That kind of gossip breaks out all the time in academia — it makes professors look bad and people enjoy the idea that they get where they are by stealing someone else’s work — that is just the way it is.
When I heard this story, I went right round to Zhendi to ask him about it and he said it was a pack of lies. Daddy asked him about it too and he still said it was all rubbish.
Daddy said, ‘I hear that you spend every afternoon round at his house, is that right?’
‘Yes,’ said Zhendi.* The world’s first computer, ENIAC, was built in 1946.
‘What are you doing there?’ asked Daddy.
‘Sometimes I read books, sometimes we play chess,’ said Zhendi. Zhendi was very definite, but we still felt that where there is smoke, there must also be fire — we were worried that he was lying. After all, he was still only sixteen years old and knew nothing about how complicated the world can be; it was quite possible that he was being deceived. Well, I made excuses several times to go round to Liseiwicz’s house and find out what they were doing, and every time I saw that they were indeed playing chess: the standard international game. Zhendi often played go at home with my father, and he was a fine player — the two of them were pretty evenly matched. Sometimes he also played tiddlywinks with Mummy, but that was just for fun. When I saw the two of them playing chess together, I thought that Liseiwicz was just doing it to keep him company, because everyone knew that he played at grandmaster level.
In fact, something completely different was going on. According to what Zhendi told me himself, he and Liseiwicz had played all sorts of different kinds of chess together — the standard kind, go, elephant chess, battle chess and so on. Occasionally he could win at battle chess, but he never beat Liseiwicz at any of the others. Zhendi said that Liseiwicz played all these games to an amazingly high level, so the only reason that he could occasionally win at battle chess was because ultimately victory in that game is not dependent entirely upon the player’s skill; at least half the time the outcome is determined by sheer luck. If you think about it, even though tiddlywinks is a much simpler game than battle chess, it is a much better determinant of the player’s skill, because the element of luck is so much smaller. In Zhendi’s opinion, battle chess should strictly speaking not be considered a type of chess at all; at the very least, it should not be regarded as a chess game for adults.
You may well be wondering, given that Zhendi was so far from being able to give Liseiwicz a good game, why did they keep on playing together time after time?
Let me explain. As a game, all types of chess are easy to learn to play, in the sense that they do not require the player to develop any special skills: you can just learn the basic rules and get stuck in. The problem is that once you have started playing, chess calls upon completely different attributes from any game requiring physical skill, where as you practice you just get better and better; from a rank beginner you become a practiced player, then a skilled one, and finally an excellent one. The more you play chess the more complicated it gets. The reason for this is that as you improve, you learn more of the set variations and that then opens up more avenues for you to explore — it is like walking into a maze. At the entrance, there is only one way to go, but the further you penetrate, the more crossroads you encounter; the more options you are faced with. That is one reason that the game is so complex; the other is that as you might imagine, if two opponents are walking through the maze at the same time, as one proceeds he is also trying to block the other’s advance, and he is trying to do the same — advance and block, advance and block — well, that is adding another level of difficulty to an already extremely complex game. That is what chess is like: you have standard openings and endgames, attacking and defensive moves, obvious and secret manoeuvres, pieces that you move close at hand and those you send to the other side of the board, enveloping your opponent in a fog of mystery. Under normal circumstances, whoever knows the most set variations has the most room to manoeuvre, and can create the most mystery about his moves. Once his opponent has become confused and can no longer determine the direction of attack, he has created the most favourable circumstances to win the game. If you wish to play a good game of chess, you have to learn the set variations, but that is not enough. The whole point about set variations is that everybody knows about them.
What is a set variation?
A set variation can best be compared to a path beaten through the jungle by many passing feet — on the one hand you can be sure that it is a route that goes from A to B, on the other hand it is also available for anyone to use. You can travel this path, but so can everyone else. Or to take another example: set variations are like conventional weapons. If you are fighting against people who have no weapons at all, your weapons will kill them dead in an instant. On the other hand if your opponent has exactly the same conventional weapons, you may be out there laying mines but he just sends in the minesweepers to clear them up, so you have been wasting your time; you send up your planes but he can see them bright and clear on his radar and he can blow you out of the sky. In those circumstances, you need secret weapons to win on the battlefield. Chess has many secret weapons.
The reason that Liseiwicz was prepared to carry on playing chess with Zhendi was because he realized that he had many secret weapons. He seemed to be able to conjure up an endless series of bizarre and tricky moves, apparently from thin air, giving his opponent the feeling that as he was walking along, someone was tunnelling through the ground beneath his feet. He could really confuse you, because a piece that you thought was dead would — in his hands — suddenly turn out to be crucial for his next move. Zhendi had been playing chess for such a short time, he had so little experience, and he knew so few of the set variations that it was easy to confuse him with your conventional weapons. Or to put it another way, because he did not know any but the most basic set variations, your standard moves were deeply mysterious to him. Of course each of these moves had been used by tens of thousands of people — they are reliable, they have been proved time and time again — so whatever peculiar and tricky move he had thought up was not able to stand up against the tried and tested, and in the end he would lose the game yet again.
Liseiwicz once told me himself that Zhendi was losing not on the basis of intelligence, but on experience, knowledge of the set variations, and playing skill. Liseiwicz said, ‘I have played all sorts of different kinds of chess, starting at the age of four, and over the course of the months and years I got to learn the set variations for each type of game like the back of my hand. Of course it is difficult for Jinzhen to beat me. The fact is that there is no one in my immediate circle who can beat me at chess — I can say without fear of contradiction that at chess, I am a genius. Furthermore, having played for such a long time, I have honed my skills. Unless Zhendi were to spend the next few years concentrating solely on improving his chess-playing abilities, he is never going to be able to beat me. However, when we range our forces against each other, I often feel a refreshing sense of surprise, which I enjoy enormously — that is why I have carried on playing with him.’
That is what he said.