Weird as he may be and anathema to most serious chess players, Bobby Fischer’s variation on chess is attracting attention in the tournament world. In the game, the ranks of pawns are lined up as always, but white player gets to arrange the other row of pieces behind the pawns in random order (except that the king must be between the two rooks and the bishops must be on opposite colors). The black pieces are set up to mirror the positions of the white. The point is to free chess from the rote play of memorized openings, since there are 960 possible starting positions for the game (thus, the game is sometimes referred to as Chess960; it is also known as Fischer Random Chess). “Competitors live and die by skill alone from the very first move.” Fischer had proposed the game in 1996 and it finally caught on in Europe in 2001. As this Wired coverage points out, it also holds strong appeal for chess programmers for the same reason; chess programs’ analysis of the openings in a conventional game relies on a digital lookup table version of an opening book. It is not clear yet if the game tips the odds toward either human or computer in a person-machine match, as compared with conventional chess. Fischer, now in jail, continues to publicize his chess variant, and announced he does not play conventional chess any more. Anatoly Karpov has just publicly challenged Fischer to a match at his own game. (A rudimentary chess player, I would do as well at Chess960 as at conventional chess, since I have memorized exactly zero standard openings…)