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The I.G.K. Fifth Symposium Hamburg 1999

Chess Historical Research and the Internet:
A Meeting of "Many Worlds"

From notes prepared by Don McLean for IGK Chess Symposium,
November 26-29, 1999 - Hamburg, Germany.

The Tower
In ancient times, all good things, and some not so good, were kept in the tower for protection. Some items were of material value, some intellectual and some spiritual. Just as often, important captives were held hostage in towers for ransom or execution. For these and many other reasons it could be said that towers impacted enormously on culture, for no matter what they contained, without them the struggle to secure a continuously rich and meaningful existence remained in jeopardy. As the records show, among those who foreswore the construction of artificial heights, a great diminishment is generally evident.

Towers propose an interesting ambiguity. In ancient times, they were perceived as being both dark and light - evil towers and friendly ones. Variously, the activities and information they protected were no less important to the general order than the information contained in computer towers sitting on today's 21st. Century desktop. From the citadel, emissaries and agents could dispatch to foreign lands asking and delivering answers to question such as: "Is the world flat or spherical?" - "How many knights does the Caliph have?" - or - "Is chess really the game of the goddess?"

Long before the days of electricity, watch fires burned from parapets and although much light was shed from them, paradoxically, each tower reserved the right to conceal or reveal. To extend this analogy to its limits. the enigma of the tower shows how the artifice of organized culture has always maintained the capacity to generate as much insecurity from within as it may resist from without. Conservative on one hand and liberalizing on the other, towers symbolize a double edged potential that can cut in many directions at once.

From the angle of conservation, concerns for the safety of our modern watchtowers generate around multi-faceted high-tech threats. Anxieties over hardware and software corruption and the collapse of the building itself speak to us of internal and external intrigues. These include viral incursions and potential violations of intellectual property rights due to Internet access, the unsettled state of international copyright laws and its system of protective enforcement. All the insecurities of ancient estates apply in this new domain and in most cases there is no guarantee of fair treatment once a message is dispatched from the desktop console. To be forewarned is to be forearmed and yet, there exists no Strategic Defensive Initiative capable of ensuring the kind of invulnerability we might prefer. All systems have their limits and vulnerabilities which may be why, despite its potential, even on the Internet, measured phrases often substitute for full disclosures. At times, the electronic dialogue remains guarded - shrouded in diplomacy, secrecy, unknowing and distrust.

Alexandria and the Great Library
In and of themselves, secured towers were never a foolproof system. Vulnerable to assault both from within and without, regardless of their shortcomings, they have nonetheless provided a practical means for raising and sustaining ever-evolving systems of culture and communication. As a result, towers and the court cultures that erected them became touchstones of knowledge and innovation. While it existed, Alexandria's great library served as a cache for the collective wisdom of several distinct regions of the Mediterranean and beyond. Her reach was long and her archival functions amounted to a formidable search engine - a prototypical Hard Drive and Random Access Memory all rolled into one consolidated method of storage, retrieval, copy and dissemination. Unfortunately, like her sister in Thebes, the unrelenting advance of predators caused Alexandria to sputter and fail. Later, an unstoppable series of cataclysms sent it crashing to earth. Inoperative, the loss included several centuries worth of irreplaceable documents and the combined knowledge of both east and west.

As with the dislocation of Thebes, we are at a loss to estimate the full extent of the tragedy. However, these days, reclaiming Alexandria from the waters of Aboukir is a far more difficult chore than reclaiming lost bits and bytes of information on a damaged hard drive. Instead of heavy bricks and stubborn mortar, the tower on your desktop is made of silicon chips flexibly embedded into a plastic exoskeleton etched with many chambers, all embedded one inside another. There, the treasure amounts to what symbolic wares one might inscribe in a library of coded files. A labyrinth of possibility, each solitary tower builds upon the merits of its predecessors and contemporaries, in order to convene a vast variety of networking capabilities. Getting to the heart of how it functions and why may take years of study. In a manner of speaking, experts in the field of computer hardware and software development, I.T. and Internet protocols are our latter day Merlins. A majority do not know exactly how they work their magic, only that it works. Correspondingly, whereas a conveniently symbiotic relationship between learned and unlearned transpires over some uneven terms, such matters of trust may quickly degenerate into a recipe for passive and in some cases, not-so-passive conflict. So it goes with "mystery school" assignments of this, or any age.

In terms of practicality, the basic networking principle appears to be as old as time itself. Perhaps because of their experience as beekeepers, the ancient Egyptians knew how a series towers strung together across a borderland made viable systems of interlinked communications an integral part of self-government. Under their protectorship, facilitation of trade, cultural innovation and all manner of shared information could help make a potentially hostile world that much more secure for networked hives of expert culture builders. As a result, our current knowledge of antiquity owes much to the construction of integrated networks of educational centers similar to the one known in antiquity as "Pharaoh's House of Life". Within that synergistic environment, a durable civilization built upon common codes was rapidly established throughout Egypt borders and beyond.

Of course, many towers and micro chip squares do not make a city. Like chess, it takes human heads and hands to form a workable ecology. So, perhaps we could say that our removable discs and portable drives are somewhat like the movable feast of chess - a circuit board upon which diplomats, delegates and soldiers may be invested with whatever powers of information we might care to transmit to all outlying corners of the cyber-verse with just the click of a key. From the watchfires burning at the top of every desk, we can gather up new protocols and speed them along various electronic channels in the form of "e-mail", whereas today's special "attachments" are now viable substitutes for yesterday's "attaches".

The early Egyptians were a bright, inquisitive people who forged a complex society with more than just stone, mud and brick. The educational institution known as Pharaoh's House of Life was a vastly networked affair - a think tank that enabled the establishment of royal standards and protocols for all kinds of projective undertakings. How much easier and simpler things are for us today. Now, if we care to attach a computer to a telephone modem or one of the new fibre optic outlets being installed everywhere these days, we immediately tap into the power of thousands, if not millions of little Alexandria's, all linked to a tightly woven network of electronic cart roads and canals, with each one capable of crisscrossing the entire planet at virtual light speed.

Chess at Virtual Light Speed: Chess and computers already share some common ancestry. While we have come a long way since Alexandria, the abacus, The Turk, and Babbage's early experiments with artificial intelligence, among the many modes and nodes spanning the Internet grid, chess is well represented. News Groups, User-groups and Electronic gaming centers abound. At home within this environment, it hardly seems accidental that chess should find itself so comfortably situated on the Internet brainchild of CERN, the Swiss conglomerate whose need to accommodate international discoveries into questions relating to advanced particle physics helped set the tone of our current online reality. In some ways akin to the think tank agendas of investigative bodies such as the I.G.K., scientists from all over the planet who wish to know what new moves are being discovered for their bosons, photons and electrons have drawn upon discoveries made in far flung places which, when we come right down to the black and white of it, signals intensive inquiry into the nature of the universe even as their exact findings often serve to advance co-existing developments in the technologically driven arts and sciences of modern communications, medicine, education, economics and warfare.

From Gnu Chess to Big Blue, there are few things on the Internet that are as well adapted to one another as chess and cyberspace and fewer still that are quite as free. As anyone who has ever played against a computer or even against an opponent halfway across the globe can attest, the marriage of chess and computers seems a marriage made in the negotiable space between Heaven and Hell. Perspectives may vary according to our experiences although, at some point, one may find a niche that feels trustworthy - a home with hearth and companions in whom we can sharpens skills, or perhaps even confide our most ambitious hopes and dreams. In short, not only do computers and the Internet challenge our intellect, they also elicit affective response to the messages and the messengers themselves.

Virtual games thrive in virtual space and with the sum total of networked "event horizons" serving to establish an effective partnership with the projective capacities of human consciousness itself, the frustration of separating virtual from actual, cognitive from affective and the rational from the intuitive plays upon themes of holism already well known to innumerable generations of board games players. If this sounds similar to centuries-old remarks made about the capacity of chess to sharpen self-awareness, it may serve the modern chess historian to take note of the common ground of human consciousness underlying both the very ancient and the seemingly very novel approaches we use to help close the symbolic gap between simulation and stimulation, or what this implies when attempting to define the historic intent of the people who invented our earliest virtual realities. The more one looks into this topic, the more it becomes clear that the great philosophical divide classical forms of reason traditionally impose upon the interactive middle ground separating subjective and objective states belies a well worn fiction that no longer suffices to explain the complexities of inner or outer space.

Chess metaphors woven into the metaphorical world of computer technologies may give us comfort in the midst of cold calculation. It is also somewhat reassuring to know that no system, regardless of how rigorously designed, is without an Achilles heel. Accidents and intangibles do more than make it "appear" as though our rapidly evolving computer culture is a bit like Oz's serendipitous balloon. While tracking information we may not always be sure which direction the wind may take us. How serendipity and exception engage us, or how we chose to engage them remains a subjective feature of all research and we must allow that while we travel a mythic highway, information may assemble that causes us to diverge and reconsider our original course. Even while sifting through mainstream assumptions, the Internet is still relatively full of surprises and setbacks, through which it invariably progresses and transforms itself. Inevitable course corrections boldly take us wherever the farthest reaches our minds and our technologies are capable of suggesting while providing access to the many grey zones that lie just another pace or two beyond the threshold of yesterday's cutting edge.

The obvious benefits are often difficult to categorize without falling into the soup of utter abstraction and yet, it goes without saying that there is a black and a white to the Internet as well, for although computers and the Internet remain dispassionately techno-logical, it is not so with people. Some of the data gleaned from a clean machine may be awash in articulate conjecture, or simply a whitewash. Certainly, Harold Innes' "Bias of Communication" is as alive and well on the Internet as it is on all other forms of mass media. With information ranging from the highly credible to the deceptively facile, establishing what is what and who is who becomes a kind of board game in its own right, with the true beauty of it being that all facets of a multi-dimensional opportunity to state a trial case or express a minority position gather on the screen without any overriding formal preoccupations. As might be expected, when we search the Internet under a topic heading we will find things that disturb and challenge us. We may not always like what we find, although it helps to be ever mindful of how open ended options persist towards which we can either pose new variants or chose to ignore certain matters altogether.

The "Many Worlds" of Internet Research:
All tolled, a proliferation of choice means that somewhere on these search engines an appealing fit exists and is just waiting to be found. Presently, I feel most welcome and included at a site called Goddesschess and the message boards it supports at Delphi. In these small spaces, some interesting bonds have been forged and with the inclusion of veterans such as Dr. Calvo and Mr. Josten into the arena, our inquiry has been strengthened and deepened. Thus, the opportunity to learn and to participate directly in the developmental process of information sharing has never been more pronounced for me personally and I believe that I can speak for our membership in forwarding the conclusion that it has been similarly eventful for them as well.

The Goddesschess Partnership is an example of a cooperative message board and research phenomena that we find springing up spontaneously all across the Internet "multiverse". Topics range from the formal to the informal as we come to examine the old while pondering a seed bed for possible future innovations. In such gardens, informative discussions and even heated arguments may unfold, even as the basic theme presents clearly defined parameters which we use to delve into the game, its history and the various meanings it may hold for a small but dedicated ensemble. What comes about through this great sharing of fact, fiction, myth, allegory and opinion, is an amazing thing that tends to defy abbreviated description. Effectively, the matrix of outcomes apparent in efforts of this type seems much greater than the sum of its constituent parts for we are not only sharing data, we are also empathizing, creating consciousness and preparing the ground for what we hope will be a fruitful harvest - perhaps a full series of many such harvests.

While we read, reflect and contribute, it is impossible to remain unmoved by the continuing process of cooperative sharing, education and recreation that has come about through informal alliance. As such the wires and mechanical relays that are the underpinnings of each person's tower reflect not only the process but the outcome of a very human and humane experiential field of inquiry. Under such conditions, growth is inevitable. Where the History of Chess is profoundly concerned, as the world of Goddesschess turns, not only do we have access to each other's experiences, knowledge and creative abilities – though dialogue, we also encounter opportunities to view some rather moth eaten old materials in novel ways. Reflecting and diverging is food for the soul, whereas there is no substitute for well mapped links to the storehouses of reliable fodder - the persons and organizations anchored in deep intellectual soil who help provide a sense of stability and continuity while others remain preoccupied with the endless round of labour that attends tomorrow's harvest.

As tribute to those legendary characters who have "gone before", in our growing collection of interlinked towers and chambers, one may find whole libraries of sites devoted solely to the study or the play of chess. A portion of these are encyclopedic, containing definitions and abbreviated notations on the history of chess, whereas there are also links to more specific items from which a number of important materials may be retrieved, sometimes with the aid of a password or special membership. Britannica and many other encyclopedic resources are now free online. Hopefully, others will feel motivated to follow this lead. On a much smaller scale however, Goddesschess remains a committed example of a shared trust, community based initiatives and the available means we all have to make vital contributions to the global treasury of chess. Large steps or small, it is nonetheless a voyage of discovery and like many of the more imaginative sites on the Internet, Goddesschess promises to take us to new places - to stimulate and to inform in a way that was unimaginable to us only a few short years ago.

During its life span, Goddesschess has already been used as an effective research tool by the online community. E-mail inquiry, text searches, cross-referencing of items, links and related contacts will only develop into something more sophisticated. In conclusion we, the people of Goddesschess, would like to consolidate a number of messages by stating that the world of computers and the world of the chess historian do not have to remain mutually exclusive. The library tower is now liquid, live, streaming and multimedia. It is accessible if we so desire. Hopefully, Windows, light bridges – not hard walls, will become the features that organize, protect and disseminate whatever truths or falsehoods we should happen to discover and like the game itself, only truth will endure. Chances for this outcome improve with increased interplay, for, with many eyes open at once, it can be seen that no enduring truth remains hidden for very long.

In closing, I would like to point out that those who deliberately attempt to hide their gifts under a bushel, or hold information hostage in dark places, will, at some point, be left to deal with the consequences of their own political actions. As the light of truth emerges from previously darkened places, it is the perennial hope of an optimistic few that the need for subterfuge will fall away from arbitrarily imposed defenses like so many blocks of granite. Naturally, how we chose to raise or lower the drawbridge to our private worlds will always remain a matter of personal choice. However, as is well enough known to all of us, knowledge is the only road to freedom and what truths lie hidden in towers of many varying descriptions contain the power to set men free or enslave them. How we chose to respond today as individuals will no doubt set an example for the future. Moreover, given that the model reality of chess and its illustrious history portends the smallest thing we can possibly wager against any number of overtly cynical positions, if idealism cannot win the day upon the grid of a totally idealized convention, then we must conclude that either chess and our ideals have somehow failed us, or that we have somehow failed them.

a bientot

Don McLean

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Graphic Image - "Computer Polis" from: http://www.daniellearnaud.com/flat_pack.htm
Rieko Akatsuka Untitled 99 - 01 2001 computer circuit boards, computer components
and mixed media As part of the Vauxhall Festival