Another Tal Tale

The 1988 Software ToolWorks Tournament

Former world champion Mikhail Tal played in the November 1988 Software Toolworks  tournament at Long beach, California.

Tal also participated in the speed chess tournament held the evening before the American Open in Santa Monica  tournament, hosted by Wlalter Browne’s Speed Chess Association, the WBCA, where I qualified to play two speed games against him after making it to the semi-finals, when I got knocked out.

Tal was the World Speed Chess Champion at the time, at age 52, exactly twice the age  of Fide World Champion Gary Kasparov. Plaudits to Walter Browne and his WBCA for the magazine he published with speed games of the worlds best blitz players, but especially for enabling US players to play some games against this great tactician. I was proud of spearheading the founding of the WBCA indirectly through a much less ambitious project to reinstate speed ratings in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The leading picture and linked score  is of Tal’s later 1992 victory a month before his death, in a blitz game against Kasparov.

The Fiddler's Green and the birth of the WBCA

About fourteen years earlier in San Francisco 1974, there were monthly speed chess tournaments with a Swiss pairing system held at The Fiddler Green, a small, family owned used bookstore / coffee bar with a pleasant atmosphere, music, a fireplace and distinctive antiuque furnishings. In a good month I might win the round trip transportation from Berkeley and even a  meal by finishing second to Walter Browne or one of the other strong SF players at the time, like Jay Whitehood or Jeremy Sillman. These tournaments also had an informal rating system maintained by a local programmer.

When his program was no longer available and the tournaments had been discontinued, I offered to write a rating program and start a new speed chess club called the Speed Chess Association, or SCA, at the home of hall of fame chess arbiter  Mike Goodall and tournament director Allen Benson at Berkeley. Jokingly I mentioned that SC were also my initials in case any issues of authority or jurisdiction arose.

I hardly suspected this would be picked up by Walter Browne himself, naming the organization the World Blitz Association so as to have his initials.

For that I got several years free subscription to his magazine.

The Sixty-Four Square Madhouse

The 1988 Software ToolWorks Tournament at Long Beach was also the materialization of a tale I read in high school.

This 1962 short SCI-Fi story by Fritz Lieber was the first story about  the onslaught of the ‘Chess Terminators’ that I read 25 years earlier. Set in the days of Nimzovitch, Tartakover and Bogolubov, the story dramatized the chaos and panic that ensued when a supercomputer successfully competed among the grandmasters.

There was also an early interview with Tal where he said some eccentric came up to him once and told him that computers would rule one day.  Tal  dismissed the man as a lunatic at the time. I’ve searched for this interview without success for dates and other details - would appreciate any leads in the comments section.

Fast forward twenty-five years to Long Beach, 1988. Sponsored by the Software Toolworks, Inc. This was the first tournament where a computer (Hitech from Carnegie Mellon) beat top level grandmaster Bent Larson of Denmark. 

I recall some grandmasters complained about being paired against a computer, with the rules that they had to take their name off this list in advance of the tournament. I think I recall Jeremy Silman saying that Tal also was surprised by the rule, though this may have been at the American Open the next year, also held at Long Beach.

This victory marked a significant milestone in the history of computer chess, as it was the first time a computer had beaten a grandmaster in a tournament setting with standard time controls. Deep Thought, developed at Carnegie Mellon University, was a predecessor to the more famous Deep Blue3.

‘The System’ of Deep Thought author Hans Berliner

In this little known work IM Hans Berliner gives his system of thinking for his own play that he automated for his programs like Hitchech and different versions of Deep Thought. In a sense he carried the ball to the 99 yard line, beating super-gm’s with his Deep Thought program before his graduate student Feng-hsuiung Hsu developed Deep Blue, first on a shoestring budget from his graduate scholarship, then later funded by IBM to target the world championship, as detailed in his book Behind Deep Blue.

In Berliner’s book he claims that he refuted the Gruenfeld defense, proving it a win for White with his Deep Thought program. A little premature, and interesting that decades later Larry Kauffman’s New Repertoire for Black would recommend the Gruenfeld Defense as a good engine backed system for Black!

But Berliner’s book showing the refutation has some interesting precursors of Alpha-Zero style of attacks, with White advancing his h pawn to h6 to attack the Black king all the while with the White King stuck in the center. In order to carry out the ‘forced win’, White needs to find triple exclamation mark moves to avoid losing during this long sequence of attacking moves. Whatever the status of this analysis now (it will be fun to revisit it with the help of LC0), it highlights the fact that a good move for a computer might be a poor choice for a biological player, requiring them to break dance through miles of land mines without a single slip before converting an advantage that only the computer can see.

Chess for Programmers and Programming for Chess Players

If there is interest we could do a series of posts on these topics.