Welcome to the 76th issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about Chess. In this edition, we explore the role of humans in a world where computers are undeniably better at chess than us; in the Library section, we review "How Computers Play Chess" by David Levy and Monty Newborn; and in our Vidéothèque section, we learn from Bartek Spitza how to create a chess engine.
Carl Sagan, in the opening words of his 1977 best-seller book, "The Dragons of Eden", quotes a phrase from Plato's Phaedrus, saying "In good speaking, should not the mind of the speaker know the truth of the matter about which he is to speak?" In this occasion I ask myself the same question, and thus I start this article by stating openly that I am no expert in the game of chess (I actually think I have a negative Elo rating!) I am just a fascinated onlooker who happens to marvel at the intricacies of a game that I have never mastered, most probably never will, but one which I greatly enjoy watching and reading about.
Truth or dare! I defy any of my readers to refute this simple fact: watching "The Queen's Gambit" on Netflix during the pandemic made you to either dust out that old chessboard in the attic, or sign up for a chess.com account. I know I did both things, and not only because Anya Taylor-Joy grew up in literally the same neighborhood of Buenos Aires where I did.
The literature about and around chess is too long to enumerate in an article of a thousand words, and this is clearly not my intent. If you want to learn chess, there are so many good books around, it is hard to pick just one. There are, however, fewer books explaining the art of how to teach a computer to play chess; and the one chosen for this issue of the Library section does a magnificent job at precisely that.