Jim West On Chess: Chess on "Mission Impossible"

Monday, June 25, 2007

Chess on "Mission Impossible"

On January 14, 1968, an episode called A Game of Chess aired on the Mission Impossible television series.

The chess tournament scene would truly have been impossible because, at the time, chess computers were notoriously weak.

It is curious to note that the computer generated its chess moves in descriptive notation. Apparently, algebraic notation was not yet in vogue.

"My study of chess was accompanied by a strong attraction to music, and it was probably thanks to this that from childhood I became accustomed to thinking of chess as an art, and have never regarded it as anything else, for all the science and sport involved in it. And, moreover, an art which in some ways is closer to music than it is customary to think. Perhaps chess and music are drawn together by laws of harmony and beauty which are difficult to formulate and difficult to grasp, or perhaps by something else." - Vasily Smyslov