I used to play chess. But then it started to bore me.

I still do like the appearance of a nice chess set. I saw a classic Italian one in Sorrento in 2016 that I wouldn't have minded having as a decoration, but really my life has too much clutter as it is so I didn't buy it.

You will see articles in the media exclaiming that computers have beaten a human Grand Master at chess, often accompanied by an abundance of exclamation marks. This is the result of journalists completely failing to understand their subject matter.

I had a colleague who is a statistician. He declared to me that the number of possible moves in chess was infinite. It's not. The way you can move in chess is regulated very tightly. There are only 20 possible first moves for white, not counting resigning. There are only 20 possible responses by black, also not counting resigning. The number of possible second moves by white will depend on what the first move was, but again it will be a finite number. Also games cannot go on forever. If you're in a situation where neither side can win, it is a stalemate. If you are in a game where the same board placements are repeated a certain number of times, it is again a stalemate.

And computers are really, really good at projecting thousands, millions, or tens of millions of possibilities. Thus a computer can, in theory, with enough memory and CPU power, look at a chess board and predict every possible move and thus every possible outcome from that point onward. It doesn't matter whether the human player does something completely erratic and random from the point of view of another human player. Because the rules are so rigidly fixed, the computer will have already predicted this as a possibility, and will know everything that it can do to counter whatever it is that the human player does.

The best human players, of course, can see a few moves ahead. As computing capacity increases, it is less surprising that a computer WILL beat a Grand Master. It's more surprising if it doesn't.

In life, on the other hand, there are random events. If you're playing an empire building game, perhaps your cities are invaded by people that you didn't even know existed. Perhaps a disease will decimate your population. If you're playing a football manager type game, maybe one of your players has an injury. I like my games to have a little bit of realistic randomness in them, which is something that I never find in chess.

Similarly, I don't think I would ever bother watching chess on TV. However if I wanted to unwind and relax, and if I had the time (which of course I never do when I'm travelling) I could see myself watching an open-air match like this and seeing how the participants play.

But it's been so long since I have played, don't expect me to be able to tell you what the opening of moving that specific pawn forward is called. I can't even see clearly which pawn it is.

And I'm really not that fussed.

I still like the IDEA of chess. I just don't enjoy the reality that much.