How Can Structure and Creativity Co-exist?

“A good sacrifice is one that is not necessarily sound but leaves your opponent dazed and confused.” (Rudolph Spielmann)

Congratulations you’re going to be on TV! You have been selected to play on “Who Wants to be Filthy Rich” You are psyched up for it and in the zone. The host throws the questions at you thick and fast, yet the answers effortlessly roll off your tongue. Before you know it, you are facing the last question in the quiz. It’s the lateral thinking question. You are one answer away from being filthy rich:

Q) How many squares are there on a chessboard? Is it: (A) 16, (B) 32, (C) 64 (D) 96 (E) 204, (F) 256

Without closing your eyes, you count the pieces, the squares, you do the maths: its 8 rows by 8 columns. That’s easy; you say: “it’s 64”. The host asks you to lock in (C) 64 as your answer. You agree… there’s a drum roll… the audience are on the edge of their seats silent with anticipation. All of a sudden, the buzzer sounds and you are wrong! The answer is (E) 204.

The host laments how close you were to winning the big prize before explaining that the frame of the chessboard is a square and how the squares themselves can be grouped together to form squares. That is: 1^2 + 2^2 + 3^2 + 4^2 + 5^2 + 6^2 + 7^2 + 8^2 or 204 squares in total.

You are in complete shock – you weren’t that close really. Instead of being filthy rich you are just filthy with yourself. Filthy wretched to be precise… How can something so structured be seen to be so creative? Surely something so structured only limits creativity?

The “no limits” on creativity in chess were highlighted in October 1956 when the Marshall Chess Club in New York hosted the 3rd Rosenwald Memorial Tournament, a pre-cursor for what would later become known as the US Open Championships. In the 8th round, a 13-year-old Bobby Fischer, who had just won the US Junior Championship, took on the 26-year-old Grandmaster Donald Byrne, the 1953 US Open Champion. On the 17th move Fischer sacrificed his queen and went on to win in 41 moves. Clearly a young Fischer was not hampered by structure:

Fischer played 17. Be6, moving the bishop from g4 and offering up his queen. Generally, a player who sacrifices their queen does so as part of bringing the game to an immediate clear-cut end. But in this case, Fischer didn’t overwhelmed Byrne until 24 moves later. He envisaged a significant advantage with multiple possibilities. Hans Kmoch, editor of the Chess Review magazine, dubbed it as “The Game of the Century” and wrote: "The game, a stunning masterpiece of combination play performed by a boy of 13 against a formidable opponent, matches the finest on record in the history of chess prodigies."

For the chess enthusiasts amongst us, the game continued with: 18. Bxb6 Bxc4+ 19. Kg1 Ne2+ 20.Kf1 Nxd4+ 21. Kg1 Ne2+ 22. Kf1 Nc3+ 23. Kg1 axb6 24. Qb4 Ra4 25. Qxb6 Nxd1 26. h3 Rxa2 27. Kh2 Nxf2 28. Re1 Rxe1 29. Qd8+ Bf8 30. Nxe1 Bd5 31. Nf3 Ne4 32. Qb8 b5 33. h4 h5 34. Ne5 Kg7 35. Kg1 Bc5+ 36. Kf1 Ng3+ 37. Ke1 Bb4+ 38. Kd1 Bb3+ 39. Kc1 Ne2+ 40. Kb1 Nc3+ 41. Kc1 Rc2# 0-1.

When we look at it, we do not readily pair structure and creativity together. In life we often see structure as something akin to bureaucracy that blocks creativity; wherever we turn there is structure in the form of positions, processes, procedures, policies and protocols. So how can we work creativity into such an environment? How do we navigate through all the rules in life?

When Gary Kasparov, (ex-World Chess Champion), was asked to explain his decision-making process for a move he said: “I see a move, a combination, almost instantly.” This is based on patterns he has seen before and when he looks at the board, he does not necessarily see the 64 individual squares; he will see groups of squares. He will not see structure; instead he will see patterns in the form of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. He will assess the problems and challenges and find a solution.

For me chess is like looking at the hexagon tiles on an old bathroom floor. Remember those old bathrooms where there was a random mix of light and dark tiles? I pick a colour, light or dark, and cast my eye across the floor looking for a continuous pattern. That is, I select a tile on the floor and I plot a path out from that point using only that one colour. I run my eye out from that first tile plotting a path until I hit a dead end. I return to the starting tile, select a different path and try again. Maybe the second time around I will count 6 tiles in the path instead of 5. After trying all the combinations from one tile, my eye spots another tile, another opportunity somewhere else on the floor and I repeat the process again… Over the course of my analysis, I will note where I found the longest sequence, the best combination through the randomness. It’s like the cryptography scene in the movie, “A Beautiful Mind”, when John Nash arrives at the Pentagon and starts searching and seeing patterns in amongst the walls and walls of cryptic numbers.

In 2007, National Geographic TV gave Susan Polgar, an ex-Women’s World Champion, a pattern recognition test. They sat her in front of a clear chessboard at a sidewalk café in Manhattan as a series of billboard trucks drove by with a large diagram showing the middle of a chess game. Each one was different but each time after Polgar caught a glimpse of the billboard she perfectly re-created the position on the board in front of her. However, when the pieces were arranged randomly on the billboard Polgar was unable to recreate the position.

For a chess player the satisfaction comes from visualising a pattern as a future scenario and constructing a path, a solution, through all the randomness to create that pattern. When a pawn or piece blocks the pattern then the challenge is to find a sequence to remove the obstacle and open up the possibilities. In the Byrne v Fischer game, Byrne’s bishop on c4 was blocking black’s attack against the white king sitting out in the open in the middle of the board. It was counter intuitive and unexpected, yet Fischer realised that capturing the bishop was well worth sacrificing his queen.

Elizabeth Spiegel, a full-time chess teacher at the Eugenio Maria de Hostos School in Brooklyn, also picked up on creativity in chess in “Brooklyn Castle” (2012), a chess documentary: “One of the things you’re doing when you have a position in chess, you’re thinking: ‘Where do I want to go from here, and what do I want to accomplish?’”

Spiegel went on to add: “…a lot of the ideas are dependent on very tiny details—one pawn is in a different place – and it affects what is going to work. Creativity in chess is being able to come up with lots of these ideas—to have lots of things going on in your mind that you want to do— to be able to take (in) all the ideas…

It is this creative problem-solving process that drives chess players to think outside the box. They imagine the potential for a pattern several moves ahead and work towards creating ways to achieve it. Here they work with structure and not against it.

In life we come across roadblocks that prevent progress. It could be an overly complicated procedure, an obsolete process, or an unworkable policy. Getting around it will require us to visualise the desired outcome and work back to our current position. Where are the bottlenecks? How can we remove them?

To plot a robust path through a structured environment we must be prepared to trawl through the permutations looking for the opportunities by asking the “what if?” questions to generate new ideas. What if we can streamline the procedure? What if we make different assumptions?

With so many ideas at our disposal chess is equally a critical process as it is creative. We see a move or combination, we check it, we double check it, we accept it, or we dismiss it, we look again. The structure and rules behind all this are buried deep in our subconscious whilst all the possibilities are consciously front and centre in our thinking.

On the flipside, imagine chess without structure. Picture playing on a different odd-shaped board each time; a blank canvass with the pieces randomly placed and making different random moves throughout the game. Yes, it would be creative but without structure it would be meaningless. It’s like going on a driving holiday, the roads provide structure whilst our sightseeing desires pick the route. Without the roads there is nothing to see.

In Fischer’s case he displaces white’s bishop on c4 and opens up the “windmill”, a tactic involving a combination of checks and discovered checks that force the opposing king back and forth and around and around like the sails on a windmill. Fischer asked himself: where is white’s main weakness? How can the position of white’s king be exploited? What if the white squared bishop was out of the game? What if a rook was established on the second rank? He did not accept the current position on the board for what it was and he used the structure and position of the game to look for ways to disrupt the status quo. In life, we must do the same…

The next time you get the opportunity, check out that old bathroom floor. Let your mind wonder across the different coloured tiles, look for a pattern, and work through the permutations. Chances are, you won’t look at the bathroom floor the same way again... I understand if you won “Who Wants to be Filthy Rich” that the bathroom would be replaced, but who in their right mind would want to renovate one of those old bathrooms with retro tiles? Why lose such a great source of inspiration? I say preserve that lavatory gem and don’t let the structure of the tiles stand in the way of your creativity!