An Immortal Game for the 21st Century: Wei Yi Fashions on the Chessboard a Pure Work of Art

The musings below were prompted by an astounding game played by the young Chinese chess prodigy Wei YI in a recent tournament in China. Wei was facing off against the Cuban Grandmaster Batista Lazaro  Bruzon in the 6th Hainan Danzhou tournament held last month in Danzhou, China.

Wei Yi, The Chinese Prodigy

The game is already being celebrated across the globe with epithets like ‘Wei’s Immortal Game’,  ‘Game of the New Millennium’,  ‘the Chinese Immortal’, ‘21st Century Immortal’ and so on. The web is flush with encomiums for the game and there are hundreds of videos out there celebrating this game.

This is a great video on the game by Simon Williams. The Wei Game

The Wei game is an astounding fete of human imagination, intuition, and intellect which makes you marvel at the incredible fetes human mind is capable of.  It has, stamped all over it, the sign of that strange and mysterious natural phenomenon: Human Genius. 

If you are not a chess-person, and is not interested in a bit of narrative on the game itself, please ignore the next two paragraphs.

In the game the players start off with a classical Scheveningen in Siclian Defense, a much analyzed  line which has been popular in grandmaster practice since the 1920s.  On move 22 Wei, instead of retaking a Knight to equalize the power parity, sacrifices his Rook on the f7 square and drags Bruzon’s King into the center of the board. This is a huge gamble, and before making the sacrifice-move, Wei’ had to have visualized a win through the maze of possibilities of moves that follow.   What ensues is a romantic king hunt, reminiscent of the combinatorial chess played by the likes of Adolf Anderssen and Paul Morphy in the 19^th century and Rashid Nezhmetdinov and Mikhail Tal in the 20^th century.

In games like these the attacking side has to make forcing moves to keep the attack going, and if the attacker cannot visualize forcing moves it is rare he or she will embark upon the risky enterprise of sacrificing a whole Rook. Forcing moves are like chasing the enemy through a lighted path, whereas ‘quiet’ moves in a king-hunt are like swerving into unlighted diverging byways with the intention of tightening the trap from different directions. ‘Quiet’ moves are difficult to visualize because they do not present themselves in the obvious move-sequences (variations).

The Position Before 22. Rxf7!!

In Wei’s game, he uncorks a number of ‘quiet’ moves which slowly encircle the black King until Black’s defenses collapse and the mate, inevitable, looms on the horizon. Is it possible that Wei would have calculated the immense number of variations, or was he intuiting how the chase of the King will develop and end? The fact that the path to the win contained the ‘quiet’ moves indicates he would have had to visualize them through the maze of variations.  A computer, through the ‘brute force’ of its calculating prowess of its silicon brain, may be able to find out those moves in the variations that follow the sacrifice, but how does the human mind do it? By intuition?

In his biography of  the greatest 20^th century mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (The Man Who Knew Infinity- The Life of the Genius Ramanujan), Robert Kanigel defines human genius  as the ability to leapfrog across intermediary steps and directly arrive at  the truth, whereas ordinary mortals like us have to work out the intermediary steps, the so called ‘proof’, to convince ourselves about the truthfulness of the truth, so to speak. Often the Genius knows the truth by intuition, even before she or he sets out to devise the procedure for arriving at it.  In other words the genius has the ability to find truth by insight, whereas others struggle towards it by proof.  Insight vs. proof, as method.

When natural laws and ideas combine at its most logical union, there is a beauty in the harmony that results. Isn’t the instinctive recognition of this harmony, that, when expressed in tangible form,  becomes, a scientific formula, a mathematical equation, a work of art or poetry, or a celebrated composition in music?  The harmonious inter-play of elements which evokes a sense of beauty is intuitively grasped by the mind of the genius.

The Romantic, The Magician From Riga- M. Tal

Nowhere else is the work of genius mind seen as obviously and frequently as in mathematics, music, and the game of Chess, and probably Art. It is a well-known fact that many great proponents of any of these forms of creative activity have had an affinity for one or more of the other three forms of creativity. Throughout history, from Danican Philidor to Vasily Smyslov to Mark Taimanov we see the musicians excelling as world-beating chess champions.   Emanuel Lasker, the great 20^th century world chess champion, was a celebrated mathematician-philosopher, and several others in the following generations, like Mikhail Botvinnik, Max Euwe, and John Nunn, continued to straddle the worlds of chess and mathematics. Marcel Duchamp the great proponent of ‘Conceptual Art’ and ‘Dadaism’ was obsessed with Chess, an art form which in his firm belief opened up immense possibilities for human creativity.

That chess romantic, the immortal Mikhail Tal, said every chess game was as inimitable and invaluable as a poem. The Wei game is a work of pure art that creates beauty and inspires the awareness of the Beautiful in an otherwise blemished world of harsh realities we live in.