Abstract
We have long been waiting for a book on the history of “the epic battle of man versus machine for supremacy at the game of chess”. Now that book has been written by Karsten Müller and Jonathan Schaeffer, the logical pairing of a Chess Grandmaster and a renowned computer chess expert, both of whom have ample writing experience. Karsten Müller published over a dozen chess books, and Jonathan Schaeffer wrote (amongst other things) One Jump Ahead,1
Curiously enough, the Wikipedia disambiguity page for the entry ‘One Jump Ahead’ does not include Jonathan Schaeffer’s book. Instead, there are four other entries for that title: A 1955 British film (“A hard-boiled reporter tries to solve a mysterious crime despite an increasingly complicated love life”), a 1972 Canadian novel by Anthony Armstrong (details unknown), a 2007 science fiction novel by Mark L. Van Name (“A nanotech-enhanced warrior searching for a way back to his home world”), and a 1992 song from Walt Disney’s ‘Aladdin’.
Like Janus, the god of beginnings and transitions in Roman mythology, this review has two faces. Not one towards the past and the other towards the future, like Janus himself, but one towards the content and one towards the appearance of this book. It was tempting to use yin and yang as a metaphor, but that comparison is crippled because yin and yang represent the philosophy that in the good there is bad and in the bad there is good. In this case, however, there is no bad in the good (the content) and no good in the bad (the appearance). To start with the bottom line: this is a great book that suffers from sloppy publishing.
Most of the pictures are printed in an abysmal quality, lacking all the rich contrast and detail that can be seen in the digital version of this book. Notably ‘Charles Babbage with a modern recreation of his Difference Engine’ (p. 19), ‘Leonardo Torres y Quevedo’s first chess-playing machine’ (p. 22) and the picture of Herbert Simon and Allen Newell analyzing a chess game (p. 37) are pitiful shadows of the original images. The problem is further compounded by the vagueness of the print (lack of ink?) on some of the pages, most notably the even-numbered pages at the beginning of the book. The latter problem might be only affecting my copy of the book, but the lack of crispness of the pictures is a problem throughout the printed book.
It may seem unjust to mention printing defects and layout flaws in a serious review of a book on computer chess, but I just happen to love books and always consider a book to be the amalgamation of the message and the physical appearance. A famous Dutch publisher once said “A beautiful book deserves to be published beautifully.” I could not agree more, and I feel that it is very unfair to the authors who worked so hard to create this great book to have to put up with this printing hack job. Especially at a time when e-books are threatening to eradicate the traditional printed media – Let’s face it, you are reading this on an electronic device and no longer in a printed paper journal – it is of prime importance that ‘old technology fights back’, meaning that publishers must cherish and focus on the unique selling points of printed publications over their digital rivals. If you want to sell paper books, they had better look fantastic, feel and smell great, and are a joy to hold and read. Unnecessary underperformance (as in this case) does not help the cause of printed books.
Which brings me to the lack of a subject index, which is annoying. For example, after I finished reading the book, I realized that I had not come across
Another problem that authors have to cope with in the declining publishing industry, is the lack of editorship. It is simply too expensive for a publishing house to assign an editor to a book project. As a consequence, in addition to writing the book, authors must typeset and proofread it themselves. That invariably leads to ‘author blindness’: the inability to catch errors in your manuscript because you’ve read it too many times.3
One instance I discovered in this book is misspelling ‘Fischer’ as ‘Fisher’ in a quote by Hans Berliner (p. 105). That mistake can be traced back to its source: a transcript of a recorded interview with Hans Berliner kept in the Computer History Museum. Some references are missing, such as Fischer (1972) and Reshevsky (1973). The reference to Herbert Simon (1957) is also missing and the ‘7’ in ‘1957’ is awkwardly printed, which is strange because it looks fine in the PDF version of the book.To enrich the main story, there are some 70 sidebars which contain interesting quotes (Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon predicting in 1957: “Within 10 years a digital computer will be the world’s chess champion unless the rules bar it from competition”), explanations of computer chess programming concepts (Alpha-Beta Algorithm, Transposition Tables), and milestones in computer game playing (Christopher Strachey wrote the first working checkers program in 1952). Unfortunately, 13 of these sidebars are needlessly spread over two pages, in some cases even very short ones such as the ten-line sidebar on p. 50/51 and the nine-line sidebar on p. 369/370. I know that the authors care about such layout issues because in a draft PDF version of the manuscript, I could still read the authors’ comments such as “Possibly remove ‘by both sides’ so that the widow on the next page moves to this page?” and “This sidebar could be moved two pages back to fill in the blank space at the bottom of the page.” Of course, the problem is that by doing that, everything else shifts and moves, creating new problems with the layout elsewhere. What this book needed, is a dedicated editor with excellent proofreading skills and a sense for good page layout, who went over the manuscript from beginning to end to resolve all such conflicts. As it is, the authors undoubtedly bite their tongues in disgust knowing that the sidebar on Retrograde Analysis is spread over three pages where two would have sufficed.
As Dolly Parton said: “If you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain”. So let us now look at the beautiful rainbow. The book has nine chapters, chronologically organized as ‘a chess game’ that is subdivided into three sections: Opening (1770–1969), Middlegame (1970–1997), and Endgame (1998-present). The ‘game’ is preceded by an Introduction (Pre-Game) and succeeded by References, Additional Games, a Game Index, and End Notes (Post-Game). Each chapter bears the approximate Elo-rating of the best chess machine/program in the period covered, and contains all the important games that were played between man and machine during that time interval. Chapter 1 (0000; 1770–1956) heads off with the first ‘artificial chess player’,
The Endgame describes the increasingly rare man-machine encounters in the aftermath of the momentous computer chess victory, as well as the impact that computers now have on human chess practice, such as opening preparation with the help of a computer, the abolishment of adjourned games, and the possibility of cheating by secretly consulting a computer during the game.
At the time of the writing of this book, the best computers had achieved an Elo rating of about 3300. At the time of writing this review, the Swedish Chess Computer Association Rating List reports that