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Fictional chess game from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Poole vs. HAL 9000 is a chess game depicted in the 1968 science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Astronaut Frank Poole (White) plays the supercomputer HAL 9000 (Black) using a video screen as a chessboard. Each player takes turns during a game in progress, making their moves orally using descriptive notation and natural language. Poole resigns the game once HAL indicates a certain path to checkmate; however, the move which HAL suggests Frank might make is not forced. Stanley Kubrick, director of 2001, was an avid chess player.
The game is shown continuously and legibly for several seconds in a single shot. The board positions and moves made are identical with the conclusion of a real game: Roesch–Schlage, Hamburg 1910, which was reported in a 1955 collection of short games by Irving Chernev.[1] Chess writers have therefore attributed the fictional game fragment to the real one, equating the two and suggesting that the former derived from the latter.
According to chess writers, the game depicted in the film is based on a tournament game played between Roesch and Willi Schlage in Hamburg, 1910.[2][3]
White: A. Roesch Black: W. Schlage Opening: Ruy Lopez, Wormald Variation (ECO C77)[4][5]
1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6 4. Ba4 Nf6 5. Qe2 b5 6. Bb3 Be7 7. c3 0-0 8. 0-0 d5
9. exd5 Nxd5 10. Nxe5 Nf4 11. Qe4 Nxe5 12. Qxa8?
| a | b | c | d | e | f | g | h | ||
| 8 |              | 8 | |||||||
| 7 | 7 | ||||||||
| 6 | 6 | ||||||||
| 5 | 5 | ||||||||
| 4 | 4 | ||||||||
| 3 | 3 | ||||||||
| 2 | 2 | ||||||||
| 1 | 1 | ||||||||
| a | b | c | d | e | f | g | h | ||
12... Qd3! 13. Bd1 Bh3! (diagram)
14. Qxa6?
14... Bxg2 15. Re1 Qf3
Final position after 15...Qf3
|
 "Thank you for a very enjoyable game." | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Arthur C. Clarke's novelization of 2001 also indicated that the astronauts could pass the time by playing various board games with HAL, though no specific game (whether chess or otherwise) was depicted. Unlike the film, Clarke's treatment stated that HAL won only half of games played.
For relaxation he (Dave Bowman) could always engage Hal in a large number of semimathematical games, including checkers, chess, and polyominoes. If Hal went all out, he could win any one of them; but that would be bad for morale. So he had been programmed to win only fifty percent of the time, and his human partners pretended not to know this.
— 2001, p. 100.[9]
Unlike Kubrick, Clarke had no particular interest in chess and said that if he did, 2001 would not have been made as the two "would have just played chess".[10] Consonant with Clarke's passing mention of polyominoes, a game involving pentominoes was shot and considered for use in the film, but ultimately passed over[11] in favor of the chess game, which Kubrick felt would be more familiar to audiences.[12] Parker Brothers had planned a corresponding board game as a tie-in to the film, which was released as Universe in 1967; the cover art on the box included a still from the unused cut.[13]
Murray Campbell, a member of the team that developed the chess computer Deep Blue, contributed an article to a book exploring the scientific and cultural implications of the HAL character.[6] Campbell argued that HAL's style of play was more "human" than that of Deep Blue's, in the sense that HAL (Schlage) chose a "nonoptimal" move at 9...Nxd5, which nevertheless stymied his human opponent. In contrast, the real computer Deep Blue used "inhuman" brute-force searching and minimax optimization to always seek the best available move. The book's publication was concurrent with Deep Blue's two matches against the Russian grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1996 and 1997; the human player won the first match, while the computer won the latter.
Tim Krabbé criticized the choice of Roesch–Schlage by way of its aesthetics, calling it "a plain game"; he likewise suggested that the choice of the game implicated Kubrick's own acumen as a player, as well as that of its fictional characters. According to Krabbé, the aesthetic consideration and the simple endgame variation announced by HAL (but not actually played) might explain the character's misuse of descriptive notation when announcing the queen's movement: "A player who would be impressed by that Queen's sacrifice, might be weak enough to make a mistake in its descriptive notation."[14]
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