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.

The Book of False Records?

It has been claimed that Guinness Book of World Records (Now Guinees World Records, GWR) holds the record for being the most frequently stolen book from North American libraries. I am not surprised by this. GWR is well qualified to be a target of book thieves. Most people will not consider GWR worth spending their money on. But here is a book whose curiosity quotient is high enough to tempt a few itchy hands among the reading public to filch it from the library shelves.   An example of curiosity getting the better of good sense.

Is GWR indeed the world’s best-selling book after the Bible and the Koran, as the publishers proudly claim in their website?  According to their website, “In November 2003, Guinness World Records celebrated the publication of its 100 millionth copy! This confirms that, excluding non-copyright works such as the Bible and the Koran, the definitive book of world records is the world's bestselling book…”  This is a dubious claim, not solely for the fact that they so cleverly add up the sale of 55 odd books (GWR is an annual publication).  According to lincencing.biz, GWR has sold around 115 million copies during the period 1955-2010. That is just 2 million copies for each of its annual number, that too in 40 languages.  No doubt, GWR does makes a lot of money through its spin-offs and associated franchises (TV shows, exhibitions, museums, and such like) but most of its annual sales go to institutions (schools and libraries) for whom such purchases are an annual ritual. 

Nevertheless, there is some fun to be derived from flicking through the book, to marvel at the absurdity of some of the ‘achievements’ listed in the book and the fact that someone had taken the trouble to record them. Here is a sample of GWR records.

o   The record for keeping the most number of snails to the face for 10 seconds. Alastair Galpin (New Zealand) achieved the record of 8 snails at The Warehouse shop in Sylvia Park, Auckland, New Zealand, on 27 October 2007.

o   The record for owning the largest number of airplane sick bags (5468) is held by Niek K. Vermeulen of the Netherlands.

o   The loudest purr achieved by a cat: Smokey, from Northampton UK emitted the record of  67.7 dB (LA peak) on March 25, 2011. The decibel was measured and certified by a sound engineer in the presence of the local MP.

o   Gurning[1]: The record for ‘gurning’ (for the uninitiated, ‘gurning’ is ‘making ugly faces’) is held by Gordon Mattinson from U.K., who is the world champion gurner.

o   To have the most people tossing coins simultaneously: An Indian, Rev. Saint Gurmeet Ram Rahim Sing Ji Insan (India) from Sirsa, India, holds the proud record. 12,013 is the precise number of coin tossers he mustered for the momentous event on 15 August 2011.

The craving to get into GWR was a widely seen phenomenon in South Asia, especially in India, during the 1970s-90s.  Those who were bitten by the GWR bug were willing to go to any extreme for achieving the fleeting fame of being an entry on the pages of GWR, never mind the entries did not often last the season. The candidates shut themselves in cages filled with snakes, walked backward for large distances, stood on one leg for days, sang non-stop for hours, ate large quantities of food, and in general tortured themselves for the dubious distinction of being in the book. Some of the aspirants grew nails, hair, beards, whiskers, and generally anything that had the potential to grow on human body, and had pictures of themselves flaunting the often repulsive growths splashed in newspapers. It is even reported that there was a gent who boasted of not having bathed for almost all his life time.  This particular claim was reportedly rejected by GWR because they could not verify it. The hydrophobe’s dream remained unfulfilled.

GWR’s slogan is "We always endeavor to achieve the highest possible standards of accuracy”.  How accurate is this claim itself? Here are some dubious examples from GWR’s accuracy department.

In their editions during 1974 - 1991 GWR listed the Indian Singer Lata Mangeshkar as the most recorded singer, crediting no fewer than 30,000 songs to her between 1948 and 1987.  Lata Mangeshkar is arguably the greatest female singer India has produced in the 20^th century, but this record was a gross impossibility. Most of her songs were recorded for Hindi films, and that there weren’t more than 3500 Hindi movies during the period 1948-87. In fact this record was contested by the supporters of Mohamed Rafi, India’s leading male singer at that time, who claimed to have recorded more songs than Lata, and some enterprising soul presented statistics showing Lata recorded only about 5500 songs. The dubious record was deleted by GWR in 1992.

Are the GWR guys done with this error? No. The 2011 edition of GWR mentions Lata’s sibling Asha Bhosle, the other leading female singer in India, with studio recordings of 11000 songs, as the most recorded artist in music history!  Now consider this:  of the 36000 movies made in India in the last half-century (source Anmolfankaar website), over 23000 movies are in the southern languages (Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil), 6500 in Hindi, and the rest in the other Indian languages. Asha’s main turf, like her sister, is also Hindi movies, whereas there are other Indian singers who sing prolifically in movies in all the 4 south Indian languages. These singers have prolific outputs in devotional music, classical recordings, folk music, and pop albums as well.  You can work out the statistics.  As against, Asha’s 11000, SP Balasubramaniam (SPB) is reported to have made close to 50000 recordings.

 

That takes us to movies.  Which actors have acted in most number of movies in the world in various categories?  GWR lists Brahmanandam of Telugu cinema (India) as the record holder. 897 movies!  That is a huge feat, but there are many Indian actors who have exceeded that seemingly impossible number (Manorama with 1200 movies come to mind).

The Indian actor Prem Nazir held 4 GWR records at various times, but for some reason these do not appear in the recent editions of GWR. . Nazir played the lead in over 550 movies (!), and IMDb lists over 500 of these. But at various times, GWR had listed Marion Mitchell Morrison (John Wayne) as the most prolific actor in lead roles in movies (142 movies).

An amusing case of record number of errors per length of text is cited by Yakov Damsky in his book the Batsford Book of Chess Records: A 650 character entry on Chess, in which there are over a dozen errors! Some of the errors are really baffling if not hilarious. For example, the great Lasker’s (2^nd world champion) first name is misspelled to equate it to that of the fictional sexual adventuress Emmanuelle. And where does this bunch of errors, representing a record in itself, appear? In the 1998 edition of Guinness World Records!

‘The publishers stern warning that no part of the material may be reproduced by electronic, electro-mechanical, mechanical, or any other means without permission, is superfluous.’, writes Damsky, and rightly wonders, ‘Who will pay genuine money for such forgery?’

Who indeed! May be that explains why so many copies of the book are stolen from libraries.

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[1] Native speakers of Malayalam language will recognize ‘Gurning” as ‘കൊഞ്ഞനം കുത്തല്‍!