Two or three times after moving a piece the stranger slightly inclined his head, and each time I observed that Moxon shifted his king. All at once the thought came to me that the man was dumb. And then that he was a machine—an automaton chessplayer! Then I remembered that Moxon had once spoken to me of having invented such a piece of mechanism, though I did not understand that it had actually been constructed. Was all his talk about the consciousness and intelligence of machines merely a prelude to eventual exhibition of this device—only a trick to intensify the effect of its mechanical action upon me in my ignorance of its secret?
A fine end, this, of all my intellectual transports—my "endless variety and excitement of philosophic thought!" I was about to retire in disgust when something occurred to hold my curiosity. I observed a shrug of the thing's great shoulders, as if it were irritated: and so natural was this—so entirely human—that in my new view of the matter it startled me. Nor was that all, for a moment later it struck the table sharply with its clenched hand. At that gesture Moxon seemed even more startled than I: he pushed his chair a little backward, as in alarm.
Presently Moxon, whose play it was, raised his hand high above the board, pounced upon one of his pieces like a sparrowhawk and with the exclamation "checkmate!" rose quickly to his feet and stepped behind his chair. The automation sat motionless.
The wind had now gone down, but I heard, at lessening intervals and progressively louder, the rumble and roll of thunder. In the pauses between I now became conscious of a low humming or buzzing which, like the thunder, grew momentarily louder and more distinct. It seemed to come from the body of the automaton, and was unmistakably a whirring of wheels. It gave me the impression of a disordered mechanism which had escaped the repressive and regulating action of some controlling part—an effect such as might be expected if a pawl should be jostled from the teeth of a ratchet-wheel. But before I had time for much conjecture as to its nature my attention was taken by the strange motions of the automaton itself. A slight but continuous convulsion appeared to have possession of it. In body and head it shook like a man with palsy or an ague chill, and the motion augmented every moment until the entire figure was in violent agitation. Suddenly it sprang to its feet and with a movement almost too quick for the eye to follow shot forward across table and chair with both arms thrust forth to their full length—the posture and lunge of a diver. Moxon tried to throw himself backward out of reach, but he was too late: I saw the horrible thing's hands close upon his throat, his own clutch its wrists. Then the table was overturned, the candle thrown to the floor and extinguished, and all was black dark. But the noise of the struggle was dreadfully distinct, and most terrible of all were the raucous, squawking sounds made by the strangled man's efforts to breathe. Guided by the infernal hubbub, I sprang to the rescue of my friend, but had hardly taken a stride in the darkness when the whole room blazed with a blinding white light that burned into my brain and heart and memory a vivid picture of the combatants on the floor, Moxon underneath, his throat still in the clutch of those iron hands, his head forced backward, his eyes protruding, his mouth wide open and his tongue thrust out; and—horrible contrast!—upon the painted face of his assassin an expression of tranquil and profound thought, as in the solution of a problem in chess! This I observed, then all was blackness and silence.
Three days later I recovered consciousness in a hospital. As the memory of that tragic night slowly evolved in my ailing brain I recognized in my attendant Moxon's confidential workman, Haley. Responding to a look he approached, smiling.
"Tell me about it," I managed to say, faintly—"all about it."
"Certainly," he said; "you were carried unconscious from a burning house—Moxon's. Nobody knows how you came to be there. You may have to do a little explaining. The origin of the fire is a bit mysterious, too. My own notion is that the house was struck by lightning."
"And Moxon?"
"Buried yesterday—what was left of him."
Apparently this reticent person could unfold himself on occasion. When imparting shocking intelligence to the sick he was affable enough. After some moments of the keenest mental suffering I ventured to ask another question:
"Who rescued me?"
"Well, if that interests you—I did."
"Thank you, Mr. Haley, and may God bless you for it. Did you rescue, also, that charming product of your skill, the automaton chess-player that murdered its inventor?"
The man was silent a long time, looking away from me. Presently he turned and gravely said:
"Do you know that?"
"I do," I replied: "I saw it done."
That was many years ago. If asked today I should answer less confidently.
RENDEZVOUS 2062
Robert Frazier
In the season of chrysanthemum,
Players align like tiles along a great ivory wall,
Matching velocities with Halley's,
Which ascends as an immense flaming dot
With tail as of a fighting kite
On winds from the North reaches of our solar system.
On an East wind rides a satellite shaped
Like a Chinese character.
From the West wind a souped-up shuttle
Resembling a bamboo bird.
From the South wind a U.N. solar sail,
Shining white dragon with mylar scales.
Drawing and discarding data,
The players shift hands
Until the United Nations melds.
They board the comet under the Starfaring Provisions,
And as it swings around Sol, the heart of Ma Jong
And all games of man,
They chip away the icy packing
From an ancient alien artifact…
They have played out a rare honors hand:
"A moon from the bottom of the sea".
REFLECTIONS ON THE LOOKING-GLASS: AN ESSAY
Fred Stewart
Almost everybody has heard of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and knows most of its characters are a deck of cards. Far fewer have read Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, which is organized around a chess puzzle. Alice's adventures as she proceeds to the Queening square are not as memorable or exciting as those in Wonderland even though the poem "Jabberwocky" is the most famous passage of Carroll's work. Meeting Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Humpty Dumpty, the Lion and the Unicorn, and various animals, insects and chess pieces do not seem to charm us as the earlier book did. Yet when Alice steps through the mirror in her Victorian drawing-room into the world beyond, finds the world outside the Looking-Glass house is a huge chess board, and takes her place in the game as a White Pawn, we can see that Carroll is using the chess game as a symbolic commentary on the whole of human existence.
But what an unchessic game it is! Among its many odd characteristics, the only one critically unexplained (as far as I know) is the fact that White makes 13 moves to Red's three! I believe even this can be explained by a close look at Carroll's puzzle and translating its chess aspects into the commentary on human life that it really is. The clearest metaphor is that Alice's side wins; she becomes Queen, makes an important capture, and delivers mate to the Red King. Carroll shows through Alice that human beings do have a major role in shaping their (chess) game of life.
I.
I do not believe Charles T. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) meant his Alice books to be mere codes to be broken or logical games as so many of his non-fictional works were. However, I do believe he put his fiction together with much more left-brain activity than most literary artists; that is, the meanings in his works are far more accessible to abstract thought since they are so purposefully symbolic. The Alice books are not themselves dreams, though they are set in dream context. Carroll never lets us forget that he is controlling the march of symbolic characters and actions across the page.1 So I believe Carroll would approve of my puzzling over the chess motif that structure Through the Looking-Glass. To consider this chess situation as chess is to find h
e has framed his view of the deepest puzzle of all—the nature of human existence.
When Alice climbs through the mirror, she finds herself operating within a chessboard world. At first the chess pieces she encounters, in her normal size, apprehend her existence only as "a volcano" which can pick them up and toss them about.2 Soon after, she enters the garden of the Looking-Glass house and saw "in all directions" a countryside broken into squares, hedges lining each file and brooks each rank; " 'just like a large chessboard,' " she declares (207). When she assumes her place on the board as a White Pawn, her perspective is from then on limited to the squares immediately to her left and right; "she sweeps a narrow track," as A. L. Taylor puts it.3
Carroll sets his chessboard situation before us as a frontispiece, together with the moves of the pieces:
Diagram #1 RED
WHITE
White Pawn (Alice) to play, and win in eleven moves,
In his "Preface" Carroll addresses the problems that would immediately occur to anyone even vaguely familiar with the game of chess:
As the chess-problem, given on the next page, has puzzled some of my readers, it may be well to explain that it is correctly worked out, so far as the moves are concerned. The alternation of Red and White is perhaps not so strictly observed as it might be, and the "castling" of the three Queens is merely a way of saying that they entered the palace: but the "check" of the White King at move 6, the capture of the Red Knight at move 7, and the final "checkmate" of the Red King, will be found, by any one who will take the trouble to set the pieces and play the moves as directed, to be strictly in accordance with the laws of the game. (p. 171)
Some of Carroll's "moves" are not chess moves at all—"Queens Castle" (9th move for Red) requires two pieces to move on the same turn and merely indicates that both Queens enter their castle though staying within the same square each had been on the move before. On her 10th move Alice also enters the castle. Her 9th move ("Alice becomes Queen") takes place a move after she reaches the eighth rank—clearly some' 'moves'' are essential to the narrative plot rather than to chess rules and strategy. Carroll clearly shows that there is more to his chess situation than chess, but setting the real chess moves will help separate plot from chess:
Three things will be noticed immediately by the chess aficionado—there are more real chess moves than the eleven indicated by Carroll; White moves 13 times to Red's 3 (including one string of 8 straight!); and the original White Queen makes real move 13 even though her White King is in check from the Red Queen:
Diagram #2
The first problem has an easy solution. As Carroll's notes to his "moves" show, the eleven "moves" refer to portions of the narrative plot of the book—21 separate occurrences that happen to Alice as she moves across the board. There are only 16 separate real chess moves (13 by White, 3 by Red) by the pieces themselves.
The second problem proved to have an historical solution. Ivor Davies found that, at his death, Carroll owned a copy of George Walker's book The Art of Chess-Playing: A New Treatise on the Game (1846). Law XX in Walker states, "When you give check, you must apprize your adversary, by saying aloud 'Check'; or he need not notice it, but may move as though check were not given." Davies notes that chess rules, as Walker sets them forth, "are the Rules of St. George's Chess Club, London, drawn up in 1841 and still in force in England when Through the Looking-Glass was written in 1871." Davies notes that the Red Queen does not say "Check":
Her silence was entirely logical because, at the moment of her arrival at King one, she said to Alice, who had been crowned Queen eight, "Speak when you are spoken to!" Since no one had spoken to her she would have been breaking her own rule had she said, "Check."4
There is no doubt that the Looking-Glass characters are consistent, and those in Alice in Wonderland are not; and I accept Davies' analysis why the Red Queen did not announce check. Still, there remains a light problem—one of point-of-view: chess pieces give check, but they do not announce check, in the real game. The Red Knight does gallop up to Alice and yell "check!" on Red's second move (Carroll's 6th plot-move, chess move 9). But, as Marlin Gardner, editor of The Annotated Alice, points out, when the White Knight captures the Red Knight, he "absentmindedly shouts, 'Check!'; actually he checks only his own King" (294). The strange puzzle as to why and how the chess pieces are responsible for their own moves and strategy can be resolved in considering the third problem—White's having ten more moves than Red.
Davies takes four stabs at solving this most vexing peculiarity:
Four possible explanations suggest themselves. Firstly, Red might move the White pieces by mistake. Under Law IX White could insist that the moves stand. Secondly, according to Law XIV, if White were moving out of turn Red could insist that the moves stand. Neither of these contingencies is very likely in view of the number of consecutive moves made by White. Thirdly, the game might be played at odds. Both Walker and Staunton devote much space to various methods of giving odds to a weaker player. But the order of the moves—one Red, eight White, one Red, three White, one Red, two White—would imply an impossibly difficult mathematical basis for the giving of odds.
There remains a fourth possibility. Book V of Staunton's Companion is entitled "On Odds." Staunton begins with a discussion of the origins of chess and remarks that at first the giving and receiving of odds was unnecessary because the game was not one of pure skill. At the remote period of its birth in India it belonged to the widespread family of human games based on chance and "the moves were governed by the casts of dice". These significant words occur in the very first sentence of the treatise Staunton wrote and Lewis Carroll bought. They provide a key that turns easily in the lock of the door to Alice's secret garden. White has more moves than Red because White wins on the throw of the dice more often than Red!
"They don't keep this room so tidy as the other," thought Alice to herself when she arrived behind the looking-glass and discovered a world beyond the care of providence or the decrees of fate. How disturbing if Carroll is suggesting that this 'other world' is, after all, the real one and that it is ruled by the principle of uncertainty! A pawn's progress towards the eighth rank is hazardous in the hands of a skilled chess player. In looking-glass chess its survival depends on the casting of unseen dice by an invisible master. No wonder Alice cried as she threw herself down on the last square, "Oh, how glad I am to get here!"
None of these four suggestions resolves anything about the moves because none explains either the character or implications of the game itself. Only the fourth suggests a real solution—the game is controlled by "an invisible master" and "is ruled by the principle of uncertainty!" Gardner more narrowly implies the same: "Carroll may be suggesting… that the knights, like Punch and Judy, are merely puppets moved by the hands of the invisible players of the game" (295). Richard Kelly can assess the same evidence and come to the complementary conclusion that "in the Looking-Glass world life is completely determined and without choice."5
These men come to different conclusions about the character of the game either because they are either examining different objects, or the same object from differing points of view. Actually, they are doing both. Davies and Gardner view Carroll's chess puzzle as a game, using a player's point-of-view totally beyond the game and finding the game symbolizes the uncertainty of human existence. Kelly sees the puzzle as a chess problem and takes the point-of-view of the pieces. Kelly finds this world narrow, limited, and totally determined.
What is our puzzle—problem or game? Alice calls it a "huge game of chess that's being played—all over the world—if this is the world, you know" (207-8). However, Carroll has already called it a "chess-problem" in his "Preface" (172).
If we look at our puzzle carefully, we will find that it is both game and problem, and that this paradox is the solution to the highly symbolic narrative plot.
II.
In his fine book The Enjoyment of Chess Problems, Kenneth S. Howard makes an essential distinction betwee
n the chess problem and the chess ending:
There is an essential distinction between a chess problem and a composed endgame. In an endgame the solver has to demonstrate a win or draw for white against a superior, or at least an equal, force, and is allowed an indefinite number of moves in which to do so. The point of the endgame is based on the difference in the apparent relative material strength of white and black. In a problem it is not a question of relative strength but of the possibility of showing a mate against any defense in a limited number of moves. In an endgame the solver is fighting against material odds; in a problem he is fighting against time.
The modern chess problem is an illustration of some particular powers of the chess men in their interaction with one another. The chess problem is not primarily merely a puzzle.6
However, in neither the problem nor the ending is the solver actually playing against another mind. He is acting within the rules of the problem situation, and for the most efficient win or mate in the game-like ending. If a problem mate can be escaped or solved in fewer moves than required, the problem is said to be "cooked." In the ending, the situation must be a win or draw for the appointed side or it too is ruined. For both problem and ending, one's opponents are the pieces, rules, and the situation set forth on the board. The game of chess pits two minds against each other, the board situation remaining at their mercy.
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