The 64-Square Madhouse

"The 64-Square Madhouse" by Fritz Leiber is a science fiction story from the early 1960's that looks at a chess tournament where humans go head-to-head against machines. It's mainly about Sandra Lea Grayling, a journalist who's reporting on the contest, as she watches the chess masters play. She has to learn all the hard parts of chess, figure out who the players are as people, and realizes just how stressful the competition is. The story builds up as the machine goes up against chess pros such as Igor Jandorf and Mikhail Votbinnik, which shows how cool and how not-so-cool the machine is. Characters in the story talk a lot about what chess is, how smart machines are getting, and what it all means when a machine can think as well as a human. The story has some big questions about what the future holds when people and machines go up against each other in smarts and skills.