Alice in Wonderland Chess: The Game From Through the Looking Glass

Anyone who has not read this classic, drop everything now and read it. Especially chess players. It, along with "Alice in Wonderland" is one of the greatest books of all time. It is not just a childrens' classic. This book can be appreciated at all ages. In fact, it is one of those classics that can be read for different reasons at different ages. As a child I remember loving the colorful imagery, the strange conundrums, and the twists and turns had me on the edge of my seat. It was a bit frightening, which I, unlike many nanny-types, think is just fine for kids. Fairy tales from ages past often have frightening plots and characters. These, I believe help children prepare emotionally for the real battles to come, as in the fairy tale everything usually works out all right, and good triumphs over evil. However, in Lewis Carrol books, it is hard to say what is evil. I guess the only thing that seems evil is the lack of logic.

"Hell is a place where there is no reason." - Dante

Reading this book as an an adult I enjoyed the logical twists and plays on words and such. It is more than anything else meant as a humorous fantasy.

In "Through the Looking Glass," Alice has of course entered a place where there is no reason. Or, another way to put it, reason is backwards, as it would be in the mirror. Alice needs to become a queen, and strives for this throughout the entire story as she goes through various challenges, usually involving the white queen, the red queen or the white knight who talks backwards. One image I remember as particularly disturbing as a child was when Alice is terribly thirsty from running and the queen offers her a dry bisquit. She says it quite nicely, as if this would be just the thing to help her thirst. Alice, not wishing to be rude politely accepts. She chokes down the dry bisquit, and then the queen offers her another.

The queen brags of her ability to remember the future. This, in particular reminds me of chess. Isn't that exactly what we are doing, when we try to visualize the outcomes of our moves, that is, when we calculate?

Then there is the ridiculous chess game. The game has White moving twice over and over which of course violates the rules of chess but then, it is chess through the looking glass, so why not?

There is even, in the book, a diagram of Alice's position, or the position of Alice in the game, along with the absurd claim, "White to move and mate in eleven."

The moves as laid out in the text are pure nonsense, even having White move twice in a row half the time. It could just be playful nonsense with no deep meaning but Glen Downey (author, teacher) wrote his dissertation on the meaning of the chess game in Through the Looking Glass. Whatever the underlying meaning of chess in Alice's Through the Looking Glass, many of the characters are chess pieces, the red queen for example, and the white knight, and much of the plot centers around Alice's attempt to promote and become a queen. Chess is perfect for a story about logic, of course, which both "Through the Looking Glass" and "Alice in Wonderland" are. Not too suprising, because although these are children's stories, the author, Lewis Carrol, was a professor of math and logic at Oxford University. These books should be read for fun but also with the thought in mind that funny observations about logic, mirrors, chess and reality abound in them as classic works of philosophical children's literature.

At the beginning of the game the two sides of the chess board are a mirror of each other, clearly the reason chess was chosen to be the game for "Through the Looking Glass." But the minute one side moves the mirror is disturbed. Certain openings illustrate this, like the Copycat. You can't simply copy each others' moves like a mirror for very long because the fact that one side moves first always precludes that, unless you are in an opening system where both sides sort of leave each other alone. The Colle might be an opening where if you imitate each other it can lead to a drawish position. But not always. Often if center pawns are traded, and the same number of pawns are left on the exact same sides this can be rather mirror-ish and drawish as well.

Watch the video of the game below. And for more fun, check out Jennifer Shahade, she plays the red queen!