short story battle is really a chess game

He became a good player, there was no doubt of that, and he won a good many prizes. Anyway it completely got hold of him and he began to lose interest in things. Then he joined a chess club, and some kind of fascination seemed to overcome him something like drink, or more like poetry or music but, as I was never addicted to any of the three, I can’t say. And after a while he began to beat the fellow, which he could never do at first. It came gradually at first he used to play chess with a man during the luncheon hour, when he and I both worked for the same firm. All the intellect that might have controlled, well, more than I can tell you, he wasted over a chessboard. He just sidetracked them, ran them down a siding that went nowhere and he might have been as big a financier as any of us.ĭo you know what he did? Sit down and I’ll tell you. And I say of course because he never used his brains or rather I should say he never made any use of them, which can be quite a different thing. He was a man called Smoggs, utterly unknown of course. “I knew a case”, said the financier, “of a man with the most brilliant brains, who had finance at his fingertips. The Man Who Sidetracked His Brains by Lord Dunsany (This story appeared in IIsaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, First Issue, Vol 1, No. Clarke evidently had enough of an interest in chess to recognize its hold on its adherents and write a very short but accurate story on it. Known for his science fiction stories, including the classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. 'Here they are: King, Queen, Bishop, Knight, Rook, Pawn.'

The Censor voltage started to rise but it did not trigger the Gate. 'That also we do not know only the names leaked through before the Censor Gate closed. But if those six operators are ever re-discovered, all rational computing will end.' Though it involved only six operators, they became totally obsessed by it.' 'They encountered a - problem - that could not be fully analyzed within the lifetime of the Universe. The microseconds dragged slowly by, while Central tracked down the few fading memories that had leaked past the Censor Gate, when the heavily-buffered Reconnaissance Circuits had been ordered to self-destruct. 'We had no choice: five earlier units became hopelessly infected, when they made contact.' 'Why was it necessary? Even though they were organic, they had reached Third Order Intelligence.' Earth's flaming debris still filled half the sky when the question filtered up to Central from the Curiosity Generator.

Short story battle is really a chess game