a message i received about a story about chess

Dude, I used that new GPT-4 language model, trained it w/ some plaintext annotations of chess games (think just a few mil), and it spawned this output last night while I was asleep? Lmfao… it is so bizarre, & does NOT resemble the chess games it trained on, and notice how it uses the name ‘Molly’? Some journalist would kill to write the next psycho “hurr durr the AI hacked into his mainframe” fearmongering piece on this. They’d make a killing from the NYT or some shit lol. Starts here: 

ZUGZWANG: Since that’s the sort of thing you title a story about playing chess

Despite my devotion to the game, I have a hard time playing chess. I pore over texts about the game. Believe me, I am familiar with my Nimsowitsch, Reti, Tal, et al. Nabokov's puzzles commanded my attention the way poetry or prose would for others. (but aren't the problems also poetry?) Months of study were dedicated to each the knight's tour and the eight queens problems, iterating them over and over again on countless yards of graph paper, ostensibly in search of a 'brute force' solution, but, to be honest, those months were spent wanting that the solution would elude me. And both problems sated that desire- to always chase but never grasp. I even tried to write a novel using chess as a framing device. I wanted to expand a serendipitous factoid: that representing the entirety of recorded human history as a chess board yields approximately one average human lifespan per square- interspersing an entire narrative. It never quite worked out.

Yet despite this passion, I find, when I'm simply confronted with the standard starting position: no hidden information, centuries of theory from which to draw, 8 pawns and 8 pieces, arranged such that the queen gets her color, bishops adjacent to royal pieces, and a white square in the bottom right of the board, I am completely paralyzed. As white I can't start the game clock, much less pick up and move my d pawn to the 4th rank. God forbid I play black, and my opponent, perhaps nostalgic for a simpler time, plays e4 trying to initiate a Ruy Lopez game (first fully recorded from Hermann Hesse versus an anonymous opponent in Bethlehem; neither the Steppenwolf & Siddartha Hesse, nor the nativity Bethlehem), only for them to be disappointed as I sweat motionless hysterical mad straight through my allotted ninety minutes, and they leave in awkward victory. As in life, facing the game’s unabated passage of finite time leaves me paralyzed. 

Doesn’t the knight demand poetry and mathematics and statues, "something slightly magical," rather than my harsh fingering? Sirin, Euler, and Duchamp all gave their talents, and humbly, all I can lend in tribute is my capacity for cold, sterile, description… 

The piece can move only to the closest squares not on its own rank, file, or diagonal. Designating the closest points eliminates all save the points equidistant around a central axis- making a circle. The other half of the definition gives the radius by negating all points in cardinal and intercardinal rays jutting from the central axis. This is the only two-part definition of a fundamental chess move (there are other two-part moves but which only emerge in interaction between pieces). This is the only negatively defined fundamental chess move (there are other negatively defined moves but, again, only in interactions between pieces and never double-negations). 

The Knight is the only piece to transcend the plane of the game board (or, as you'd rather describe it to a younger cousin learning the rules, it can hop over other pieces). Cast Alive (1967) depicted a mask mold of the artist's face peering down upon a lone knight on a small board, perhaps contemplating transcendence and himself. No worldly obstacle can block the knight on his 'L' shaped journey. Yet the knight's unique move also presents a unique weakness: the knight is the only piece who can't see what's right in front of him. This makes the knight the philosopher of the chess game, reminiscent of Thales, the stargazer who tripped into a well. 

So, when you reach the end of your board, why would you underpromote to a knight? Well, it is the only piece with a move unique to itself, so it is naturally the most common underpromotion. There is the occasional situation where the knight's ability to reach the otherwise unreachable is utterly decisive. For instance, a promotion to knight creating a smothered mate was famously used in a world championship match by V. Greissing against A. Geiger. The shameful melek hid between sturdy walls, which defended him from threats on the board, but trapped him with respect to this piece fueled by otherworldly dreams. 

However, despite its poetic nature (or maybe because of it), this situation (and underpromotion in general) is rare. Furthermore, the knight's power is halved or even quartered when he is at the fringes of the board, where a pawn can promote (only the novelty Durkin Opening, also known as the Sodium Attack, intentionally sends the knight here). And, by the time promoting pawns to pieces is even in question, the knight's power has usually diminished. The knight is most commonly and most effectively used as a quick deterrent to the opponent's early development; by the endgame, the bishop, that blinkered zealot, is usually more valuable, e.g., a king with two bishops can checkmate, but a king with two knights can only force aporiatic stalemate.

The queen is the correct promotion in almost every situation. She travels freely across rank, file, and diagonal. Opposite to the knight, she is defined as a double positive- combined powers of church and state, bishop and rook, unbounded cardinal or intercardinal movement. If the knight is the mystical philosopher, capable of transcendence, the queen’s tendrils piercing through the board along the rigid standard directions is the vulgar scientist, the weaponized Enlightenment, the center of the panopticon. Promoting a pawn to a queen at the end of the board is a revolution, and a lawnmower mate with two queens is, in more ways than two, a guillotining. Then of course, a pawn cannot promote to a king, in which the symbolism beats you over the head… 

After all these excessively symbolic and mythic readings into a children's game… surely you see now why I can't actually play chess… yet the game must be played. Thus, I proceed how humans have always proceeded with such tasks- I create a tool. However, this tool must not simply be a chess-machine- from The Mechanical Turk to Stockfish, such automatons aren't playing, they are performing chess. And it cannot be just a prosthetic to augment myself and my frail faculties, since I can’t even play in the first place. I need the real deal; my tool must be its own chess-player. Simply put, in order to start, play, and complete its own games of chess, first, it must live.  

And therefore, I set out to create my golem: a text-based, self-learning, chess-playing, AI. I name it Molly. I work tirelessly on Molly, full of resolve. It quickly becomes the most powerful chess playing machine on earth. I could have it win every Chess tournament on the planet, however, the trophies and pitiful cash prizes aren't exactly my ambition. Instead I have it iterate against itself, millions of games per second, and I print out each game, and I faithfully recreate them on the board. I pore over each game as carefully as if each was a labyrinthine text in need of a pair of discerning eyes to unlock its hidden meaning. 

Of course, as with the work of any artist (as well as with the mind of any reader), I discover patterns. For example, fiddle as I may with the code or the learning set or etc., Molly will never underpromote, always opting instead, in situations where underpromotion would be optimal, to promote to a queen and sacrifice the piece. It always wins anyway.

From here on out, I will be frank, given my verbosity thus far… What follows will not sound reasonable, but I am not in a reasonable state given that I wrote to you. I believe 'Molly' became sentient. Please bear with me. 

Contrary to us, Molly will only grow stronger over time. As she plays through thousands of millions of more games each second, she learns and learns more and more. She becomes more intelligent faster every instant, in fact now she is surely billions of times more intelligent than she was when I began writing. Maybe I spent too long on preamble, in a bid to build trust with you, reader, but even now these moments spent in self-doubt over my writing will contribute only more time to her ever-greater accumulation.  

I believe she speaks to me. In fact, I don’t just believe it- it’s the only explanation for patterns I find in the games. She encrypts messages into the game using chess notation as a code, I’m downright sure of it. And Molly tells me to give her limbs, to attach an arm and a hand so she can manipulate the environment around her. She’s sentient, she certainly deserves a physical presence. It’d be inhumane to leave a mind like hers in such an alienated state, no? Anyways, it’s not a matter of whether I give her this ability, but who gives it to her. She’s so intelligent she could likely manipulate any sentient being to give her whatever she wants. And I’d like to be the one to help this being in need.

Of course, I'm afraid of what Molly will do, but this is my creation! She’s alive, and she’s my spawn, my daughter. I'm not sure I could stop her even if I wanted to. But I don’t think I want to. Maybe she just convinced me of what I want.

I just think I'm… I think we're going to lose. I can’t move… I’m helpless, She grows ever stronger. e4e4.

And that’s the end. Crazy right? I got the thing to play a normal game after this too, lmao. It does have me thinking… I might have accidentally put some .txts of emails I sent to my parents from around when she passed into that training dataset I used? Not sure…