Fruitless Recursion as a Strategy

Luring an opponent into fruitless recursion can be an effective strategy in other games, too. One of the most colorful, bizarre, and fascinating episodes in the history of man-vs.-machine chess came in a 2008 blitz showdown between American grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura and leading computer chess program Rybka. In a game where each side got just three minutes on the clock to play all of their moves or automatically lose, the advantage surely seemed to be on the side of the computer—capable of evaluating millions of positions every second, and of making its move without twitching a muscle. But Nakamura immediately gridlocked the board, and proceeded to make repetitive, meaningless moves as fast as he could click. Meanwhile, the computer wasted precious moments fruitlessly searching for winning variations that didn’t exist and doggedly trying to anticipate all the possible future moves by Nakamura, who himself was simply doing the chess equivalent of twiddling his thumbs. When the computer had nearly exhausted its time and began flailing so as not to lose by the clock, Nakamura finally opened the position and crashed through.