Decoded (8 page)

Now it was Jan Liseiwicz’s turn not to agree.

The fact is that at that time there was a lot of talk about the two weirdos of the mathematics department. One weirdo was Professor Rong Yinyi (that is Master Rong), who treasured a heap of letters, sticking to them when she could have been getting married to any one of her admirers. The other weirdo was the foreign professor, Jan Liseiwicz, who cared more for a couple of shelves of mathematics books than for his wife – certainly he would not let anyone other than himself look at them. Young Lillie could say whatever he liked, but he didn’t hold out much hope that Liseiwicz was going to change his mind. He was well aware that the chances of that happening were vanishingly small. If you were going to express it mathematically, you would need to use a very small fraction of a per cent and even there you would be rounding the number up. However, calculation often proves a slipshod method of determining the future – it shows the possible as being impossible.

That evening, when Jinzhen mentioned at the supper table that Professor Liseiwicz had lent him a couple of books and agreed that in the future he could borrow whatever books he wanted whenever he liked, Young Lillie suddenly felt his heart thud. He now realized that in spite of his assurance that he was ahead of the rest, in fact Liseiwicz had already left him far behind. More than anything else, it was this that made Young Lillie realize quite how important Jinzhen was in Liseiwicz’s eyes: he was irreplaceable. Liseiwicz was hoping for great things from Jinzhen, much greater than Young Lillie could even begin to imagine.

Of the two wierdos of the mathematics department, Master Rong’s story was very sad and people felt a great deal of respect for her. Professor Liseiwicz on the other hand seemed to be making a mountain out of a molehill, and it caused a lot of talk. Under normal circumstances, where there is a lot of talk, you end up with endless gossip. Hence, of the two wierdos, there were a lot more rumours about Professor Liseiwicz than there ever were about Master Rong. Pretty much everyone at the university had some sort of story to tell. Because everyone had heard about him refusing to lend anyone his books, they also heard about the fact that he was now lending books to one person – this is the effect you get when some little thing is done by someone famous. This is like the mathematical conversion of mass into energy. People gossiped constantly, asking why Professor Liseiwicz was so kind to Jinzhen, and only to him? It was practically as if he were letting him sleep with his wife. One explanation was that the foreign professor appreciated his student’s intelligence and hoped for great things from him – but the theory that he was doing it purely out of friendly motives was not particularly popular. Eventually those who said that Professor Liseiwicz was taking advantage of Jinzhen’s genius out-shouted the rest.

[Transcript of the interview with Master Rong]

The very first winter after the end of the Second World War, Jan Liseiwicz went back to Europe. The weather was terribly cold, but I guess that it was even worse in Europe, because he didn’t take any of his family with him – he just went on his own. When he came back, Daddy borrowed a Ford car from the university and told me to go down to the docks to collect him. When I got there I was stunned to see that Professor Liseiwicz was sitting on an enormous wooden packing case, about the same size as a coffin, with his name and address at N University written on it in both Chinese and English. The size and the weight of his packing case made it impossible to get into the car. I had to get a cart and four brawny men to transport it back to the department. On the way, I asked Liseiwicz why on earth he had brought so many books back with him and he said excitedly, ‘I have a new research interest and I need these books!’

Apparently on this trip to Europe, Liseiwicz had recovered the interest in research that had been dormant in recent years: he was feeling inspired and was going to make a new start. He had determined to begin research on an enormous new topic: artificial intelligence.

Nowadays, everyone has heard of the subject, but at that time the world’s first computer had only just been built.* That was what had given him the idea – he was way ahead of most people in realizing the potentials of the field. Given the massive scope of the research project that he had in mind, the books that he brought back were just a tiny part of the whole; but it is not surprising that he was not prepared to lend them to other people.

The problem is that the blanket ban applied to everyone except Zhendi, and so people started making wild guesses about what was going on. There were all sorts of stories circulating in the mathematics department anyway about what a genius Zhendi was – how he completed four years of study in the space of two weeks, how cold sweat broke out on Professor Liseiwicz’s face at the mere sight of him; and before you knew it, some people who didn’t understand the first thing about how these things work were saying that the foreign professor was using Zhendi’s intelligence to advance his own research.

That kind of gossip breaks out all the time in academia – it makes professors look bad and people enjoy the idea that they get where they are by stealing someone else’s work – that is just the way it is.

When I heard this story, I went right round to Zhendi to ask him about it and he said it was a pack of lies. Daddy asked him about it too and he still said it was all rubbish.

Daddy said, ‘I hear that you spend every afternoon round at his house, is that right?’

‘Yes,’ said Zhendi.

‘What are you doing there?’ asked Daddy.

‘Sometimes I read books, sometimes we play chess,’ said Zhendi. Zhendi was very definite, but we still felt that where there is smoke, there must also be fire – we were worried that he was lying. After all, he was still only sixteen years old and knew nothing about how complicated the world can be; it was quite possible that he was being deceived. Well, I made excuses several times to go round to Liseiwicz’s house and find out what they were doing, and every time I saw that they were indeed playing chess: the standard international game. Zhendi often played go at home with my father, and he was a fine player – the two of them were pretty evenly matched. Sometimes he also played tiddlywinks with Mummy, but that was just for fun. When I saw the two of them playing chess together, I thought that Liseiwicz was just doing it to keep him company, because everyone knew that he played at grandmaster level.

In fact, something completely different was going on. According to what Zhendi told me himself, he and Liseiwicz had played all sorts of different kinds of chess together – the standard kind, go, elephant chess, battle chess and so on. Occasionally he could win at battle chess, but he never beat Liseiwicz at any of the others. Zhendi said that Liseiwicz played all these games to an amazingly high level, so the only reason that he could occasionally win at battle chess was because ultimately victory in that game is not dependent entirely upon the player’s skill; at least half the time the outcome is determined by sheer luck. If you think about it, even though tiddlywinks is a much simpler game than battle chess, it is a much better determinant of the player’s skill, because the element of luck is so much smaller. In Zhendi’s opinion, battle chess should strictly speaking not be considered a type of chess at all; at the very least, it should not be regarded as a chess game for adults.

You may well be wondering, given that Zhendi was so far from being able to give Liseiwicz a good game, why did they keep on playing together time after time?

Let me explain. As a game, all types of chess are easy to learn to play, in the sense that they do not require the player to develop any special skills: you can just learn the basic rules and get stuck in. The problem is that once you have started playing, chess calls upon completely different attributes from any game requiring physical skill, where as you practice you just get better and better; from a rank beginner you become a practiced player, then a skilled one, and finally an excellent one. The more you play chess the more complicated it gets. The reason for this is that as you improve, you learn more of the set variations and that then opens up more avenues for you to explore – it is like walking into a maze. At the entrance, there is only one way to go, but the further you penetrate, the more crossroads you encounter; the more options you are faced with. That is one reason that the game is so complex; the other is that as you might imagine, if two opponents are walking through the maze at the same time, as one proceeds he is also trying to block the other’s advance, and he is trying to do the same – advance and block, advance and block – well, that is adding another level of difficulty to an already extremely complex game. That is what chess is like: you have standard openings and endgames, attacking and defensive moves, obvious and secret manoeuvres, pieces that you move close at hand and those you send to the other side of the board, enveloping your opponent in a fog of mystery. Under normal circumstances, whoever knows the most set variations has the most room to manoeuvre, and can create the most mystery about his moves. Once his opponent has become confused and can no longer determine the direction of attack, he has created the most favourable circumstances to win the game. If you wish to play a good game of chess, you have to learn the set variations, but that is not enough. The whole point about set variations is that everybody knows about them.

What is a set variation?

A set variation can best be compared to a path beaten through the jungle by many passing feet – on the one hand you can be sure that it is a route that goes from A to B, on the other hand it is also available for anyone to use. You can travel this path, but so can everyone else. Or to take another example: set variations are like conventional weapons. If you are fighting against people who have no weapons at all, your weapons will kill them dead in an instant. On the other hand if your opponent has exactly the same conventional weapons, you may be out there laying mines but he just sends in the minesweepers to clear them up, so you have been wasting your time; you send up your planes but he can see them bright and clear on his radar and he can blow you out of the sky. In those circumstances, you need secret weapons to win on the battlefield. Chess has many secret weapons.

The reason that Liseiwicz was prepared to carry on playing chess with Zhendi was because he realized that he had many secret weapons. He seemed to be able to conjure up an endless series of bizarre and tricky moves, apparently from thin air, giving his opponent the feeling that as he was walking along, someone was tunnelling through the ground beneath his feet. He could really confuse you, because a piece that you thought was dead would – in his hands – suddenly turn out to be crucial for his next move. Zhendi had been playing chess for such a short time, he had so little experience, and he knew so few of the set variations that it was easy to confuse him with your conventional weapons. Or to put it another way, because he did not know any but the most basic set variations, your standard moves were deeply mysterious to him. Of course each of these moves had been used by tens of thousands of people – they are reliable, they have been proved time and time again – so whatever peculiar and tricky move he had thought up was not able to stand up against the tried and tested, and in the end he would lose the game yet again.

Liseiwicz once told me himself that Zhendi was losing not on the basis of intelligence, but on experience, knowledge of the set variations, and playing skill. Liseiwicz said, ‘I have played all sorts of different kinds of chess, starting at the age of four, and over the course of the months and years I got to learn the set variations for each type of game like the back of my hand. Of course it is difficult for Jinzhen to beat me. The fact is that there is no one in my immediate circle who can beat me at chess – I can say without fear of contradiction that at chess, I am a genius. Furthermore, having played for such a long time, I have honed my skills. Unless Zhendi were to spend the next few years concentrating solely on improving his chess-playing abilities, he is never going to be able to beat me. However, when we range our forces against each other, I often feel a refreshing sense of surprise, which I enjoy enormously – that is why I have carried on playing with him.’

That is what he said.

Another game of chess!

And another game of chess!

Because they were playing chess together, Zhendi and Liseiwicz became close friends – they quickly moved beyond the normal teacher–pupil relationship to become really good friends, going out for walks together and eating together. Because they were playing chess, Zhendi spent less and less time at home. Up until then, during the summer and winter holidays, Zhendi would hardly put his nose out of doors – Mummy would often have to practically throw him out of the house in order to get him to spend some time in the fresh air. However, that winter Zhendi was hardly ever at home during the day; to begin with we thought he was playing chess with Liseiwicz but later on we found out that this was not the case. They weren’t playing chess – they were developing a new kind of board game.

I am sure that you will find it difficult to believe they were inventing their own variant of chess – Zhendi called it ‘mathematical chess’. Later on, I got to see them play on many occasions and it was really weird – the board was about the same size as a desktop, and there were two military encampments on it – one was a kind of hatch # shape, the other the shape of a Coptic cross. They played this game with mahjong tiles rather than chess pieces. There were four routes across the board and each player held two of them, stretching out from the hatch and the Coptic cross encampments. The pieces that started in the hatch encampment had a set arrangement, somewhat like that seen in elephant chess, where each piece has a particular starting position, but the pieces in the Coptic cross encampment could begin in any position – the arrangement was determined by your opponent. When your opponent arranged your pieces, he was of course thinking entirely of his own plan of campaign, placing them in the most favourable positions for his own purposes. Once the game began, you took over control of these pieces and it was up to you to move them. Naturally, your priority was to move these pieces from a position advantageous to the enemy to one favourable to yourself at the earliest possible opportunity. During the course of a game, a piece could move between the hatch and the Coptic cross encampments, and in principle, the fewer impediments you faced in advancing your pieces into the enemy encampment, the greater your chances of victory. However, the rules governing the circumstances in which you could simultaneously move a piece into the opposition camp were very strict and needed careful planning and preparation. Furthermore, once a piece had entered the enemy encampment, the way in which it could move changed. The biggest difference in the types of movement possible was that pieces in the hatch encampment could not move on the diagonal nor could they jump over other pieces. Both of these types of moves were allowed in the Coptic cross encampment. Compared to standard chess, the biggest difference was that when you were playing, you had to be thinking about how you would advance your own pieces along the two routes under your control: making sure that you had them arranged for the moves you intended to carry out, while at the same time making sure that at the earliest possible moment the disadvantageous pieces were moved into better positions and that when the time came, both you and your opponent could simultaneously move a piece into the enemy camp. You could say that you were playing chess against your opponent, but also against yourself – it felt as though you were playing against two different opponents at one and the same time. It was one game, but it was also three, for each of the two players had the game going on against themselves, as well as the one against their opponent.