Isaac Asimov and Chess

Isaac Asimov was born in 1920. In his lifetime, he wrote over 500 books.

One of his first science fiction stories, Nightfall, written in 1941, contains a reference to chess. A multi-chess board was set up and a six-member game was started. In 1968, the Science Fiction Writers of America voted Nightfall the best science fiction short story ever written. When the book was expanded into a novel, multi-chess had been changed to stochastic chess.

His first published novel, Pebble in the Sky, published in 1950, propelled a man thousands of years into the future. The only thing that did not change, after thousands of years, was the game of chess. The novel also mentioned variants of chess such as 3-D chess, and chess played with dice.

In 1979, Asimov wrote Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts. On page 68, he says, "The number of possible ways of playing just the first four moves on each side in a game of chess is 318,979,564,000." This may be wrong. The number of possible ways for White to play the first move is 20 (16 pawn moves and 4 knight moves). For the first move with Black, the number is 400. For the 2nd move for white, the number of possible moves is 8,902 (5,362 distinct). For the 2nd move for Black, the number of possible moves is 197,281 (71,852 distinct). For the 3rd move for White, the number of possible moves is 4,865,617. For the 3rd move for Black, the number of possible moves is 119,060,679. For the 4th move for White, the number of possible moves is 3,195,913,043. For the 4th move for Black, the number of possible moves is 84,999,425,906. This is smaller than what Asimov says.

In 1981, Asimov wrote a science fiction short story called The Perfect Fit. He referred to a 3-dimensional chess game which was a game with 8 chessboards stacked upon each other, making the playing area cubic rather than square.

He has been quoted as saying, "In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate."

In 1990, he wrote an essay for the Los Angeles Times about computer chess vs. human intelligence.

In 1994, Isaac Asimov's last autobiography, I. Asimov: A Memoir, was published. He died in 1992 of AIDS after a blood transfusion during heart surgery. In his chapter titled Games, this is what he said about chess.

Failure at physical sports has never bothered me...What bothered me, though, was my failure at chess. When I was quite young and had a checkerboard, but no chess pieces, I read books on the game and learned the various moves. I then cut out cardboard squares on which I drew the symbols for the various pieces, and tried to play games with myself. Eventually I managed to persuade my father to get me real chessmen. Then I taught my sister the moves and played the game with her. Both of us played very clumsily indeed.

My brother, Stanley, who watched us play, learned the moves and, eventually, asked if he might play. Ever the indulgent older brother, I said, "Sure," and prepared to beat the pants off him. The trouble was that in the first game he ever played he beat me.

In the years that followed, I discovered that everyone beat me, regardless of race, color, or religion. I was simply the most appallingly bad chess player who ever lived, and, as time went on, I just stopped playing chess.

My failure at chess was really distressing. It seemed completely at odds with my "smartness," but I now know (or at least have been told) that great chess players achieve thier results by years and years of studying chess games, by the memorization of large numbers of complex "combinations." They don't see chess as a succession of moves but as a pattern. I know what that means, for I see an essay or a story as a pattern.

But these talents are different. Kasparov sees a chess game as a pattern but an essay as a mere collection of words. I see an essay as a pattern and a chess game as a mere collection of moves. So he can play chess and I can write essays and not vice versa.

That's not enough, however. I never thought of comparing myself to grand masters of chess. What bothered me was my inability to beat anyone! The conclusion that I finally came to (right or wrong) was that I was unwilling to study the chessboard and weigh the consequences of each possible move I might make. Even people who couldn't see complex patterns might at least penetrate two or three moves ahead, but not I. I moved entirely on impulse, if not at random, and could not make myself do anything else. That meant I would almost certainly lose.

And again - why? To me, it seems obvious. I was spoiled by my ability to understand instantly, my ability to recall instantly. I expected to see things at once and I refused to accept a situation in which that was not possible.