Years ago (circa 1988) for my own
chess practice, I played against a stand alone computer with a built-in board.
It worked by pressing the piece you wanted to move on its own square, then
pressing the square where you moved it to. When the computer made its move,
there were rows of lights along one vertical and one horizontal edge that lit
up telling you in a matrix fashion (ala Battleship) what the computer wanted to
do.
The computer pieces were small, the
king no more than an inch and a half, so I usually set up my tournament board
and pieces (much larger) and played the computer that way (with no computer
pieces on the board).
When my son was three, he used to
watch me play these chess games at the dining room table. While I played he
would eye all the big pieces with round eyes lit with excitement. As the game
progressed and pieces were inevitably captured, I would hand him the pieces and
he would play with them while I fought the computer. Naturally, the knights
were his favorite and yes, he would occasionally make neighing sounds. What a
delight that was!
This arrangement worked for a year,
then I decided to see if he would like to move the pieces for the computer, giving
the appearance of playing against dad. He jumped at the opportunity, and as
luck would have it, I had just decided to play the computer’s next higher
level.
The game moved along nicely and we
were having a lot of fun together. I made a mistake somewhere in the middle
game and couldn’t recover, and ended up getting checkmated in the endgame. I
said something like, “Well, I lost, son.” He looked up at me with a smile only
sons can give their dads, and slipped off his chair and went running into the living
room, while I reset the pieces on the board.
To my delight, off in the distance, in
his four-year-old voice, he quipped, “Mom, I beat daddy at chess!”
Who was I to shatter that excitement?
And yes, he went on to play chess very
successfully in scholastic tournaments, and today at the age of 34, still
plays.
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