Hi,
I hope you don’t mind me publishing something a little different this week.
Best wishes,
Chris
In a game of chess, a hallucination refers to a particular kind of mistake. It is not simply that the player made an incorrect move or failed to see an attack from their opponent, but as they try to calculate a series of moves, they imagine a piece being in the wrong place or some other aspect that is not there.
A lot of the game is about imagining what is possible. Players sit still, often for hours upon end, both staring at the same set of wooden pieces on a board. Part of the beauty is that all the information is equally present; it is a test of what you can do with it that matters. The vocabulary of chess is indirectly tied to imagination: variations and lines describe how the pieces might move in sequence, and the challenge is to identify not just your best moves, but the defence your opponent will put up. Hallucinations haunt any attempts to look ahead.
It is commonplace for players to talk about ‘calculation’ when referring to this process of abstract thinking. A specific variation might be described as ‘concrete’, which means accurate, solid and worthwhile to pursue. This contrasts ‘hope chess’ or ‘telling yourself a story’. Visualisation is the goal – to see what lays ahead, accurately and with confidence. The invocation of ‘hallucination’ as a term therefore makes sense as it’s connected not just with mental processes, but our perception of reality.
In my first serious game – played in real life, as part of an official game where the result would be recorded – I was immediately on the backfoot. My opponent set a trap in the opening of the game, which I partially fell for. I didn’t lose a piece but I almost did; in attempting to recover, I lost time, which allowed them to prepare an overwhelming attack. Momentum was building in the position, and I began to resign myself to accepting the loss. It was my first over the board game after all. Most people who switch from games online to real life are humbled at first.
But then everything changed – as they prepared to deal a fatal strike, they fumbled. They sacrificed a piece to break down my defences, while also revealing an attack at the heart of my position. But a single pawn, the weakest piece on the board, blocked their line of attack. They immediately held their head in their hands. I wondered if this was another trap; a performance to mask the plot and lure me in. I thought a little longer and tried to test every possibility I could find. Later they explained it was a hallucination.
Hallucinations are categorised as errors, although this fails to capture the full scope of what is being described. Some mistakes come from a lack of thinking. We overlook a response or a threat, perhaps due to a lack of experience or out of tiredness. Other mistakes can be attributed to a lack of knowledge, like failing to grasp a complex dynamic to the game which might only be understood by an advanced player. In many ways, this is also part of the charm of the game – two players of equal strength will have a similar skill set and knowledge, so ‘mistakes’ only matter if another one recognises it, therefore the complexity and challenge is always tailored to who is playing. None of this is applicable to computers, which have long outperformed humans at chess. There is no question of mistakes, imagination or hallucinations, only levels of depth to their calculations. Machinic clarity crushes creativity every time. But there’s little sport in that.
The hallucination is therefore both an abundance and scarcity. We simply think too much and make an error, seeing things that are not present, distorting the reality of the position. All this happens because the game is played at the edges of our imagination, where things begin to blur. The patterns and plans unfold in the dark of our mind’s eye. The rhythm of play crashes into the reality of what is in front of us. We might want the game to go in a particular direction, but we are sharing the board with our opponent who has their own reading of what is happening: the pieces are indisputably on a specific square of the board or they are not. Hallucinations, in chess and perhaps elsewhere, are a kind of error that is not exactly a failure – they are too much, rather than too little.
Loved