Jim West On Chess: The "Deep Blue" Goodbye

Thursday, May 1, 2008

The "Deep Blue" Goodbye

The late mystery writer John D. MacDonald once played a game of chess against Ernest Hemingway. Perhaps this explains why Travis McGee's sidekick Meyer is a chess aficionado.

The first Travis McGee mystery The Deep Blue Goodbye is about to be made into a movie. But it does not tell the tale of what IBM said to its chessplaying computer that defeated Garry Kasparov!

"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