Chess Game

Chess is a two-player strategy board game with origins in 6th-century India (chaturanga), which spread to Persia (shatranj), then the Arab world, then medieval Europe where the pieces evolved into their modern forms (the queen became the most powerful piece — representing the European queen's authority — around 1500). It is played by an estimated 500-600 million people globally. The number of possible chess games is greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe (Shannon number: 10^120). World champions from Paul Morphy to Wilhelm Steinitz, Emanuel Lasker, José Raúl Capablanca, Bobby Fischer (whose 1972 match with Boris Spassky in Reykjavík was a Cold War drama), Anatoly Karpov, and Garry Kasparov defined the game's evolution. IBM's Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in 1997 — the first time a computer beat a world champion in a match. Today, AI engines (Stockfish, Leela Chess Zero) are so superior to humans that they render chess a solved game at the elite level.