Christmas Puzzle 1999

A game begins with 1.e4 and ends in the fifth move with knight takes rook mate.

This is the starting position. All you have to do is enter some legal chess moves, so that the game ends on move five with the stipulated knight takes rook mate. Easy enough, don't you think? Maybe not. When John gave me the problem originally, he sealed the answer in an envelope and asked me to return this unopened, with the solution written on the back. Together with Ken Thompson, one of the people behind Unix and C, I spent many hours trying to solve the problem (and Ken spent at least an hour trying to read the contents of the envelope over a bright light). In the end we tore the thing open and admitted humiliating defeat.

There is a nice story about this problem. In 1986, during the turmoils after Kasparov had won the world championship and was forced to face an immediate rematch, both he and Karpov went to Lucerne to meet with FIDE president Campomanes. I was with them and we had a long car journey together from Zurich to Luzerne. To entertain them I gave the two top players in the world John's puzzle. It kept them busy during the ride and for the next couple of days in the hotel. They couldn't solve it.

Before we parted I did the Nunn on Garry: I sealed the answer in a hotel envelope and told him to return it unopened with the solution. I didn't hear from him for many months. Then one day I came home and found a number of messages with a phone number where I should call Kasparov urgently. I did so and found him in a distraught state. "You are a dead man, Fred," he said, "you have put me in a very embarrassing situation." Turns out he was running a session of his chess school, together with Botvinnik, and he had given the problem to his students. When they couldn't solve it and asked him for the answer he had told them to try for another day. Meanwhile the hunt was on for the envelope, which unfortunately could not be located. When I told him the solution on the phone I could hear Mikhail Botvinnik gasp in the background. And Garry, who was convinced I had stated the problem incorrectly, couldn't believe that he and his students had missed it.

Another little story? I was telling the above to Vishy Anand and Vlady Kramnik two years ago in a little restaurant in Wijk aan Zee. They were listening bemused, thinking that I was probably adding a lot of journalistic dressing to the whole thing. But then suddenly a Grandmaster sitting at the adjacent table turned to us and said, "Are you talking about the problem which Kasparov gave his students back in 1986? Well I was one of the students!" The Grandmaster was Boris Alterman, now grown up and one of the seconds that has helped Garry in some of his matches.

Recently Boris sent us the above picture that was taken during the 1986 Botvinnik School session described above. It shows Garry Kasparov and Mikhail Botvinnik (being interviewed) in the front, and the youthful Boris Alterman sitting in the middle of the picture in the second row of students.

Frederic Friedel

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