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Today, Earth is playing a game of chess against Space

Your move, space.

Mihai Andrei by Mihai Andrei
June 9, 2020
in Science

At a time when the entire sporting world has been brought to a halt, Russian Grandmaster Sergey Karjakin will play a game of chess against Russian cosmonauts, Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner, who are currently based on the ISS.

It’s Earth versus Space.

Sergey Karjakin concentrating at the chess board. Image credits: Andreas Kontokanis.

A most unusual chess game

Fifty years ago, in 1970, the first Earth vs Space chess game was played. The Soyuz 9 Cosmonauts represented by Andrian Nikolayev and Vitaly Sevastyanov played against the ground-based cosmonauts Viktor Gorbakto and Nikolai Kamanin. The game took place when the crew had a rest day and lasted for six hours (or 4 orbits of Earth) — the moves were sent via radio whenever the shuttle would pass above Moscow.

The chess set that went to space on the Soyuz. Image credits: V. Boiko, Russian Chess Federation.

In 2008-2009, NASA and the US Chess Federation organized another match between Earth and Space. It was American astronaut Dr. Greg (Taz) Chamitoff, who served as the Flight Engineer and Science Officer for a 6-month mission aboard the ISS, who pushed for the game to happen. This game took place at a crawling speed of one move per day, but it was a fun event that both sides enjoyed and that drew some attention to both the space program and chess itself.

Greg Chamitoff plays chess from inside the space station’s Harmony module. Image credits: NASA.

Now, the next game will be played by Sergey Karjakin, who was a challenger for the title of world champion in 2016. Karjakin will be seated at the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics, and the entire deal will be streamed by the Russian chess federation. This time, the game will happen much faster. Karjakin will play Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner who are 400 km away on the ISS.

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Karjakin even called out Elon Musk in his Twitter announcement, though it’s not entirely clear why.

4 days left till the very important match with the cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Wagner.⁰The match is timed precisely to the half-century anniversary of the first Space to Earth game of chess played on June 9, 1970. How do you like it @elonmusk ? pic.twitter.com/XLgpb49tQJ

— Sergey Karjakin (@SergeyKaryakin) June 5, 2020

The game is meant to serve as a celebration of the early space pioneers, and how far we’ve come in the meantime. We no longer need to wait for the ship to pass over a specific place, astronauts on the ISS can make calls with their family with relative ease. Email also has a short lag.

So, E4 or D4?

Mihai Andrei

Mihai Andrei

Andrei's background is in geophysics, and he's been fascinated by it ever since he was a child. Feeling that there is a gap between scientists and the general audience, he started ZME Science -- and the results are what you see today.

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