[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. 

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich. 

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: We're talking about—well, what are we talking about?

JAD: Sports.

ROBERT: We're talking—sport? 

JAD: Sports, games. 

ROBERT: Games. Yeah, you know what? What we're really talking about is a fundamental behavior of everyone on Earth, including, like, wolves and cats.

JAD: Wolves and cats? That was—well, you're broadening more than I would broaden. But that's, you know, go—go with it. 

ROBERT: Well, I mean, come on. Like, what do little wolves do?

JAD: They don't play football.

ROBERT: No, but they tussle.

JAD: Yes. You mean, like, like they play?

ROBERT: Yes, like human babies.

JAD: Yeah. Okay.

ALISON GOPNIK: Babies and young children spend almost all of their time playing. It seems so natural we don't even think about it.

JAD: So let's just go with that thought. This is Alison Gopnik, she's a developmental psychologist.

ALISON GOPNIK: At the University of California at Berkeley.

JAD: Big sports fan.

ALISON GOPNIK: Yeah.

JAD: Baseball.

ALISON GOPNIK: An Oakland fan.

JAD: Professionally though, she studies kids. And she's got an interesting idea. She says if you look at kids, how they play over time?

ROBERT: Yes?

JAD: You see that at the center of their play, there's this really interesting tension that exists.

ROBERT: Tension of what kind?

JAD: Well, you can actually hear it. So we'll get back to Alison in just one moment, here's a four-year-old girl named Rosa.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rosa: Now pink is anger.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rosa's dad: Yes.]

JAD: Listen to her describe her imaginary friend to her dad.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rosa's dad: And how does Hermione know Antarctica?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rosa: She was in the Antarctic for a bit before she moved to the moon.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rosa's dad: Oh, what was she doing in the Antarctic? In Antarctica?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rosa: You know how she used—what she used to keep warm?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rosa's dad: To keep what?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rosa: Warm.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rosa's dad: Warm?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rosa: Do you know what?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rosa's dad: No.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rosa: She got leopard seal skin for—to make a coat.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rosa's dad: I see.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rosa: And then went back to the moon.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rosa's dad: And what prompted her to move from Antarctica to the moon?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rosa: Because she wanted a place high, but now she's thinking she wants to move back to Antarctica.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rosa's dad: Really?]

ALISON GOPNIK: In preschool children you start seeing this wonderful flowering of pretend life. The children are becoming ninjas and princesses and superheroes. 

JAD: And at first, says Alison, this is what play is all about, inventing, making up crazy psychedelic connections, complete improv.

ALISON GOPNIK: You get this period to just explore, just innovate.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rosa: Can jump from planet to planet.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rosa's dad: What does it eat on the moon?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rosa: House mice. House mice.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rosa's dad: House mice?]

ROBERT: House mice, of course.

JAD: But if you fast forward just a couple of years, not four anymore, but six, six year olds, the vibe totally changes because now it's all about rules.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child's voice: You wanna play? The person who wants to be it is the freezer. If they—if the tagger—if the freezer tags you, you're frozen. But then if somebody else tags you, you're—you're unfrozen. And—and, like, these two are bases, okay? So let's play! She's it. And she freezes. Freeze. That's how you play freeze tag. Go!]

JAD: With six year olds it just sounds really different. You hear a lot of this ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child's voice: No fair!]

JAD: A lot of yelling about what's allowed, what isn't allowed.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child's voice: I start out with it. I start out with it.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child's voice: Last time you started out with the ball!]

ALISON GOPNIK: In some ways, I think the school-aged children are practicing being in a society. They're practicing having laws, they're practicing having rules.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child's voice: Nigel, no you don't. Not anymore.]

ALISON GOPNIK: They're sort of developing a theory of sociology.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child's voice: Yes I do.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child's voice: I had the ball first.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child's voice: I had the ball!]

JAD: So you've got these two modes of play: you've got the three-year-old inventor, who's like ...

ALISON GOPNIK: "Okay, I'm just gonna make this happen. I'm going to create something new in the world."

JAD: Then you've got the six-year-old enforcer, who's like ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child's voice: No fair!]

JAD: "You can't just create what you want!"
ALISON GOPNIK: The world is bigger than we are.

JAD: We need rules!

ALISON GOPNIK: And one of the things that's really interesting about the games that seem to stick is that the greatest games like baseball are games that let us experience the world in both those ways at the same time. 

JAD: In other words, like, a good game is like a weird, constantly shifting war between the three year old in us, and that—and the six year old.

ROBERT: I think she's probably correct because there are games which suffer from a lack of the tension she's describing. There's one game in particular ...

BRIAN CHRISTIAN: Okay.

ROBERT: I don't know if you've played it lately, but we heard about it from this guy, Brian Christian.

BRIAN CHRISTIAN: A writer, yeah.

ROBERT: He was on a recent show talking about robots, but he also mentioned this little ...

JAD: Moment?

ROBERT: Yes, it's a moment.

BRIAN CHRISTIAN: So yeah. At the world checkers championship ...

ROBERT: [laughs]

BRIAN CHRISTIAN:  ...in Glasgow, Scotland in 1863. It is James Wiley against Robert Martins. 

ROBERT: The two best checker players in the world. 

JAD: Wiley! Wiley!

BRIAN CHRISTIAN: Playing a 40-game series. All 40 games opened with the same three or four moves, and all 40 games were draws.

ROBERT: [laughs] Really?

BRIAN CHRISTIAN: Yeah.

ROBERT: Not only that ...

BRIAN CHRISTIAN: 21 of the 40 games are the exact same game.

ROBERT: Meaning that move for move for move, they were precise duplicates of each other.

BRIAN CHRISTIAN: Start to finish.

JAD: Every single move was the same?

BRIAN CHRISTIAN: Yeah.

ROBERT: Yup.

BRIAN CHRISTIAN: You know, can you imagine? It's like a month of checkers.

JAD: How exactly does that happen?

ROBERT: Well see, these guys were professional checkers players.

JAD: Yes.

ROBERT: So they studied moves that other competitors had made. They would write them down, memorize them and they became a kind of catalog. So at—at a certain point, every move you saw on the checkerboard you'd think, "Oh yeah. That one."

BRIAN CHRISTIAN: Checkers had hit this point where the conventional wisdom about what was the proper move to play had gotten to this point where there was now basically a perfect game of checkers. And with the world title on the line ...

ROBERT: Both players played that perfect game over and over and over.

BRIAN CHRISTIAN: They stuck to the script. So this was really rock bottom for the checkers community. I mean, it—it's ...

ROBERT: Wow. Yeah.

JAD: So there you go, that's why no one plays checkers anymore.

ROBERT: Well, some people play checkers. I play—I play checkers.

JAD: What? No you don't.

ROBERT: Checkers is fine, as long as you don't play it for too long. 

JAD: No.

ROBERT: Or too well. 

JAD: No, no, no, no.

ROBERT: I mean, if you're a lame checker player you could play checkers forever.

JAD: Well, then what's the point? I mean, why would you play a game that's been gobbled up? It's dead!

ROBERT: But by the way, this thing that you just said killed checkers?
JAD: Yeah? 

BRIAN CHRISTIAN: This concept ...

ROBERT: Has a name. It's called ...

BRIAN CHRISTIAN: Called the book.

ROBERT: The book!

BRIAN CHRISTIAN: The danger is that the entire game stays in book the whole time.

ROBERT: And that danger, says Brian, is not specifically confined to checkers.

BRIAN CHRISTIAN: Occasionally, very rarely, in the chess world you'll see two grandmasters play the exact same game that another pair of grandmasters played, you know, a year before. And they'll get boos and jeers all over the internet as a result. 

JAD: Now chess. Let me—let me talk about chess.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: Chess—the book in chess is huge. It started in the 16th century, and for hundreds of years players were keeping track of moves and counter moves and counter-counter-counter-counter moves. Until by the 1950s ...

FRED FRIEDEL: It was like a library ...

JAD: It actually was a library.

FRED FRIEDEL: ... in the Moscow central chess club.

ROBERT: Who is this?

JAD: This is Fred Friedel. He's a chess analyst and one of the few non-Russians to have seen this room.

FRED FRIEDEL: Yes, it's a huge musty room. All these shelves, and there were little boxes, and the boxes contained little cards. Index cards.

JAD: And each of these cards documented a particular game of chess from the past. And for a while, this was all a secret.

FRED FRIEDEL: There were about three or four players in the world ...

JAD: All Russian ...

FRED FRIEDEL: ... who had access.

JAD: When one of these guys had a big game they would go to this library, and say, "All right. I've got this opponent, he's a Polish guy, Przepiórka something or other. Give me all his games."

FRED FRIEDEL: And suddenly you have a few hundred cards ...

JAD:  ... which you and your team could study ...

FRED FRIEDEL: This is how they prepared.

JAD: ... by memorizing literally thousands of moves.

FRED FRIEDEL: Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands.

JAD: But where Fred comes in is in the '80s, he convinced the Russian Federation to put this online where anyone could study it and add to it. And suddenly, this book explodes. Which is, for some people, distressing.

FRED FRIEDEL: People tend to boo me sometimes when I come into a chess tournament today. They will point to me and say, "That's him, Frederick, the man who ruined chess."

JAD: Because here's the modern game: when two players sit down at one of these tournaments to face off, they've already consulted Frederick's database, which he's named Fritz. 

FRED FRIEDEL: The chess players all call it Fritzy now. 

JAD: And because of Fritzy, they walk into these games with so much of the book in their heads that whole portions of the game are very checkers-like, very rote.

BRIAN CHRISTIAN: You'll see this if you watch grandmasters play speed chess.

ROBERT: That's Brian Christian again.

BRIAN CHRISTIAN: They'll just hammer out the first dozen or so moves ...

JAD: Bam!

ROBERT: Bam!

JAD: Bam. Ba-bam!

ROBERT: Bam!

JAD: Bam!

ROBERT: Bam! Bam!

JAD: Bam!

ROBERT: Bam!

JAD: Bam!

BRIAN CHRISTIAN:  ... with barely any thought.

FRED FRIEDEL: Out of memory.

BRIAN CHRISTIAN: Yeah.

FRED FRIEDEL: It used to be two, three, four, five, six moves.

JAD: No big deal.

FRED FRIEDEL: Nowadays, it is 16 moves, 20 moves ...

JAD: There does seem to be a kind of creep that's happening. The book is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. But inevitably in every chess game there is a moment which puts the book in its place, and if you watch a game ...

JAD: Is there a chess tournament coming up, that—like a big one?

FRED FRIEDEL: Yes. Next Thursday I'm going to Romania where some of the top players are playing.

JAD: If you watch a game, as I was able to do, 'cause you can watch these games online ...

JAD: Okay, yeah. We're gonna watch a chess tournament online.

JAD: ... you will see that moment ...

JAD: Say "Chess!"

[baby voice saying chess]

JAD: And it's not like Jordan scoring 40 points while he has a fever. It's not like that, but if you know what to look for, it's quite profound.

JAD: Okay, it's 8:30 a.m. I'm here with my little man. Say hi.

CHILD'S VOICE: Hi.

JAD: And somewhere in Romania, two grandmasters are about to sit down at a table to do battle, and I will watch it virtually.

JAD: The match I watched was Magnus Carlsen, the world's top player, vs. Hikaru Nakamura, the US champ. I call up Frederic ... 

FRED FRIEDEL: Hello, it's Frederic.

JAD:  ... to give me the play by play, because I actually don't know much about chess.

FRED FRIEDEL: Okay.

JAD: His program, Fritz, can tell you how many times each move has occurred in the entire recorded history of chess.

ROBERT: What does that mean?

JAD: It's like his computer can look at the board and say, "That move that you just made, that has happened before. And I will tell you exactly how many times before."

JAD: Hey, it started. Here we go.

JAD: Move one.

JAD: White moves its D4 to D5.

FRED FRIEDEL: White pawn two squares forward. My database tells me that there are 1,775,000 games in which this occurred.

JAD: Then ...

JAD: Move two.

JAD: ... black counters with its pawn going from C4 to E6.

JAD: Now we've got two pawns facing each other, middle of the board. And according to Fred's database this exact configuration has occurred in ...

FRED FRIEDEL: 514,518 games. 

JAD: So a million and a half, down to half a million.

ROBERT: Smaller.

FRED FRIEDEL: Yes.

JAD: Move three. White moves another pawn.

FRED FRIEDEL: 335,000.

JAD: Black, another pawn.

FRED FRIEDEL: 149,000.

ROBERT: Even smaller.

JAD: Yup. White moves its knight.

FRED FRIEDEL: 114,000.

JAD: Black moves its bishop.

FRED FRIEDEL: 91,000.

ROBERT: Less again.

JAD: White pawn takes a black pawn.

JAD: Just had our first casualty, people.

FRED FRIEDEL: 2,428 games.

ROBERT: What was that again?

JAD: 2,400.

JAD: Oh, the black pawn responds.

FRED FRIEDEL: 2,613 games.

JAD: White bishop flies across the board.

FRED FRIEDEL: 2,125 games.

JAD: Black moves another pawn up. 

FRED FRIEDEL: 1,200.

JAD: White queen does a little thing. 

FRED FRIEDEL: 381 games.

ROBERT: 381. Getting lower. 

JAD: Yes. Black bishop retreats.

FRED FRIEDEL: 19 games.

ROBERT: 19.

FRED FRIEDEL: 1-9.

JAD: White moves another pawn.

FRED FRIEDEL: Which has occurred in 11 games.

JAD: Okay, black bishop retreats.

FRED FRIEDEL: Still 11 games.

JAD: White bishop advances.

FRED FRIEDEL: We're down to 10 games. 

JAD: 10, whoo! Black bishop falls back even further.

FRED FRIEDEL: And we have nine games.

JAD: Black bishop takes white bishop.

CHILD'S VOICE: Good.

FRED FRIEDEL: Five games.

JAD: White pawn retaliates, taking black bishop.

FRED FRIEDEL: Still five games.

JAD: And then white rook and white king switch places.

FRED FRIEDEL: Now there are no more games. You have a position which has never occurred before in the universe.

JAD: Ever?

FRED FRIEDEL: No.

JAD: In the universe?

FRED FRIEDEL: Not in the history of this universe. And this is what is known as the novelty.

JAD: The novelty.

FRED FRIEDEL: The novelty, yeah. And in chess notes, if you read chess notes, you will see ...

JAD: That shortly after this move ...

FRED FRIEDEL: The annotator writes, "Out of book."

JAD: Out of ...

CHILD'S VOICE: Book.

JAD: Book, yeah. 

JAD: Out of book.

JAD: Bye-bye book. 

CHILD'S VOICE: Bye-bye book.

FRED FRIEDEL: Which means ...

JAD: No more book.

CHILD'S VOICE: No more book.

FRED FRIEDEL: ... both sides now are on their own.

JAD: And everyone we talked to who plays chess told us that when you get to that moment ...

FRANK BRADY: You feel you're alive in a way that you're not normally. 

JAD: That's Frank Brady, he's an author and a professor at St. John's. 

FRANK BRADY: And an international arbiter of the World Chess Federation. You're totally in it. Your mind is in some ways not even operating.

JAD: It's like you're back to being three again.

ROBERT: What are you saying?

JAD: I'm saying this is one of the reasons we watch sports, for these kinds of, like, zero moments. 

FRED FRIEDEL: A position which has never occurred in the universe.

JAD: At the same time, the zero is happening inside all of these rules, which are like, our lives. And this is what Alison was saying.

ALISON GOPNIK: Games let us experience the world in both those ways at the same time.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: The Pacers could foul.]

JAD: For example, here's one. 1999, Knicks-Pacers. Larry Johnson has the ball, Knicks are down by three, final seconds. He has no shot. Best you could think he can do is tie. But he has no shot! And yet, somehow, he twists, he shimmies, he moves to the left, he throws it up ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: Johnson is fouled [ball goes in, crowd roars] and yeah!]

JAD: That—that was like what? What? I mean, that's in the rules but nobody could have imagined that.

FRED FRIEDEL: A position which has never occurred in the universe.

JAD: I mean, I don't know about never, but ...

ROBERT: You wanna know about mine?

JAD: Sure.

ROBERT: This is a hockey moment. It's Wayne Gretzky, early '90s. He's playing, shoots for the goal, the puck hits something, somebody, and starts flying through the air like a tennis ball. Wayne Gretzky turns around and whacks the flying puck out of the air.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: And up in the air, Gretzky scores! What a shot by Wayne Gretzky!]

JAD: Just smacked it out of the air?

ROBERT: Yup.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster:  ... right out of midair!]

ROBERT: The universe would have to be extremely old to have a previous version of that.

JAD: Frank, do you have a number one favorite novelty in chess?

FRANK BRADY: Well, my number one favorite would be Bobby Fischer's game of the century.

JAD: And when—and when did that happen?

FRANK BRADY: We're jumping to 1956, Bobby is 13 years old. 

JAD: And is he the Bobby Fischer of legend at this point? Or just a 13-year-old kid?

FRANK BRADY: No, he's a 13-year-old kid. He got invited to this tournament, it was an all-adult invitational tournament.

JAD: And Frank says all the world's best were there. And this was kind of Bobby's first official match in the big leagues, so to speak.

FRANK BRADY: Exactly.

JAD: And to set the scene: it was October.

FRANK BRADY: Warm Indian summer.

JAD: We're at the Marshall Chess Club in Manhattan, which is this big, stodgy brownstone with lots of mahogany. And Bobby Fischer in his T-shirt sits down to play a fellow named ...

FRANK BRADY: Donald Byrne.

JAD: A guy who looked the part.

FRANK BRADY: Very urbane, sophisticated.

JAD: Jacket. Bow tie.

FRANK BRADY: He always had a cigarette between two fingers. 

JAD: I imagine it would have been hard for him to take this kid seriously.

FRANK BRADY: Yeah, and he was not doing all that well.

JAD: From the beginning, Bobby Fischer was making what looked like dumb errors.

FRANK BRADY: He was losing.

JAD: For example, midway through the game ...

FRANK BRADY: Bobby made this move where he moved his knight to the rim of the board, which is usually strategically speaking is not the greatest place to move your knight.

JAD: Because you know, if your knight is shoved against the edge, it's boxed in.

FRANK BRADY: And the knight could be taken. And people said, "What? What is it, did he blunder?"
JAD: Like, c'mon kid.

FRANK BRADY: Yeah, this is crazy.

JAD: But then Bobby Fischer does something truly crazy.

ROBERT: What?

JAD: He leaps so far ...

FRANK BRADY: Out of the book, in effect ...

JAD: ... that people are still talking about this move 50 years later.

FRANK BRADY: On the 18th move he allowed Byrne to take his queen.

JAD: He just said, "Here, take my queen?"

FRANK BRADY: Now in chess ...

JAD: That's—that's, like, crazy.

FRANK BRADY: Yeah. In chess, it's almost impossible to win a game if you lose your queen. It's like, what? It's got to be wrong, that must be a stupid blunder that you ...

JAD: It seemed like maybe he was throwing in the towel, so a crowd gathered ...

FRANK BRADY: Scrum of people hanging around ...

JAD: ... to watch this kid get put in his place. And Byrne did what anyone would do in that situation, he took the queen.

FRANK BRADY: But maybe four moves later ...

JAD: Just at the moment you would think he would have Bobby Fischer in a stranglehold ...

FRANK BRADY: Bobby started checking the king.

JAD: He was chasing Byrne all over the board.

FRANK BRADY: And people began to see that there was some combination, but it was a long combination, and, you know ...

JAD: 20 moves later, Byrne was done.

FRANK BRADY: Nothing he could do. He was checkmated.

JAD: And Frank says if you analyze the game you see that it all began—and in a way ended—when he sacrificed his queen.

FRANK BRADY: It was a lost game from that moment. If Byrne didn't take the queen he was lost. If Byrne took the queen he was lost.

JAD: Wait, are you saying he essentially checkmated him 20 moves ahead of time?

FRANK BRADY: Yes, it was unstoppable, it was forceful. 

JAD: So it's like he wrote a new book. He stuck the guy in his book.

FRANK BRADY: [laughs] I love that.

JAD: So it's kind of interesting, like you—you can—you can start the game in book, so to speak.

ROBERT: And you're kind of locked into a set of moves. The game ends ...

JAD: Kind of the same way.

ROBERT: The same way. That's destiny.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: But then in the middle, you just get a peek at something ...

JAD: Infinite.

ROBERT: Infinite.

JAD: Although, we were wondering, like, is that middle space really infinite? I mean, we asked Frederic if people played chess for hundreds and hundreds of years, inventing new moves into that empty space would they ever fill it up? And he said ...

FRED FRIEDEL: No. Because the number of chess games that are possible is vastly more than the number of atoms in the universe.

JAD: More than ...

FRED FRIEDEL: That's just a silly little number compared to the number of chess games.

ROBERT: What kind of a number is that? How many atoms are there in the universe?

FRED FRIEDEL: 1082 the last time I counted. No, 78.

ROBERT: 10 with 82 zeros.

FRED FRIEDEL: 1078 I think is more accurate.

JAD: And there are more possibilities within a 40-move chess game?

FRED FRIEDEL: 10120, approximately.

JAD: And he says if he were to try to get all that information into Fritzy, his database ...

FRED FRIEDEL: We would have to dismantle an entire solar system just to store the information.

JAD: And he says he'd have to dismantle another one, just to plug it in.

ROBERT: And what he says about chess, you could say that about hockey, you could say that about baseball, you could say that about curling.

JAD: But you could not say that about checkers, let's just be clear.

ROBERT: Exactly. So, checkers aside, every game has this kind of strange thing. It has a field of play ...

JAD: A small, little box.

ROBERT: It could be a board, it could be a field, whatever. And then, you step into it, and there's like a whoosh.

JAD: A solar system.

JAD: Thanks to Alison Gopnik. She wrote the wonderful book The Philosophical Baby. And Frank Brady who's the author of Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall, and also Brian Christian, who wrote the book The Most Human Human.

 

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