“Game Theory,” by Stephen Starr
May 20th, 2015 | By DefenestrationRaymond Chandler once said that chess was as elaborate a waste of intelligence as you could find outside an advertising agency. Still, it had always been a human waste. As a last redoubt of the rarified mind, it was an irresistible target for programmers and purveyors of the new “thinking machines.” By the 1980s, computers had reached a level of sophistication that allowed them to challenge a grand master. As it happened, the world’s greatest chess player in the mid-80’s was a restless genius named Garry Kimovich Kasparov (pronounced “Gary” in Russian).