Immortal Game A History of Chess, or How 32 Carved Pieces on a Board Illuminated Our Understanding of War, Art, Science and the Human Brain

Name: Immortal Game A History of Chess, or How 32 Carved Pieces on a Board Illuminated Our Understanding of War, Art, Science and the Human Brain
Price: 3.6 USD
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 9780385510103

ISBN-10: 0385510101

ISBN-13: 9780385510103

Edition: 2006

Authors: David Shenk

List price: $26.00

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Description:

Why has one game, alone among the thousands of games invented and played throughout human history, not only survived but thrived within every culture it has touched? What is it about its thirty-two figurative pieces, moving about its sixty-four black and white squares according to very simple rules, that has captivated people for nearly 1,500 years? Why has it driven some of its greatest players into paranoia and madness, and yet is hailed as a remarkably powerful intellectual tool? Nearly everyone has played chess at some point in their lives. Its rules and pieces have served as a metaphor for society, influencing military strategy, mathematics, artificial intelligence, and literature and…

Book details

List price: $26.00
Copyright year: 2006
Publisher: The Doubleday Religious Publishing Group
Publication date: 9/5/2006
Binding: Hardcover
Pages: 352
Size: 6.25" wide x 9.50" long x 1.00" tall
Weight: 1.342
Language: English

David Shenk a former fellow at the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center at Columbia University, he has written for Harper's Wired, Salon, The New Republic, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker, and is an occasional commentator for NPR's "All Things Considered". He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

"Understanding is the essential weapon" : chess and our origins	p. 13
House of wisdom : chess and the Muslim Renaissance	p. 29
The morals of men and the duties of nobles and commoners : chess and Medieval obligation	p. 43
Making men circumspect : modern chess, the accumulation of knowledge, and the march to infinity	p. 65
Benjamin Franklin's opera : chess and the enlightenment	p. 87
The emperor and the immigrant : chess and the unexpected gifts of war	p. 107
Chunking and tasking : chess and the working mind	p. 123
"Into its vertiginous depths" : chess and the shattered mind	p. 141
A victorious synthesis : chess and Totalitarianism in the twentieth century	p. 163
Beautiful problems : chess and modernity	p. 185
"We are sharing our world with another species, one that gets smarter and more independent every year" : chess and the new machine intelligence	p. 199
The next war : chess and the future of human intelligence	p. 227
The rules of chess	p. 245
The immortal game (recap) and five other great games from history	p. 255
Benjamin Franklin's "The morals of chess"	p. 281
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.