Finiteness: life and chess

Both life and chess are finite, bounded. But both seem to be infinite to players participating in either event.

A chess game can go on and on for years but some carefully drawn rules made it finite. However, even if a game goes on and on over years (without those rules) chess is still finite; number of all possible games of chess is calculated and its a problem already solved by mathematicians.

There are several discussions over finiteness of chess games, in first look chess may seem to be infinite to many, in fact I too had the same idea in the begining. But in 1990's I finally realized that its anyway finite. Look in rec.games.chess.analysis for similar discussions. One starting point of one such discussion is:

Newsgroups: rec.games.chess.analysis
Date: 1997/05/05
"Number of all possible games of chess is finite. Its a huge finite number, but its finite. So one day ( I don't know how soon ) computers will definitely beat human beings in all chess games. So what's the big deal about this Kasparov vs. Deep Blue match? thanks, som."
(for more discussion on this click here )

In case of life, we also seem to forget that life is finite too! One human life, all possible human life (even the solar system, galaxy and beyond..) everything is finite: going to end one day! But our day to day activity, our entire effort to construct something permanent, our whole effort to build up things for future never ends. In fact, if we look deep inside our life, we will find that we spent most of the time building our future, a pemanent stable future which doesn't exist :-)

This view may look too pesimistic to many, but its a hard fact that we aren't too bothered about the knowledge that everthing around us is really temporary (including our solar system and beyond). I am sure this information is not new to many and its not going to change soon!

So, here lies the similarity between chess and life: both seem to be infinite in the begining, but both are finite in nature when you look carefully! Even though we understand this very well we don't care much about this kind of hard facts, we still treat them as infinite objects!

In both cases, this feeling of infinity within a finiteness is the beauty we enjoy!

Positional Sacrifice

This is a draft and outline only, going to write someday!
(send comments if you have any idea in this line and you like to share or even write in my blog on similar ideas)
......................

-history of chess how theory has changed
-hyper-modern theory of giving up position on temporary basis
-old theory of occupying position is obsolete
-let the opponent win over the position in temporary basis
-let the opponent spend its time and energy holding that position
-in the meanwhile I will search for real values, real meaning of the game!!!

Life and pawn move only in forward direction

There are so many similarities between movements in life and moving chess pieces over a board. I am just searching for similarities here, this doesn't mean all we have are similarities.
This is the very basic similarity between life and chess.

A pawn can only move in forward direction over a chessboard, you can't move it in backward direction.

Since we don't know (yet) how to do time traversal, we can't go backwards in real life. Once we do a thing, say a thing we are done with it. We can't take back a word or a doing. One may get confuesd by saying sorry etc. we can take back certain events, but its not exactly the same situation.

This very basic concept is the fundamental similarity between life and chess: nothing can be taken back! We can't move backwads. We mean the pawns. The bigger forces can move in many different directions (probably in a different dimension not visible to us, pawns). But pawns are not like bigger forces, they must not be aware of such dimensions otherwise they could have moved in that direction.

Who are these bigger forces in real life? That's a good question but that's not the subject of discussion here, we will get back to that question when we understand other questions!

isolated pawn and human life

Speaking in terms of chess, isolated pawns over a chess board is treated as positional weakness. These pawns can not be supported by other pawns, so it needs continous protection. It needs the help of bigger forces like king, queen, bishop etc. Thus the bigger forces have more work to do and can't be free to perform their usual task.

So what does this has to do with human life? Are we all like isolated pawns? Or, just some of us? I am not sure about what percentage of us are like isolated pawn. From now on, I will refer to "isolated pawns" as "we". We need connections, connections to other pawns, not bigger forces...

Once we are well connected, we can play an important role over the chessboard!

However, its tough to stay connected with same set of pawns, as others move forward, or get killed; nothing is static, events move over the board and in life. Getting new connections is a definite possibility, not a certain event!

...Every now and then we all feel like isolated pawn...