Chess vs. Chess960: A PC's View

Chess960 seems to hold special appeal for chess programmers. Because the placement of pieces is random, computers rely on lightning-fast processing, without retrieving archives of past moves from a database.

Conventional chess-playing programs, with their dreadful power to calculate moves deep into the future, still rely on a digital version of an opening book at the outset of each game. This is essentially a look-up table constructed by a specialist, dictating the correct move for two million or more unique positions. >>>mehr: Story in Wired News

Unorthodox Chess From an Odd Mind

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 Reykjavík, 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.

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. >>>mehr in Wired News