Has chess got anything to do with war? - BBC News
From ancient India to the computer age, the military has used chess as both a metaphor and even as training for warfare. But as Dominic Lawson writes, generals who compare themselves with grandmasters are exaggerating their control of human combat.
Beevor's books on the World War Two battles of Stalingrad and Berlin have sold in their millions across the globe, but his first career was as a British army cavalry regiment officer. And since he is also a passionately keen chess player, I was intrigued to know if he thought that great generals were like chess grandmasters - brilliant strategists of iron logic.
It is fair to say that the computer programmers themselves, whose motives were solely to create world-beating chess algorithms, thought this was hokum. Ken Thompson, of Bell Labs and creator of the Belle chess program, observed: "The only military application for a chess machine like Deep Thought is to drop it from an airplane to kill someone."
On the other hand, it is interesting that in 2007 Darpa named its project to develop a super-intelligent battle computer system Deep Green - apparently in homage to the Deep Blue program which beat Kasparov in what, apart from Bobby Fischer's match against Boris Spassky in 1972, must be counted the most famous chess match in history.
From ancient India to the computer age, the military has used chess as both a metaphor and even as training for warfare. But as Dominic Lawson writes, generals who compare themselves with grandmasters are exaggerating their control of human combat.
Beevor's books on the World War Two battles of Stalingrad and Berlin have sold in their millions across the globe, but his first career was as a British army cavalry regiment officer. And since he is also a passionately keen chess player, I was intrigued to know if he thought that great generals were like chess grandmasters - brilliant strategists of iron logic.
It is fair to say that the computer programmers themselves, whose motives were solely to create world-beating chess algorithms, thought this was hokum. Ken Thompson, of Bell Labs and creator of the Belle chess program, observed: "The only military application for a chess machine like Deep Thought is to drop it from an airplane to kill someone."
On the other hand, it is interesting that in 2007 Darpa named its project to develop a super-intelligent battle computer system Deep Green - apparently in homage to the Deep Blue program which beat Kasparov in what, apart from Bobby Fischer's match against Boris Spassky in 1972, must be counted the most famous chess match in history.
