MARK RUBERY CHESS
Deputy Editor of India Today, Kunal Pradhan, conducted a comprehensive interview with former world champion, Viswinathan Anand. He touched on many parts of his career with the following fragment focusing on Anand’s view the impact computers have had on the game.
Q: How much has the emergence of computers and all these information being available to you constantly all the time, changed your sport over the last 20-25 years?
Anand: It’s night and day. Computers have brought this forward so much. For instance when I was growing up in order to acquire the experience people used to say: well, he needs about seven or eight years of experience and then he’s ready to challenge for this or to try for that. Now, you think six months, because computers collect all the information, they present it to you instantly, and if you have any doubts you don’t need to discuss it with another strong player – you can just ask the computer, because quite often the computer itself will give you the answer. In the event you need to talk to another player, you do it online – on Skype or with a phone, whereas there are years I remember where I had to write down stuff I wanted to ask someone and then wait for the next time we happened to be in the same city together. The way you can consult and ask questions and clarify your thoughts has changed so much that people get much stronger much younger. When I became a grandmaster at the age of eighteen, I was the youngest grandmaster in the world. Now I would have to be eleven to be the youngest grandmaster in the world. So that age is descending fast, and in fact chess is getting much, much younger, and one of the reasons is because of computers. The other thing computers have done is to level the geographic playing field. Once upon a time if you wanted to become a good chess player, it was ideal to be born in Russia. If you couldn’t be born in Russia, if you had to be born in India, then Chennai was a good bet, and so on. Now it doesn’t matter. You can be in some island in the Pacific – it’ll still hurt, the lack of contact, because you won’t make the initial friend and you won’t interact, but a big part of the gap has disappeared, which is why the top ten now is filled with players from countries which never had a top ten player for the last hundred years. You can see how computers are changing the game.
Q: But are they robbing chess of the human element or match craft still have enough of that? Chess still needs to be about emotion, about feeling, it can’t only be a mathematical algorithm because then a very essential part of what makes sport will disappear. Do you think that is going on? Is it just used as a tool or is it slowly taking over the sport?
Anand: Not at all. There were fears expressed along these lines some years back, but the point is as long as chess is a sport between two humans then the human element is there. Of course if you play a computer, that’s absent, because you can’t have emotions on your own. So playing against a computer is depressing. But the point is computers have gotten so strong that nobody plays against a computer anymore. In 1997, you needed a supercomputer to beat the strongest human on the planet. By 2000, your laptop could do it. By 2004, an old laptop could do it. Your mobile phone couldn’t do it for a while but by the second or third iteration of these things that started to happen. Soon your kitchen table will do it, your fridge will do it!
BLACK TO PLAY AND DRAW