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US Chess Magazine Magriel Reference

Posted By: AP
Date: Saturday, 30 June 2018, at 11:58 p.m.

From July Chess Life, Chess to Enjoy Column by GM Soltis:

"But to play good chess, as opposed to perfect chess, you have to separate yourself so that you can look at two sides of a position. My first tournament opponent, the late Paul Magriel, managed to look at 64 sides, but not at chess. Paul was good at chess, better at poker, and great at backgammon. He studied the mathematical aspects of backgammon by playing 64 versions of himself, numbered X-1, X-2, and so on. In the end, X-22 won. For the rest of his life Paul bore the nickname X-22. This sounds a little like what the latest artificial intelligence wonder, AlphaZero, did. It was given the rules of chess and nothing else. By playing game after game against itself it learned what worked and what didn’t. No one knows how good AlphaZero is but it seems that nothing on earth, human or silicon, is close to it."