Play Chess with the Dead
What I am suggesting here is very doable. If some company already offers such a service, please point me to it. If not, I’m hoping this will inspire someone to do it.
Powerful chess-playing programs are inexpensive or free. My favorite is Shredder (available as an app on the iPhone and probably in other forms). These programs can adapt to your strength, so you have a reasonable chance of winning, and automatically adapt as your strength improves or declines.
There are also programs that include games played by great champions and grandmasters, so you can watch those games played out on the screen, sometimes with commentary.
I would like a program that can analyze a player’s style, and build a chess personality, such that the computer can play like a certain individual. In other words, the computer’s decision-making algorithm would be weighted with the proclivities of a certain person.
You could choose to play a ghost match against Lasker or Capablanca, Alekhine or Fischer. Or you could train for a tournament game against a particular rival.
To enable the system to build a chess personality, you would enter the moves that person played in previous games. For historic games, those are probably already stored as part of the program. This would be a different way of using that data. For contemporary players — frequent tournament competitors or friends you often play for the fun of it — you would need to enter the moves of a significant number of their games. I’m guessing maybe 100 games as black and 100 as white. The company providing this service should test to determine the optimum number to establish a realistic profile.
With practice, you could improve your chances of winning against such individuals.
You also could enter your own games so the computer could play as you against you, allowing you to explore your vulnerabilities and find better follow-on moves for your favorite lines of play.
And if and when a favorite opponent of yours is no longer available, you can continue to play against the simulated version of him or her
And you could program such a system to continue to match you and your friend after neither of you can play— a peculiar form of immortality, a stopgap, until it is possible to play in the afterlife. (What is Heaven for except the fulfillment of impossible wishes?)
