Short Fiction Fritz Leiber (free e books to read .txt) 📖

she dreamed, to walk out this minute, find a quiet bar and get pie-eyed in an evil, ladylike way.

“Perhaps mademoiselle would welcome a drink?”

“You’re durn tootin’ she would!” Sandra replied in a rush, and then looked down apprehensively at the person who had read her thoughts.

It was a small sprightly elderly man who looked like a somewhat thinned down Peter Lorre⁠—there was that same impression of the happy Slavic elf. What was left of his white hair was cut very short, making a silvery nap. His pince-nez had quite thick lenses. But in sharp contrast to the somberly clad men around them, he was wearing a pearl-gray suit of almost exactly the same shade as Sandra’s⁠—a circumstance that created for her the illusion that they were fellow conspirators.

“Hey, wait a minute,” she protested just the same. He had already taken her arm and was piloting her toward the nearest flight of low wide stairs. “How did you know I wanted a drink?”

“I could see that mademoiselle was having difficulty swallowing,” he replied, keeping them moving. “Pardon me for feasting my eyes on your lovely throat.”

“I didn’t suppose they’d serve drinks here.”

“But of course.” They were already mounting the stairs. “What would chess be without coffee or schnapps?”

“Okay, lead on,” Sandra said. “You’re the doctor.”

“Doctor?” He smiled widely. “You know, I like being called that.”

“Then the name is yours as long as you want it⁠—Doc.”

Meanwhile the happy little man had edged them into the first of a small cluster of tables, where a dark-suited jabbering trio was just rising. He snapped his fingers and hissed through his teeth. A white-aproned waiter materialized.

“For myself black coffee,” he said. “For mademoiselle rhine wine and seltzer?”

“That’d go fine.” Sandra leaned back. “Confidentially, Doc, I was having trouble swallowing⁠ ⁠… well, just about everything here.”

He nodded. “You are not the first to be shocked and horrified by chess,” he assured her. “It is a curse of the intellect. It is a game for lunatics⁠—or else it creates them. But what brings a sane and beautiful young lady to this 64-square madhouse?”

Sandra briefly told him her story and her predicament. By the time they were served, Doc had absorbed the one and assessed the other.

“You have one great advantage,” he told her. “You know nothing whatsoever of chess⁠—so you will be able to write about it understandably for your readers.” He swallowed half his demitasse and smacked his lips. “As for the Machine⁠—you do know, I suppose, that it is not a humanoid metal robot, walking about clanking and squeaking like a late medieval knight in armor?”

“Yes, Doc, but⁠ ⁠…” Sandra found difficulty in phrasing the question.

“Wait.” He lifted a finger. “I think I know what you’re going to ask. You want to know why, if the Machine works at all, it doesn’t work perfectly, so that it always wins and there is no contest. Right?”

Sandra grinned and nodded. Doc’s ability to interpret her mind was as comforting as the bubbly, mildly astringent mixture she was sipping.

He removed his pince-nez, massaged the bridge of his nose and replaced them.

“If you had,” he said, “a billion computers all as fast as the Machine, it would take them all the time there ever will be in the universe just to play through all the possible games of chess, not to mention the time needed to classify those games into branching families of wins for White, wins for Black and draws, and the additional time required to trace out chains of key-moves leading always to wins. So the Machine can’t play chess like God. What the Machine can do is examine all the likely lines of play for about eight moves ahead⁠—that is, four moves each for White and Black⁠—and then decide which is the best move on the basis of capturing enemy pieces, working toward checkmate, establishing a powerful central position and so on.”

“That sounds like the way a man would play a game,” Sandra observed. “Look ahead a little way and try to make a plan. You know, like getting out trumps in bridge or setting up a finesse.”

“Exactly!” Doc beamed at her approvingly. “The Machine is like a man. A rather peculiar and not exactly pleasant man. A man who always abides by sound principles, who is utterly incapable of flights of genius, but who never makes a mistake. You see, you are finding human interest already, even in the Machine.”

Sandra nodded. “Does a human chess player⁠—a grandmaster, I mean⁠—ever look eight moves ahead in a game?”

“Most assuredly he does! In crucial situations, say where there’s a chance of winning at once by trapping the enemy king, he examines many more moves ahead than that⁠—thirty or forty even. The Machine is probably programmed to recognize such situations and do something of the same sort, though we can’t be sure from the information World Business Machines has released. But in most chess positions the possibilities are so very nearly unlimited that even a grandmaster can only look a very few moves ahead and must rely on his judgment and experience and artistry. The equivalent of those in the Machine is the directions fed into it before it plays a game.”

“You mean the programming?”

“Indeed yes! The programming is the crux of the problem of the chess-playing computer. The first practical model, reported by Bernstein and Roberts of I.B.M. in 1958 and which looked four moves ahead, was programmed so that it had a greedy worried tendency to grab at enemy pieces and to retreat its own whenever they were attacked. It had a personality like that of a certain kind of chess-playing dub⁠—a dull-brained woodpusher afraid to take the slightest risk of losing material⁠—but a dub who could almost always beat an utter novice. The W.B.M. machine here in the hall operates about a million times as fast. Don’t ask me how, I’m no physicist, but it depends on the new transistors and something they call hypervelocity, which in turn depends on keeping parts of the Machine at