90 / Chess - big deal, how many moves can there be?
Well, quite a few, actually. In fact, the possible moves in a chess game outnumber the estimated number of atoms in the universe.
Come again? I have written before about the Cosmos and some of its staggering numbers. In fact, I like numbers - numbers and mathematics are fun.
Back to chess. I read about Magnus Carlsen in Time, a chess grandmaster who became the world's #1 at age 18, the youngest to ever achieve this in the game's history. The thing with Carlsen is, he doesn't even try hard. As other chess players in his league, he can play many games at the same time - blindfolded; where he just listens to the coordinates of where a chess piece is moved to.
So what fascinates me most about this guy is the seeming ease of his mastery. Now retired grandmaster Kasparov says Carlsen has a deeply intuitive sense for the game, that he has a natural feel for where to place the pieces. Imagine someone like Carlsen hardly ponders where to make the next move to, but he just places the piece in the right spot by intuition - all the while calculating about 20 moves ahead. A bit like you walking in the street, knowing three steps ahead where your foot is going to go.
Somehow I can relate to that intuition: It is the same sixth sense that makes me frame a picture in a certain way, press the shutter button at a certain time. People ask, 'how do you know what to do?' Well, there's no answer to the question; you just know - it's intuition.