About the Shannon number, chess and nostalgia

In 2020, chess became a trend thanks to the series ‘Queen's Gambit’ that tells the story of Beth Harmon, an orphan girl who learns how to play chess with the janitor and becomes a prodigy player.

The story is a fiction based on the novel written by Walter Tevis; but the plot takes up the true atmosphere that existed around chess during the decades from 1960 to 1990.

In those years, people were avidly following chess games in newspapers, magazines and on television. The championships were quite an event, especially the duels between the Soviet and the American grandmasters. However, that era ended on May 11, 1997 when Deep Blue, an IBM computer, beat the world champion Garry Kasparov.

We currently live in another kind of world in which computers and artificial intelligence have become part of our lives and it is in this world, precisely, in which the number of chess movements known as ‘Shannon number’ takes relevance.

Claude Shannon was an American mathematician who conducted research related to computing, electrical circuits, and communication. In his mathematical theory of communication, he demonstrated that the speed of information transmission from all kinds of sources such as the telegraph, telephone, radio and television (in his time), and the internet and cellular communication, (in our time), can be measured.

Shannon's theory is applied today to the speed of computational calculations that in our internet times is something essential for the operational speed related to the functionality of internet or, in more mundane words, for all of us to be able to search everything in the possible greatest speed.

In our world, we all use internet and mobiles to search for news, hobbies and all kinds of information on the internet but we do not know what is behind it… Well, Shannon's research is a fundamental part of how the internet works nowadays .

No wonder Shannon also researched in programming chess-playing computers, getting into computational calculations. In 1949, he published an article about it where he established that the minimum number of possible movements in chess was:

This number is known as the ‘Shannon number’ and sets out all the possible moves that may have been present, at least potentially, in the minds of the great chess geniuses.

In the fiction, Beth Harmon was looking up at the ceiling and contemplating all the possible plays of her games. In reality, surely Bobby Fisher, a chess genius, thought of infinite game possibilities. Apparently, Tevis was inspired by Bobby Fisher and other prodigy chess players to create his character.

It is quite possible that in the former Soviet Union, where chess was almost a religion in those years, thousands of Soviets learned all kinds of game combinations within that huge Shannon number. And, of course, Deep Blue already had the information on match combinations when it beat the champion Kasparov.

I remember seeing newspaper clippings of hundreds of chess games in my dad's books. He enthusiastically talked about players like Bobby Fisher and the Cuban genius Capablanca. Score updates on the Karpov-Kasparov duels were one of the essential news items on the morning news in Mexico, it was quite a tradition to watch the one-to-one games or the simultaneous games in places like the University City or the Chapultepec Forrest.

For years, my dad used to go to Chapultepec to play chess. A short time ago, I was delighted to know that he used to play simultaneous games in the Chapultepec Forrest and he was a chess master. I looked for information on the internet about it but there was no information.

I know there was a world long before the digital world of the 21st century and many names are hidden in the pages of the past, among them the name of Ernesto Díaz Becerril, civil engineer, soccer player and passionate chess player in Mexico.