished from the chess world for years, re-emerging in 1992 to play and win a reunion match against Spassky, for a reported purse of $5 million. The match was held in Yugoslavia, and Fischer participated in open defiance of U.S. sanctions against that country. Back in the United States, federal prosecutors indicted Fischer, who became a fugitive.
Despite the endorsement of one of the chess world's most famous, and controversial, figures, years passed without Chess960 gaining much traction. Then, in 2001, German aficionados began organizing Chess960 exhibition matches and open tournaments as part of the Chess Classic Mainz -- an annual chess festival held outside Frankfurt that draws players from throughout Europe.
In 2003, Russian grandmaster Peter Svidler defeated the Hungarian Peter Leko to become the official Chess960 World Champion. Last year over 200 players, including scores of grandmasters, competed for the right to challenge Svidler for the championship this year.
In the meantime, Chess960 also holds a strong appeal for chess programmers. Conventional chess-playing programs, which can calculate moves deep into the future, still rely on a digital version of an opening book -- basically a lookup table dictating the right move for two million or more positions. The random aspect of Chess960, on the other hand, requires original analysis for each move.
Participants in the first Chess960 Computer World Championship are coming from Holland, Greece, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, Germany and even the United States, says organizer Vogelgesang. First place takes 1,000 euros ($1,200)
"It'll be great to get these programmers together," Vogelgesang said. "The spectrum ranges from the amateur who does this in his spare time, to the guy who lives for writing chess programs, and who is working day and night to have the best chess program. I think it'll be a big blast."
An exhibition match the day before the event will put Svidler, reigning Chess960 champion and the seventh-ranked chess player in the world, across the board from a Chess960-playing program called the Baron for two games. So far, such high-level man-machine battles are rare for Chess960, leaving unanswered the question of whether the game favors humans or machines.
In orthodox chess, the matter is largely considered settled in favor of the computer, following Hydra's spanking of British grandmaster Michael Adams last month in a six-game match in London. Adams drew one game against the supercomputer, and lost the other five.
Last year, Armenian grandmaster Levon Aronian -- the 10th-rated chess player in the world -- drew the Baron twice in a two-game Chess960 exhibition. Richard Pijl, the Netherlands-based coder who wrote the Baron, says neither game gave his program much trouble, and he thinks that Chess960 might turn out to be even better for computers than conventional chess. "I think it would be more of a problem for a human player than a computer, because the computer just calculates anyways," said Pijl. "But I'm not really certain that's true."
It's also unclear whether Chess960's reputation is helped, or hurt, by Bobby Fischer's proselytizing.
Fischer was arrested in Japan last year on immigration charges after the United States revoked his passport. From jail, Fischer continued promoting the game he invented.
"I don't play chess anymore. I play Fischer Random," said Fischer, in a radio interview from a Tokyo detention center last August. "You can learn the rules in two minutes. It's a great game, and can become the standard for chess."
After nine months in custody fighting U.S extradition, Fischer was released last March to the nation of Iceland, which granted him citizenship and a new passport.
Even before his arrest, Fischer was a controversial figure. Paranoid, rabidly anti-Semitic and a Holocaust denier, the chess king sees himself as the victim of a vast Jewish conspiracy aimed at everything from stealing the royalties for a book he authored, to blocking his work on an improved chess clock. He archives interviews and writings on these topics on his personal website.
He notoriously celebrated the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in a radio interview with Bombo Radyo, a small public-radio station in the Philippines, a few hours after hijacked planes hurtled into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing thousands.
"This is all wonderful news," he said at the time. "It's time to finish off the U.S. once and for all."
Vogelgesang says the chess world has mixed feelings about Fischer.
"People are very divided on him as a person and a chess player," says Vogelgesang. "There are people who think what happened to him was unjust, (and) there are people who are upset over the statements he makes. Have you heard the statements he's made? They're very disturbing."
Though Chess960 is growing in popularity, it's not the first chess variant to be proposed by a celebrity player, and seems unlikely to displace orthodox chess. But it is finding support from unlikely quarters.
Last month, former world champion Anatoly Karpov, jilted by Fischer 30 years ago, publicly challenged his absent opponent to a match at his own game.
"I would love to play Chess960 with Fischer," Karpov said, in an interview published by ChessBase News. "It is not necessary to spend ages preparing some opening variations, because there is just no theory. It is important to be in good shape and to have a clear mind. Then you can play a match with Fischer and you can even beat him."
So far, Fischer hasn't risen to accept the challenge.
