"Do you remember me?"; Kriegspiel (#260, Topic G, N)

At the end of my presentation last Saturday, on issues related to translating Analects (#254), a young man came to the podium and asked: "Do you remember me?" His face looked familiar, but I could not place him. Not wanting to embarrass me further, he said: "Ten years ago, I interviewed you for articles published in the Washington Chinese News." This reminder brings back many fond memories. One of the interviews he (Gary Cheng) did on me, later published as a full-page article in that paper, was on Kriegspiel, a western-chess-based game that focuses on one's ability to infer rather than on regurgitation -- a game even Bobby Fischer, a world champion in western chess, considered "difficult." (#13, 1/2/06,Topic G) Realizing that there was no English-language book to introduce this fascinating game, after reading a western-chess columnist to this effect, I wrote one, which was published in 1994. (At the time, I was aware of a Kriegspiel end-game book written in English, published in London in the 1950s; later, I learned that there is an introduction to Kriegspiel written in German, published in Geneva in the 1930s.) The publication of my book received attention on both sides of the Atlantic -- one reason might be my bold statement in the book's preface: "In a few years, and certainly by the end of this millennium, a computer, endowed with a gigabyte of memory to store all past games and nanosecond speed to retrieve winning moves from these past games, will be the World Chess Champion." (This proved to be so, when, in 1997, IBM's Deep Blue defeated Gary Kasparov, then the world's western chess champion.) In addition to Gary's interview, there was another full-page article, in English, published in City Paper, as Like Chess, But Not So Easy. One year, our son, daughter, and son-in-law had this article framed and gave it to me as a Christmas gift -- it is now displayed in my study. Come to think of it, I must do justice to this Chinese-language article by framing and hanging it in my study as well. The article in WCN has two photographs, one was on a game of Kriegspiel played in DuPont circle in DC, being videotaped by ABC (and, later, beamed by a local station in Seattle as well, since many games in my Kriegspiel book were played by faculty members at the U of Washington, where I was a full professor). The game was invented by a Fleet Street (London's Wall Street) reporter in 1896. Hoping to mount an international congress to celebrate the game's centenary, in 1995, I went to London to promote it. An editor of Chess came to my hotel to interview me, which, along with an article I wrote on the subject (touting that, at one time, a Cambridge biochemistry professor who was a Nobel laureate as well as the President of British Chess Federation, preferred Kriegspiel to western chess, with a 7-move game resulting in a checkmate to prove it), appeared in that magazine; telephonic interviews were published in Rochade Europa. Lacking a financial backer (a million pounds would take care of it nicely), this centennial tournament, for London in 1996, did not materialize, I regret to say. In my presentation last Saturday, I also added my blog address. Gary later sent me an e-mail saying that, using my blog as a model, he had set up a blog of his own, lqj.blogspot.com. If I may say so, his is much more colorful than mine, with color photographs and vivid prose in Chinese. Yesterday, he sent me another e-mail saying that he had written an article about my talk last Saturday, and that, in addition to posting it in his blog, it will be published in tomorrow's (11/17/06) New World Times 新世界時報, a Chinese-language weekly, of which Gary is, in all likelihood, a contributing editor. My, my, the vitality of the young generation!