A brief history of chess Alex Gendler
The attacking infantry advances steadily,
their elephants already having
broken the defensive line.
The king tries to retreat, but enemy
cavalry flanks him from the rear.
Escape is impossible.
But this isn’t a real war–
nor is it just a game.
Over the roughly one-and-a-half millennia
of its existence,
chess has been known as a tool
of military strategy,
a metaphor for human affairs,
and a benchmark of genius.
While our earliest records of chess
are in the 7th century,
legend tells that the game’s origins
lie a century earlier.
Supposedly, when the youngest prince
of the Gupta Empire was killed in battle,
his brother devised a way of representing
the scene to their grieving mother.
Set on the 8x8 ashtapada board used for
other popular pastimes,
a new game emerged with two key features:
different rules for moving
different types of pieces,
and a single king piece whose fate
determined the outcome.
The game was originally
known as chaturanga–
a Sanskrit word for “four divisions.”
But with its spread to Sassanid Persia,
it acquired its current name
and terminology–
“chess,” derived from “shah,” meaning
king, and “checkmate” from “shah mat,”
or “the king is helpless.”
After the 7th century Islamic conquest
of Persia,
chess was introduced to the Arab world.
Transcending its role as a
tactical simulation,
it eventually became a rich source
of poetic imagery.
Diplomats and courtiers used chess terms
to describe political power.
Ruling caliphs became avid
players themselves.
And historian al-Mas’udi considered the
game a testament to human free will
compared to games of chance.
Medieval trade along the Silk Road carried
the game to East and Southeast Asia,
where many local variants developed.
In China, chess pieces were placed at
intersections of board squares
rather than inside them, as in the native
strategy game Go.
The reign of Mongol leader Tamerlane saw
an 11x10 board
with safe squares called citadels.
And in Japanese shogi, captured pieces
could be used by the opposing player.
But it was in Europe that chess began to
take on its modern form.
By 1000 AD, the game had become part
of courtly education.
Chess was used as an allegory
for different social classes performing
their proper roles,
and the pieces were re-interpreted
in their new context.
At the same time, the Church remained
suspicious of games.
Moralists cautioned against devoting
too much time to them,
with chess even being briefly
banned in France.
Yet the game proliferated,
and the 15th century saw it cohering into
the form we know today.
The relatively weak piece of advisor was
recast as the more powerful queen–
perhaps inspired by the recent surge
of strong female leaders.
This change accelerated the game’s pace,
and as other rules were popularized,
treatises analyzing common openings
and endgames appeared.
Chess theory was born.
With the Enlightenment era, the game
moved from royal courts to coffeehouses.
Chess was now seen as an expression
of creativity,
encouraging bold moves and dramatic plays.
This “Romantic” style reached its peak
in the Immortal Game of 1851,
where Adolf Anderssen managed a checkmate
after sacrificing his queen
and both rooks.
But the emergence of formal competitive
play in the late 19th century
meant that strategic calculation would
eventually trump dramatic flair.
And with the rise of international
competition,
chess took on a new
geopolitical importance.
During the Cold War,
the Soviet Union devoted great resources
to cultivating chess talent,
dominating the championships for the rest
of the century.
But the player who would truly upset
Russian dominance
was not a citizen of another country
but an IBM computer called Deep Blue.
Chess-playing computers had been
developed for decades,
but Deep Blue’s triumph
over Garry Kasparov in 1997
was the first time a machine
had defeated a sitting champion.
Today, chess software is capable of
consistently defeating
the best human players.
But just like the game they’ve mastered,
these machines are products
of human ingenuity.
And perhaps that same ingenuity will guide
us out of this apparent checkmate.