Since its invention, the game of chess went through numerous changes, it has been promoted as a game of strategy, denigrated as the pastimes of wastrels, played in the courts of Kings, upheld as a game of the common man, a rehearsal for war, venerated by rulers, tolerated by religions; numerous tales have sprung up around its genesis. It has spread far and wide, from India to the shores of Malaya and Java, across the Himalayas to China, changed beyond recognition in Japan; it travelled through the Middle East and finally to Europe, it has seen the rise and fall of empires, but never had it ever reached the prominence it did in the twentieth century.  A confluence of factors, including the change in a game that partially depended on chance to one wholly determined by the calculations of strategy, as well as the sped-up format aided this development. It could perhaps be said that the game of war with two players played over 64 squares reached its zenith in the bipolar world after the second world war.

 

          Arguably the enduring image of the chess in the twentieth century and one which has etched itself in the minds of millions and brought chess its greatest prominence in the world stage, was the Fisher-Spasky game in Helsinki 1972, at the height of the Cold War. The international political landscape after World War II resulted in a politically charged bipolar world, constrained by Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), the result of the development of nuclear weapons which was a natural development after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The world was divided and as Churchill said, an Iron Curtain had fallen in between.  Beyond the regular spectacles of proxy wars, the two superpowers never met in direct conflict, except on the board of 64 squares.

 

However, as far as chess was concerned, there wasn’t exactly a rivalry simply because Soviet players regularly crushed everyone else. The rivalry was more ideological than anything else. Chess had already been deeply entrenched in Russian culture for hundreds of years, with many rulers exhibiting a passion for the game and Moscow hosting the World Championship rematch between Wilhelm Steinitz and Emanuel Lasker in 1896-97. However the Soviet Union institutionalized this passion and developed it to the zenith. The behemoth of the Soviet chess machinery as fathered by Krylenko and brought to fruition by Mikhail Botvinnik was by then regularly churning out masters and grandmasters. Chess was an important business in the Soviet Union, the selected were trained vigorously on a full-time basis, it was their job to play well, and it was the path to a better life, much of the time they also had to play like their life depended on it, because it probably did. Modern chess, with its emphasis on cold logic and mathematical calculation appealed to the proponents of dialectic materialism who saw it as the best training ground for the ideology as well as an effective tool to exorcise the deep spiritual and emotive roots of the Russian people.

 

Thus when the freewheeling Bobby Fischer, the product of no system other than his own obsession with the game and his inherent genius came on the scene, he became the symbol of the liberal free west pitted against the ideology of conformist systemic militant ideology of Marxist-Leninism. This caught the imagination of the world, a lone eccentric genius who had no resource other than himself, standing against the behemoth of the Soviet chess machinery as represented in the person of Spasky. It was also the nearest that the two superpowers had ever come to direct conflict. Symbolically, the triumph of one player over the other also represented the triumph of one political-economic system over the other.

 

With the demise of the Soviet Union and bipolarity in geopolitics, chess never again saw itself raised up so high on the international stage. The fall of the Berlin wall, the disintegration of the Warsaw pact, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, were triumphantly heralded as the end of the era of political ideological competition and the liberal democratic systems of west was assumed as the de facto ideology of the entire world, or as Francis Fukuyama so eloquently if indulgently put it, it was the “End of History and the Last Man”. It was assumed that unipolarity with the United States as the sole superpower of the world and the ascendency of democracy all over the world was inevitable. In a parallel but unrelated development, in the world of chess, eight years later in 1997, the computer Deep Blue defeated the world champion Kasparov, it was the first time that a grandmaster lost to an Artificial Intelligence and certainly would not be the last.

 

The world indeed had changed in more ways than one, and chess did not enjoy the kind of spotlight it had before during the bipolar Soviet-USA rivalry. Furthermore, as computers became more and more developed, it was inevitable that humans would no longer be able to rival machines in binary chess playing.

 

Although the world nearly came to total annihilation during the cold war, there was a certain predictability about a world divided by two superpowers, almost a logical consistency that one could say was reminiscence of modern chess. The fact that the leaders of the two superpowers communicated, had hotlines, no doubt concerned that a misunderstanding could lead to all out nuclear war that would end themselves mutually, helped to sustain this predictability. The ideological dictates and ambitions of the United States and Soviet Union were of course the worldwide promulgation of their political ideas, for one it was the triumph of the market economy and democracy, and for the other it was the inevitable march towards worldwide communist utopia. In a sense they were mutually understandable and logical to each other no matter the disagreements. One could perhaps say that they were the opposite sides of the same coin.

 

The 21st century saw a much more unpredictable and chaotic environment where the players were not so logical. The rise of millenarism, large scale organized terrorism, rouge states with nuclear capabilities, the development of regionalism resulting in different competing political and economic blocs like the European Union, BRICS, all over the world, the imminent threat of environmental disaster, the rise of Artificial Intelligence as an aid as well as a threat to human activity, added several competing players in this complicated game of political chess. Samuel Huntington labeled it “A Clash of Civilizations”, referring to just one of the developments in the 21st century. As the sanguine Alfred said in “Batman Begins”, “Some men just want to watch the world burn”. The game of international politics was no longer logical, and the dreadful simplicity of a bipolar world no longer existed. The so-called Uni-Polar world existed for perhaps a decade before unpredictability announced its arrival in the form of the Twin Tower attacks in the first year of the second millennium. Some years later, the rise of China, the resurgence of Russia, the development of the European Union as a player of weight, the economic, political and economic decline of the United States inevitably complicated the world. The argument for multi-polarity became more and more cogent so much so that the authoritative journal Foreign Policy announced in 2023 what most people already knew, that the world was indeed multipolar.

 

In such a world, is the classical game of two player chess, developed over hundreds of years to ‘evolve’ into a logical, calculable, game of strategy that computers can easily triumph over human beings still relevant? To understand this, we have to take a look at the development of chess.

 

Modern chess as we know it, took several hundreds of years to develop, eventually coalescing into its present from in the fifteen century onwards, but prior to this existed in varied forms including having more than two players, reliance on factors of chance, varying board sizes, varied movements for different pieces, and a myriad of other different rules. The Persian Arabic game of Shatranj, the ancestor of modern chess was very similar for the most part, for example plays far slower than the latter.  It could be argued that the present incarnation of chess with its overwhelming reliance of logical deduction, is a reflection of a movement towards reason that started in the Enlightenment and ended in the ascendency of the scientific method in the twentieth century.

 

To the modern mind, the development of chess is seen as an inevitable evolution, much as most of us view the nature of modern society today, the reason being that the game moves faster, is more logical, plays better in a competitive setting. However chess was not always seen as a mere entertainment or a competitive game, although our present values tend to prize competition above all other matters. In a way, we can say that modern chess has coalesced around the idea of competition (and with it speed), much like the organization of modern society coalesces around the market economy as compared to the societies of other ages as Karl Polanyi pointed out. Just like in the present we cannot fathom a society organized around religious rituals, around agriculture or kinship because of the embedded commerciality of our society, we find it hard to imagine chess that was not concentrated on the idea of “rational” competition. Take for example, the element of chance was an important factor in older chess forms. In the ancient Indian four player chess game of Chaturanji, two dices were also used to move the chess pieces. In such games, the role of chance increases and the role of strategy decreases. Rationally speaking, it would seem that the development of a game eliminating chance is logical.

 

In a puzzling scene in the Indian epic poem The Mahabharata, the leader of the Pandavas, Yudhishthira wages his kingdom, his wife, his and his brothers’ freedom on a game of dice and loses it.  Yudhishthira was considered the epitome of wisdom so why did he do that? Some may put it to a demonstration of the Shakespearean fatal character flaw, an example of the evils of dice and gambling etc, but it could also be a demonstration of how sometimes random factors have an impact on life and events. Life is not always rational, nor do events always progress in a rational manner, and for that matter, neither do people. In the modern era which prizes rationality, predictability and science, this fact of life accepted for millenniums is often overlooked, yet should it be? The modern binary game of chess no matter its complexity is in the end measurable and calculable, hence a machine can beat humans at it. But should we try to be better than a machine at what it can do? And besides, can everything be calculated in life?

 

If we were to extrapolate this same idea to analyze chess as a game of war, or something that trains one for the art of war, which it has been taken to be in many cultures from India to Arabia to Europe, we would reach some interesting conclusions. Again we have to ask ourselves the question, how accurate is modern chess a reflection of the phenomenon of war? In Clauswitz’s classic treatise On War, he mentions numerous times the idea of “friction”. What is “friction” in considering the activity of war between humans? In his words, it is "the concept that differentiates actual war from war on paper," those things that “even the simplest thing difficult." These can be factors like the weather, the terrain one fights on, the morale of the troops, the mood of the enemy, anything in fact. The classic example of this would be the invasion of Japan by Mongol hordes in 1274 and 1281. By all reasonable calculations the vastly superior invading force ( in terms of experience, numbers, machinery etc) should have overwhelmed the defending force. Yet each time they were defeated in main by the weather, storms of such great intensities that the Mongolian fleet was utterly destroyed. That is friction, that is unpredictability.

 

 And herein lies the wisdom of Clauswitz when he differentiates actual war and war on paper. This same principle is articulated by Sun Tze on the art of war, these factors of terrain, circumstances and morale. For example Sun strongly discourages attacks on an enemy state that is grieving, for the simple reason that a people united by grief would fight harder. In actual warfare random as well as numerous other factors may intrude upon one’s calculations no matter how much one has prepared, no matter how many calculations one has made on paper. We can call it chance, friction or any other number of words.

 

Furthermore, in the phenomenon of war, often times there are more than one belligerent, in this aspect the binary game of chess is insufficient to mirror what happens on a battle field. Would the battle of Hastings have ended the same if Harold II did not have to fight off a Norwegian invasion three days prior to the Norman one? The war that resulted in the end of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) and the beginning of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) in China was in the end won by the least numerically superior force, the Manchurians, out of the three contending forces, and because of a woman. Perhaps it was in considering the many faceted nature of warfare that a game called the Four Seasons Chess was invented in the Arabic Spain in the 10th century, namely a chess game with four players situated at four corners of an 8 x 8 board. But was this a new invention or a hearkening to an older game?

 

Towards the end of the 15th century Europe two important changes heralded the beginning of the modern era when the moves of the Bishop and the Queen were changed to the way the modern pieces move today. Previously the Queen could only move diagonally, and one step at a time while the Biship could only move two moves diagonally. This was a departure from the game that had travelled from Persia and Arabia to Europe, Islamic chess or Shatranj, which itself was an adaptation from the Persian game of chatrang. In the Shatranj, we already see the structure of modern chess. The Persian game was derived from the Indian game of chaturanga or chaturangi, the former is a two handle game while the latter is a four player game that was played with dice. Interestingly enough, it is not clear which came first, the two player chaturanga or the four player chaturangi, although modern scholars are in favour of the former, but no outright evidence exists to prove that.

 

Western scholars like Murray sees the change of chess from a game that no longer relies on dice, and in the 15th century to a game that moves faster as an evolution. Indeed from the 16th century onwards other changes pushed chess towards the modern era, including the possibility of converting the Pawn to a Queen, this resulted in the abandonment of a win by Bare King and greatly accelerated the game. There is a disagreement as to the location where these changes started, Murray attribute it to Italy while Westward attributes it to Valencia in Spain, interpreting Scachs d'Amor (a 15th century work describing the new rules) as implying that the Queen’s greater powers can be attributed to honouring the crowning of Isabella the Catholic to King Ferdinand where she gained powers greater than her husband. Interestingly the ‘new game’ coincided with the unification of Spain and the Reconquista. These new rules also included en passant and castling. In the intervening time to the twentieth century, minor regional variations were ironed out and chess developed to the game as we know it now. As mentioned in the beginning of this essay, this development and global influence reached its zenith in the 20th century Cold War.

 

The development of computer chess engines gained apace in the second half of the twentieth century, with the first computer beating a player in a tournament in 1967, for a time humans competed against computers until it became apparent that humans simply could not compete, at which time, computers or Artificial Intelligence, began to be used as a tool of analysis by chess players, so much so that in a sense, the new players are trained by chess engines.

 

Benjamin Franklin said that some of the benefits that we can learn from chess includes foresight, circumspection, caution and perseverance. Does the fact that AI is now better than most of us can every hope to be at chess nullify these often enumerated virtues of chess? Most proponents of the game claim that it doesn’t, that in fact machines make us better players and point to the fact anyone can play with a machine that is even better than a grandmaster on a cell phone now, and how that raises the level of playing.  Yet when the epitome of the game is a machine, somehow that  changes the experience. Because one would in fact be saying that if I work hard at this game, then maybe one day I can come close to being a machine. The process matters, or it should, and even in our objective driven society we can see that. In such a situation it is not a question of whether the ends justify the means, but whether the end is worthwhile of the process.  Do we really aim to be impeccable chess engines or as Elon Musk would have us desire, a human brain linked up to a vast computer network, thinking and (feeling) like a computer, just because it can crunch data faster than anything else?

 

Or perhaps a new game is needed, one that can return chess to the human realm, and to a realm of relevance in this brave new world that we find ourselves in. A world besieged by multiple players and factors that were absent in the dangerous yet predictable bipolar Cold War, one that increases in complexity with each day. Imperfect as we are, perhaps as Laskar said “Without error, there can be no brilliancy”, we need to find this brilliancy on our own terms, a brilliancy with mistakes, failures and beauty and not in a machine generated perfect world.

 

In this picture we need to consider the game Quaternity or Quaternity Chess. A game that harkens to the earliest game of multiple players, unpredictability, human engagement, a game that cannot, as yet be mastered by machines.  Quaternity is a game that brings the human element back to the centrality of chess.

 

This is a game not just based on calculation, but on an ever shifting quicksand of alliances, strategy, chance and sometimes luck. There have been other 4 player chess games but none has the simplicity and at the same time, the complexity of Quaternity. This is no overly complicated game of points, it does not retain the board structure of two player chess with 4 players (unlike the 4-player chess invented by George Hope Lloyd-Verney in 1884). As a result, the moves are freed up and an amazingly number of possibilities emerge. The horizontal and vertical possibilities of a 12 by 12, 144 square board are endless. Checks and checkmates can come in any and every direction. Pieces move at their peril and yet at the most unexpected times, help sometimes come, or on the other hand, danger lurks at every corner. The same moves of chess are retained, with a few exceptions. The position of each player at the corners of the board demands new strategic considerations.

 

Victory can come through oneself or through others, more often than not through the help of others, either wittingly or unwittingly. The winds of fortune can shift as quickly as thought itself. There are no strongest players, sometimes strength and reputation itself can be a weakness and disadvantage. Sometimes when a player is at the weakest, they can overcome everything to win a game because they are not thought of to be a danger. In this game we are confronted with the inevitable unpredictability that life presents itself to us. Yes, calculations and plans are all very good and in fact necessary, but we cannot ignore the winds of fortune, the moods of humans, the subtleties of social interaction, the wimps and fancies of mood and behavior, because we are humans in the end. We are not machines playing a game and neither do we want to become machines. Again, back to Lasker, who said that “Chess is no certainty. And when it becomes one, Chess will cease to be useful.”

 

In this game everything is amplified, strength builds on strength, with every checkmate one’s army grows as it absorbs the conquered pieces. With every mistake one’s weakness is exposed and more as players take advantage of the one attack to put in another one of their own.  Even when one abandons the game, one’s remaining pieces are up for grabs, much like how a surrounded army is incorporated into the victor.  But at the same time there are no absolutes. A strong army can collapse as fast as it is built up. We see all these facts of the game mirrored in life itself. How many stories of war from history are there that we see a stronger army, a seemingly invincible, defeated by a ragtag army, a smaller, badly equipped army, thoroughly outnumbered army.  The game is not determined by the player who can calculate the best positions in a number of moves, it is not a slave of logic, as befits the times we live in which is increasingly unpredictable, where rouge states, pandemics, climate change, black swan incidents flip the equation in a heartbeat.

 

The game of chess mirrors the competitive nature of humans, as in the fictional exchange quoted from The Queen’s Gambit in the beginning of this article. The market economy, which has been the dominant economic system since 1991, subsists on this very principle of competition. But because greed is not always good, we have developed various mechanisms to ameliorate the market, yet that is the principle on which the world economy more or less runs on. Yet towards the end of the 20th century and increasingly so into the 21st we see disillusion with this system, from the 1998 Asian financial crisis, the 2008 subprime crisis, to the Occupy Wall street movement, there is an increasingly sinking feeling that the rich will just  get richer and the poor will get even poorer. This disillusionment has translated into distrust of the global economy and can be seen in the worldwide shift towards right wing politics and protectionism. Whether this is an inherent problem with the market economy as Piketty argues, or that the world is in a post-ethical phase where right and wrong does not matters as Judt argues, or whether we just haven’t found the solution with it, the problem exists.

 

As Laskar says, although Chess has evolved throughout the ages, the essential attribute of the game of chess has not changed, and that is it is a game of war of extinction between two parties. One interesting element of Quaternity however, also the very one that some find questionable is that in a game of four players, sometimes three will direct their forces at the fourth player, there is next to no chance that player will survive. As such a stated rule of the game is that there should be no explicit alliances, however that of course does not prevent the stated phenomenal from happening. It is interesting to note that as a matter of etiquette, some players will not join in the attack when two others are already attacking, for the simple reason that it is too much of an unfair fight. Ergo just because one can do it doesn’t mean one should. The game of Quaternity is therefore a game of cooperation as much as it is of competition

 

This is not something we see in classical two player chess. Here competition is paramount. Of course this bags the question, if one doesn’t play to win, or if that is not the final aim, why does one play for? The answer could be that one doesn’t have to always win or that one shouldn’t win at all costs, that cooperation is as important as competition. Perhaps this is the attitude that is needed to deal with the multifarious threats and issues that bedevil the world today. There are that many more of us and more problems than ever. In that sense Quaternity is the game of our times, if chess is meant to be something beyond a diversion, and if the end of human evolution is meant to be more than a futile silicon dream.

 

KH Wong, 13 February 2026

 

Scot, Adelaide “A Battlefield Of Sixty-Four Squares:The Role Of Chess In Cold War Foreign Policy”, 2022, The Mirror, Vol. 42 No. 1

Fukuyama, Francis “The End of History and the Last Man”, 1992, Free Press. Fukuyama’s Hegelian take on history has proven to be premature, yet he still insists that liberal democracy is still the final destination.

Huntington, Samuel, “A Clash of Civilisations?”, 1992, Foreign Affairs. Huntington’s brilliant analysis of a post-cold world determined by clashes in world cultures perhaps underestimates the homogenizing impact of the global economy. With the benefit of hindsight we can perhaps see that it has become a clash of different governmental systems rather than culture.

See Packer, George “The Unwinding – an inner history of the new America”, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013 where Packer chronicles the slow dissolution over thirty years of what made the USA great. This work has been compared to the great novelistic trilogy by Dos Pasos.

Ashford, Emma “Yes the World is Multipolar”, October 5, 2023, Foreign Policy

Murray, H.J.R, “A History of Chess”, 1962, Oxford University Press, pg 220, Chapter XIII, ‘The Game of Shatranj: its theory and practice’. I owe much of the information on the history of chess to Murray’s unbelievably erudite work, yet one can see how he is biased in his understanding of the so called evolution of chess.

Clausewitz C.V. “On War”, Chapter 7 Friction in War.

The three forces were the main Ming army, the rebels led by Li Zi Chen 李自成, founder of the short lived Da Shun 大顺Dynasty and the Manchurians. Li had already defeated the main body of the Ming army and conquered most of the Chinese empire, on entering Beijing the last Ming emperor Chong Zhen hung himself, Li took over the capital and declared the beginning of the Da Shun dynasty. However there was another Ming army that had not yet surrendered, this was led by the General Wu San Gui 吴三桂who was guarding the border against the Manchurians, who had been harassing the Ming for many years. On hearing of Li’s victory, and looking at his isolated and unnumbered situation, Wu decided to capitulate and started making his way to Beijing, however soon he received news that his house and property had been ransacked and his family taken prisoners, still believing that once he meets Li all would be solved, he continued to make his way. But then he received news that his favourite concubine Chen Yuan Yuan had been taken by Li. In a fit of anger he started to make his way back to his border camp where he made a deal with the Manchurians. Li meanwhile had led his troops to the Shanhaikuan border, determined to finish his conquest of the empire. Li’s 200,000 troops met with Wu’s 50,000 troops and the battle lasted one day and night before the 70,000  Manchurian troops swept down on Wu’s side, caught by surprise the rebel troops and having fought for more than 24 hours already, they broke and the Manchurians and Wu won the day. This incident has been immortalized in  Chinese poems and plays.

The pieces in this game are red, green, white and black and whenever a player checkmates another player, he/she takes over all the pieces of the checkmated player.

Murray, ibid, pg 149.

Each player occupied the four corners of a 8 x 8 board, being red, green yellow and black, each player having 8 pieces, including 4 Pawns and 1 King, 1 Elephant, 1 Boat and 1 Horse. Once a King takes another King, he gains command of his army, there is promotion of the Pawn. 

ArnieChipmunk, “Valencia and the origin of Modern Chess”, 2009 Chess.com, https://www.chess.com/news/view/valencia-and-the-origin-of-modern-chess

Holmquist, Annie “Benjamin Franklin on “The Morals of Chess”

Magnus Carlsen admits that he doesn’t stand a chance against his cell phone, “The Joe Rogan Experience” #2275.

Quoted in “Quaternity Chess-International Rules”, Ali-Shah, Arif Hashim, 2015

Jamoroz, W. “The Entangled Mind-The Green Knight, Black Holes and Quaternity”, Jamoroz estimates that the amount of variants is too large to calculate

Lasker, Emanuel, “lasker’s Manual of Chess”, 1960, Dover Publications, USA, pg 15.

Piketty, Thomas. “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, 2013.

Judt, Tony. “Ill Fares the Land – A Treatise on Our Present Discontents”, 2010.

Lasker, ibid, pg 1.