It's your move Video

It's your move Video Transcript

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>> This guy's been my nemesis. This guy -- I don't even know how to pronounce his name -- but he's been killing me.

>> Nope. Auren Hoffman, the CEO of Rapleaf, isn't talking about his fierce opponent from World of Warcraft.

>> He's been kind of destroying me. He's actually a really good player.

>> But rather a Belgian guy he plays chess with through Chess.com.

>> I log in every day, every other day, maybe every three days, play my -- whatever -- my two to three, four games that I have going on at any given time. And it usually takes me five to ten minutes to do that.

>> Auren recently picked the game back up after playing as a child, and attempts to keep his mind sharp.

>> I learned a few years ago that chess is a game that can potentially help against at least the slowing down of Alzheimer's.

>> And so far it's been a good daily challenge, it sounds like.

>> Who are you again? [ Laughter ]

>> Busy schedules. Limited equally matched opponents. He says it's tough to play face to face.

>> He's gonna come down here and take my rook then maybe I'll go here and say, check.

>> That's why he turns to sights like Red Hot Pawn and Chess.com to play.

>> Press submit and then the move is made.

>> On Chess.com, you know, our kind of like little slogan is "Play. Learn. Share." And so we kind of divide the site up into those things. So you can come on and play. You can play against, you know, your friends and other people around the world. You can also play against the computer, which usually thrashes most people.

>> Erik Allebest, the creator of Chess.com, says the Learn and Share components are features like user-generated chess articles, Chessopedia, and various forums.

>> Everybody uses this site a little bit differently, but the great part is that when you're there, you know that, like, everybody else there kind of understands you and that you love chess. And it's kind of a safe environment to say, I love chess, where, you know, some people find that they don't have that elsewhere.

>> That kind of niche social networking is exactly what has attracted more than 120,000 players to the mostly free site in the first eight months of its existence.

>> I love the passion that you see when you get somebody -- you get a group of people together that's not MySpace, right, that's not this kind of splattering of, you know, whatever. But it's -- there's something that's bringing us together that's greater than just, hey, you're online, too.

>> Erik says it gives players a chance to interact with others from all over the world.

>> Here's my friend in Syria, who I play a lot with. This guy's in India.

>> Hello, Erik.

>> [laughing] What time is there now, right? And then he's like, "Erik, I hope you have lost this game." Just some friendly banter, right?

>> With almost the very first computers, people started, you know, exploring games, using them both, you know, to play games for their own sake, but also because some games teach you a lot about human reasoning. And that was the challenge of chess. It was felt that if you could master chess, it would tell you something about human intelligence.

>> Dag Spicer, senior curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, says the first marriage of chess and the machine was in 1770 with the Turk.

>>Had a very capable chess player inside, of a small stature of, like, about four feet high, making all the moves. So the connection we make between that in our exhibit is that, in 1997, IBM started a tournament against Garry Kasporov, who was the best chess player in the world at the time. And IBM used a machine, which it built, called Deep Blue, and this machine also looks like a giant box, which has magic inside it.

>> I liked it because it's man versus machine.

>> Deep Blue, the super computer that beat Kasporov, actually performs 200 million calculations a second. And it's -- so it's looking ahead probably about 10 to 20 moves ahead.

>> Between 1770 and 1997, there have been various computer chess inventions, such as software and electronic boards.

>> This one is actually really cool because it has little magnets under it...

>> Oh.

>> ...that move the pieces for you.

>> From the Turk to Deep Blue to Chess.com, all highlight our fascination with playing the game against a machine or through a machine.

>> It's a great game to just, kind of, you know, to realize you're not as smart as you think you are.

>> I'm Kara Tsuboi, CNET News.com. ^M00:04:17 [ Music ]