The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.
When Covid-19 sent people home in early 2020, the computer scientist Tom Zahavy rediscovered chess. He had played as a kid and had recently read Garry Kasparov’s Deep Thinking, a memoir of the grandmaster’s 1997 matches against IBM’s chess-playing computer, Deep Blue. He watched chess videos on YouTube and The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix.
Despite his renewed interest, Zahavy wasn’t looking for ways to improve his game. “I’m not a great player,” he said. “I’m better at chess puzzles”—arrangements of pieces, often contrived and unlikely to occur during a real game, that challenge a player to
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