The Purpose of Chess

What is the purpose of chess?

Yes, I see the blank stares. "It's a game of course, what nonsense inspired the question?"

Well yes, but then again no. The Encyclopedia of the Soviet Union once upon a time defined chess as an artform which takes the appearance of a game. Or something like that...I never read the text.

If you ask one of the team's founding members, (Jesse) he will tell you a story about teaching chess to a kid who was badly deficient in math and English comprehension scores. After a year of using chess to help the student develop thinking and organization skills, his mathmatical abilities soared and he could finally hold his own quite nicely in comprehending a big chunk of written text.

If you ask me about what chess meant to me in graduate school, I remember every other week or so being profoundedly drowned and confounded in a tidal wave of anxieties and worries. But I could sit down in front of the chessboard, and for 45 minutes, all that stressful thinking crawled down into the dungeon where it belonged, and for just a little while, I was free! Even more, after an all nighter of pushing around equations for a homework assignment, usually a game of chess felt more refreshing than a nap. Is chess a form of sleep?

Dutch grandmaster Hans Ree is famous for the quote: "Chess is beautiful enough to waste your life for."

A few other quotes:

Bobby Fisher: "Chess is life."

Judit Polgar: "Chess demolishes differences. It's a language of different generations."

Arturo Pérez-Reverte: "Chess is all about getting the king into check. It's about killing the father. I would say that chess has more to do with the art of murder than it does with the art of war."

Stanley Kubrick: "You sit at the board and suddenly your heart leaps. Your hand trembles to pick up the piece and move it. But what chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it's really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas."

Kubrick even incorporated the moves of a famous endgame into the movie "2001: A Space Oddyssey" where the computer HAL explains the winning combination.

I have a sneaking suspicion that: -- if there exists a galactic civilization -- and it has been deliberately and sensibly ignoring us in horror that one day, if we get to join it, we'll all be very proud to say: "Chess is a HUMAN invention."

Cheers, wnm