A short poem

By Richard D. Lange ca. January 2026

"The Grandmaster"

The Grandmaster plays a most beautiful game.
With flourish and flair, pieces twirl, stomp, and sing.

A ballet of movement advances the knight.
A tactical blunder, but oh! What a sight!

Opponent impassive, it calculates mate.
Rote execution, inexorable fate.

The Grandmaster plays in humanity's name,
Not to win, but to play a most beautiful game.

Footnotes

This poem is 100% organic human-crafted without AI assistance. Though perhaps that could be guessed from the fact that I tried to rhyme "game" with "sing." That second line is tricky.

A bit of context: years ago I was mulling over Moravec's paradox and had the amusing idea that if machines will always outcompete humans in games of logic but struggle to match humans' physical prowess, that we would celebrate the greatest chess player in the world not as the person with the greatest skill or most likely to win, but the person with the greatest dexterity physically moving the pieces. I sat down to write some of these ideas, amidst the AI-related anxiety that saturates so much of life in 2026, and this surprisingly short poem was the result.