Indeed,
a good game includes both rules and imagination. When the world's top checker
players discovered that they could play the perfect game by using a set of
plays known as "The Book", they squeezed all the imagination out and
pretty much killed the game.
Chess,
on the other hand, still holds the imagination of world class players, because "a
player looking just eight moves ahead is already presented with as many
possible games as there are stars in the galaxy; and there are more possible
chess games than the number of atoms in the universe".
Listening
to all of this on the radio (RadioLab, Games) on a trip from D.C to New York, I realized
that this is Jewish Mysticism in a nutshell.
Judaism,
according to the Kabalah and Chasidic Philosophy, is all about the uniting the
infinite creator with the finite world (or in Kabalistic terminology: the unity
of the "Holy One Blessed Be He" and "His Shechinah").
It's
why Judaism believes that to connect to the infinite G-d you must follow
defined and very specific commandments; it's why the Torah scroll losses all of
it's infinite holiness if it's missing just one tiny letter; it's why the
infinite G-d creates predictable rules of nature, and it's why Maimonides
understood G-d to be a indefinable infinite being, who, paradoxically perhaps,
relates and expresses himself to humanity in a finite way.
Because
the mystery of true infinity lies in the power that combines the infinity of imagination
with the rules of the finite reality.
