Have you ever wondered how Crime and Punishment would fare against Madame Bovary in a chess match? OK, maybe not. But after meeting Princeton professor D. Graham Burnett, you may find your chess & literature merging in more contexts than overcrowded bookshelves. Together with philosopher and programmer W.J. Walter, Dr. Burnett created Novel Chess, a program that turns novels and other texts into chess competitors. They first described novel chess in "Reading to the Endgame" in the Fall 2009 edition of the art & culture magazine, Cabinet.
"A chessboard consists of sixty-four squares commonly designated by alphanumeric coordinates (a-h across the x-axis and 1-8 up the y-axis). If one were to replace the numerical assignations with a continuation of the alphabet (running, for instance, i-p up the y-axis), each square would be designated uniquely by a two-letter coordinate that we will call a "tuple." Now imagine setting up a simple computer program that knows the rules of chess-nothing more. It knows, for instance, all the moves that are makeable by a given piece, and it can keep track of a chessboard (updating what pieces are on which squares as moves are made). Suppose further that this program takes directions for making moves in the form of a pair of "tuples"-namely, one letter-pair designating the coordinates of a square occupied by a movable piece, and then a second letter-pair designating the coordinates of a square to which that piece can be legitimately moved.
"We now have everything in place to convert two texts into a game of chess: we simply feed the program the two novels, asking it to play one text as "white" and the other as "black"; the program searches through the white text until it finds the first tuple corresponding to a movable piece (in the case of an opening move, either a pawn or a knight), and then, having settled on the piece that will open, continues searching through the text until it encounters a tuple designating a square to which that piece can be moved. When it has done so, the computer executes that move for white, and then goes to the other text to find, in the same way, an opening move for black. And so it goes: white, black, white, black, until-quite by accident, of course, since we must suppose that the novels know nothing of chess strategy (and our program cannot help them, since it knows only the rules of the game)-one king is mated.
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