Fierce Game of Foolish Geniuses: The Opening of Chess

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A "quote" from Fierce Game of Foolish Geniuses: The Opening of Chess:

The tall, slim guy is beginning to realize that it is not as simple as it usually is. The psychological tricks don't seem to be working at all. The game must start to get finer, subtler details must be analyzed in more depth if HE is going to win against IT. The last move immediately caught the attention of all great players around the table as being fantastically thought up in such a short time as the black player did not have the amount of experience the white did. All the weaker players with smaller brains around the table looked confused. The black king wondered what was going on wasting his time and frantically looked for reasoning. The pawn at #F-7, the soldier just diagonal to the king, then explained to him, "The most obvious advantage that we have here is the blocked camel next to the white king from coming into and attacking the black horse. Yet, other subtler rewards of the move follow–such as increasing the transportability of the elephant in the corner, giving the queen side knight another spot to move into, a new corner of a stonewall, and a more symmetrical defense on both halves of the board. Symmetry is a vital in all logic of modern science–it is how finally the forces of nature, including electromagnetism, weak and strong force, and gravity were compounded . . ." The king continued to nod as if he understood and the move in fact was a really great idea, although it blew from one ear to the other, as this story might for some readers without a chess board in front of them unless they have a sturdy memory, or unless there is an astonishing erudition of how chess is really played, or if one is a theoretical physicist in his subtlest senses. Of course, the king understood parts of what the soldier explained and thought it made sense, the effective understanding was reduced by a tenfold.

"A star's absolute brightness is independent of its apparent magnitude, but the apparent magnitude is not independent of the absolute magnitude.  A man's brilliance is comparable to a star's brightness." - Aditya Mittal

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