Searching for Bobby FischerFollow

This was my favorite part, from another article:


WTF? Renegade Chess?

They are gonna can someone for 10 years for a game of chess. I already puked thismorning too.

Yes, yes Fischer is nutty, but he was insanely good at chess, at one time. Meetings of grandmasters typically result in draws, yet Fischer won something like 20 matches outright in a row leading up to a world championship against Spassky in 1972. It was billed at the match of the century and both nations tried to use the event as a proxy for cold war tensions.

He replayed Spassky in 1992 without having played competitively in twenty years. Spassky was ranked 99th in the world at that time, I believe. Fischer won.

Those are the highlights - they are things that just don't happen.

Now the problems.

The 92 match was in Yugoslavia, and Fischer was not allowed to go there for money because of US sanctions. This is the crime he is being held for.

As Smash mentioned, he was nuts. During play, he would ask for totally unreasonable conditions. During the Spassky match in 72 he forfitted the second game because his bizzare conditions were not met. Having lost the first match he was down 0-2. He won anyhow. (As a side note, the Soviets tried to increase his paranoia by claiming his chair, which he had flown to Iceland(?), had a secret radio transmitter which was interfering with Spassky's brainwaves, so they dissassembled it, they also sampled the air in the room, etc).

Fischer was always antisemitic and has become quite anti-American, too. He reveled in the 9-11 attacks on America. There are myriad other lurid details.

Another article is:

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/12/chun.htm

Ultimately, Fischer is a warning: just because someone is good at something, perhaps the best who ever lived, it doesn't make them a good person.

A name I have never heard compared with Fischer is Paul Erdos, who recently passed away, and is perhaps one of the greatest 10 mathemeticians who has ever lived.

Erdos was also clearly...he had problems. He lived out of a tiny suitcase for his entire adult life, by choice. Theoretically he had a job (at some University) but he never showed up - and that was considered just fine - because he travelled the world from one house/university of a mathemetician to another. He would fertalize minds and help people and then when the action slowed down, he moved on. He gave away virtually all his money, but what he needed to survive, he never acquired any of the things most people hold most dear: a home, a spouse, even a schedule of any kind or an office.

He published over 1000 papers - in math - and was still publishing at a rate of one per week into his seventies. He died September 20 1996 in Poland, working on a proof.

You can read all about him in the book The Man Who Loved Only Numbers.

...but he kept working. Fischer quit chess and his deamons got him - and they were deamons of hate. Erdos worked obsessively, requiring only a few hours of sleep per night he was just more then one person could keep up with for long. Sure he had his deamons, and he had serious problems with the US - barred from the country for around a decade - but he kept working. Even when his eyes got so bad they needed surgery he wanted to do math - during the operation. At first, he believed he would be able to read with one eye while the other was operated on, but when this turned out not to be the case, he actually got them to call a mathemetician from the local university to come over and talk math.

Lastly, he was inherently good to people: he loved math and worked constantly with loads of people on math problems. Much of his income he assigned as cash prize "bounties" for proofs. But more then that, he believe that whenever you failed to do a good deed, a "point" was marked against you and "for" the Supreme Fascist. He believed the goal of this self-inveted game was to keep the score as low as possible. Nothing lowered the score.

The Supreme Fascist, by the way, was God. Erdos was an odd duck.
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http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040720/ap_on_re_as/japan_bobby_fischer_2

I wonder what they'll do with him.