Free Will and Chess

AKA The 40 Most Popular Board Games According to Ranker, Part 14

#1 – Chess

Burzuvia, the physician, vizier, and councilor to Khosrow II, King of Persia, once wrote that there are ten advantages to the game of chess.  But I’m most interested in advantage number two:

“The Second Advantage is in Religion, illustrating the Muhammedan doctrines of predestination […] by the free will of man in playing chess, moving when he will, or where he will, and which piece he thinks best, but restricted in some degree by compulsion, as he may not play against certain laws, nor give to one piece the move of another, whereas, on the contrary, [nard] is mere free will, while in Dice again all is compulsion.”

Chess features an uncommon trait among most modern popular games.  It employs ‘perfect knowledge’.  There are no hidden cards, die rolls, or act two plot twists.  Presuming both players are aware of the rules and no one cheats, every choice in a game of chess is made knowing the results of that choice.  With a perfect mind, the game of chess is solved.  It just so turns out we don’t have perfect minds.  We have yet to build a perfect artificial mind as well, though we are making advances.

It may be difficult to wrap one’s head around a perfect mind for chess, but it should be theoretically possible.  After all, the biggest differences between the ‘perfect knowledge’ game of chess and the ‘perfect knowledge’ game of Tic-Tac-Toe is an increase in the number of rules and available options per turn.  Most adults will tell you that Tic-Tac-Toe is a solved game, and they can perform a perfect game, even if they never considered why placing an X in the corner is so important.  In the end, it doesn’t matter if they don’t understand their choices.  When two opponents play perfectly, Tic-Tac-Toe ends in a draw.  With a mind capable of understanding the vastness of possible moves in Chess (at least sixty-nine trillion by turn ten, and exponentially more beyond that point) the game is known.  And presumably all games conducted between two perfect minds should either always result in a draw, or in one side always winning.

But that number of options… sixty-nine trillion by round ten.  It’s such a staggering number of available moves.  Sixty-nine trillion is approximately the number of organisms in the human body. That would be approximately thirty trillion human cells and forty trillion microbiota, mostly consisting of bacteria introduced from outside the body. On most days, you are more bacteria than human. Think about how complex a being you are, down to the cellular level. Now imagine that you’re only on turn ten.

It’s no wonder Burzuvia compared chess to the human condition.  In a similar way, life consists of an extraordinary number of choices within choices with microscopic variations.  But those choices are all tempered within boundaries.  You can’t fly.  Living things grow.  People expect compensation for goods and services.  And actions have consequences.  If you don’t pay your taxes, you may be visited by the constable.  Tell a lie that’s then exposed and people won’t trust you.  Invest in your children and they will prosper.  Or they may end up spoiled and disappoint you.  If you were verse in perfect information, you could foresee the consequences of your actions.  Maybe. For many things, we do have perfect information, but the information is so complex that we can’t be certain of the outcome until we take our turn.

This brings us to the 8th century name drop of nard.  Nard is an ancient Persian ‘tables game‘ with a playstyle similar to backgammon.  The Russian term for backgammon is ‘нарды’ which literally translates to ‘short nard’.  Tables games witnessed a lot of variation in their long shelf life.  There’s a fair amount of skill involved, but its reliance on racing pieces across a board based on many rolls of the dice places a high emphasis on luck. 

Considering that so much of nard is luck, it might seem weird to read Burzuvia’s claim that nard is ‘mere free will’ since the result of rolling dice is out of our control. But I don’t think Burzuvia saw dice as an agent of luck so much as an agent of chaos. Dice rolling in nard represents the forces of the Universe which are sometimes surprising, but tend to fall within certain limits and average out over time. We’re asked to make choices based upon these limits and averages, again and again. All we can do is look at previous experience, math out a reasonable response or follow our gut, and hope. That’s free will, baby.

But free will or no, a game of nard still involves a considerable amount of luck. When this much luck is involved, gambling tends to follow.  And when gambling is involved, strict religions take notice.  Since some people can’t control their gambling impulses, bankrupting themselves financially and spiritually, gambling is deemed a vice.  Vices must be squelched, so games are targeted and destroyed.

And I should point out that Islam is far from being the only religion to which this happens.  Well meaning Christian zealots, to take one example, share a checkered history with games.  Ten pin bowling is the standard now because the state of Connecticut banned nine-pin bowling due to players gambling.  Pinball was illegalized in New York City and Los Angeles between the early 40s to the mid-70s because of its ‘influence on the youth’ who might while away nickels in the hopes of winning free games.  Milton Bradley’s first game, Rook, was created as an alternative to devious card games like whist which were illegal in many locations.  Rook allowed players to play a trick taking card game without using face cards or suits which were associated with a traditional deck of cards.

As games of chance were targeted by fanatics, chess thrived and prospered.  So did other perfect information games like draughts, fox and geese, reversi, and halma.  But while those four games can feel more like riddles to be solved, chess remained elusive.  Simple enough to explain the rules in ten minutes, yet complex enough to yield levels upon levels of mastery.  The metagame of chess evolved century after century.  And it’s well documented, so we can see these huge pitches in how the best players thought about chess over the years. Compare the Grandmaster games played by romantic chess players at the end of the 19th century, full of sweeping plays and dramatic sacrifices, with the hypermodernist, positional, defensive chess from the 1920s that argued the center of the board is not something to be won, but controlled. An expert knowledge of the game now may not infer an expert knowledge of the game twenty years from now.

The complexity of chess requires something beyond a memorized list of opening moves, an attentiveness to improved trades, and a understanding of how to force an end game.  Chess sparks debate.  It creates an environment similar to the battlefield it attempts to emulate and asks its general to make the best plans given everything they know.  And it shows us that even when we have perfect information, that that is never enough.  We can know everything, and be given all the tools for our own victory, and we can fail.  It’s no wonder that Burzuvia likened Chess to the philosophical conundrum of mixing determinism and free will.

Let’s take another step back.  When we say ‘free will’, what do we mean?  Recently, I made a post on Facebook for my friends and family that asked this:

“On a scale of 1 to 6, where 1 is Hard Determinism (Everything in life is bound to happen and there are no true choices) and 6 is Hard Free Will (Choices made by intelligent beings can not be impeded) what do you believe/think?”

I received nineteen responses.  This is a small, localized, and biased sample size.  But interestingly, the responses were all over the chart.  If there was an outlier, it was ‘extremes’, since there was only one pure vote for 1.5 and one pure vote for 6.  Few people were willing to commit to a life either completely out of their control, or the possibly greater nightmare of a world that was completely under their control.

But one of the biggest things I took away from this experiment is that what free will curtails is different depending on who’s doing the talking.  Luck and environment were brought into play.  Some people claimed they experienced less free will as a child than they do now.  The role of the unconscious mind was brought into question.  Someone posited that people are a 6 when making individual choices for themselves but are simultaneously a 1 when it comes to their soul journey.  The person who started as a pure 6 conceded that “Reading through all this, I am starting to wonder if all of us really do exist or not.”  There’s been twenty-seven hundred years of philosophy since Heraclitus and Parmenides argued over whether the nature of the Universe was always changing like fire, or set in place like an unmovable stone. All of human history’s best minds and vaulted logic tackled this question, and we still can’t decide whether our choices posses inherent meaning.

For many people, when philosophy fails, they turn to religion.  But the concept of self-determinism is a prickly problem, and at one time or another formed massive schisms in every major religion.  If God is all powerful and all knowing, then our future must be written and foretold.  But if each individual’s fate is defined and sealed, then why would human decisions matter?  What of Good and Evil?  Isn’t the purpose of religion to teach me how best to live my life? Why should you take responsibility for your actions if you’re not the one exerting control over your life?

It’s easy to see why mainstream religions tend to err on the side of free will, since arguers for free will tend to also argue for for personal responsibility.  In fact, the term ‘Jabriyah‘, which was originally an early school of deterministic Islamic belief, is now used by some Muslims as a term for any Islamic group that is ‘wrong’ for any reason.  In this fashion, determinism may not be seen as a sin so much as the faultiest of deductions.  It’s the erroneous idea of bolstering God’s absolutism at the expense of our humanity.  Like Islam, many religions instead prefer to shroud this process in mystery.  God is absolute. Humans have free will.  These things are both possible because that which is almighty is not bound by mortal limitations.  It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

In researching this article, I’ve been digging through a bunch of general chess articles.  A few of them talk about the value of chess, often breaking down the advantages of chess into consumable top ten lists.  Chess increases brain activity and promotes creativity, concentration, memory, problem solving, foresight, and spatial awareness.  Heck, you could argue that it also promotes reading comprehension, since there is so much written on the subject that it gets a whole number in the Dewey decimal system: Number 794.  Find a chess club, of which there are many, and you might gain an entire entourage of new friends.  It can be an outdoor activity.  It can be a ‘sitting on your toilet at two in the morning’ activity.

These are some excellent reasons to play chess.  But many of these writers are failing to recognize the spiritual value of playing chess.  Chess promotes patience and diligence.  It encourages both confidence and humility.  Chess can be a meditation, like walking a labyrinth, or performing yoga.  For many people, chess is their art, their passion, and their muse.  The Renaissance poet Hieronymus Vida once wrote a poem about the Thracian dryad Caïssa as representing the goddess of chess, and the idea gained so much popularity that she’s become an anachronistic addition to the Greek pantheon.

For many people, chess isn’t a way of life. Chess is life. It’s their profession, their hobby, and their spirituality all rolled into one. But did those people choose chess, or did chess choose them? Is there a magic moment between heartbeats where a person says ‘yes’—a pivot point of no return that tumbles lives down, down into a land of endless evaluation over a medieval entourage and their forever nemeses as they clash on a grid of sixty-four? Or was that choice made for them by an unfathomable force? If time could be rewound and played again, could that person choose once more? Or would the Universe replay like a fixed tape? Are we but molecular puppets with invisible strings, tugged upon by forces never known?

We may never know. And while I may not agree with Burzuvia’s certainty over his and my place within this Universe, I think we would both agree that it would be good to spend our time enjoying the life we’re given. We could play chess.