Introduction Thomas Huxley was once reputed to have said, “The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the Universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature and the player on the other side is hidden from us.” All those with a passion for the game, from mere beginner to Candidate contender with a 2800 Elo rating, believe in the mystical quality of this most cerebral of board games. Chess is all-encompassing, the world encapsulated on 64 squares. As the only American to ever break the Soviet monopoly on chess, Bobby Fischer once remarked in utter seriousness, “Chess is life.” True enough, this apparently placid game has drawn comparisons with warfare and court politics. By its reliance on the individual struggling against unknowable moves by the opposition, great odds, and hideous complexities, chess can be likened to one consumer confronting the multiple rewards and punishment of economic life. Only the Brainy Need Apply That bum that seems to beat all comers to his corner of the park for small stakes is no successful gambler. He is, in all likelihood, a washed-out club or national master, technically proficient at the game but otherwise a victim of the rat race that is life. But you can be sure he is neither dull nor illiterate because keeping up with every new theoretical wrinkle or newly-discovered move in the game takes up as much study time as your Economics professor needs to do. Yes, celebrities like Heidi Klum are avid chess players. But she is an exception to the rule that many great minds enjoy chess, even as a leisurely pastime. Nobel laureates like Albert Einstein (physics), Max Planck (physics), Sinclair Lewis (literature), Gabriel Garcia Marquez (literature), William Yeats (literature), Samuel Beckett (literature), William Golding (literature), John Steinbeck (literature), Bertrand Russell, chemists, and physicists loved chess. The field of economics itself is no exception: Among the economics Nobel prize winners who love chess are John Nash, John Harsanyi, Edward Prescott, Gerard Debreu, John Harsanyi, James Heckman, and Simon Herbert. Chess stimulates the restless minds of all those who created the frontrunners of the information technology and Internet age: Microsoft (yes, Gates and Allen both), Oracle, eBay, YouTube, PayPal, and Verisign. Steve Jobs of Apple Inc. does not, but he is more the artist-maverick in the field. Permutations and Endless Networks of Variables Chess seems straightforward enough: move a piece, wait for your opponent to respond, move another and see the game through to a glorious win, an ignominious loss, or an unsatisfying draw. But as soon as you begin to enjoy winning at the game, you realize how the other player has several options at his disposal, you may have two or three good moves to counter what he might do, and your opponent apparently has at least one good reply to each; then the permutations begin to look endless. And yet, you are only thinking two moves ahead. How much more when plotting a six-move mating combination to which your opponent can reply strongly at every turn? For an economist to study production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services, conceive meaningful relationships among hundreds of variables, require a supercomputer to model them, and subsequently attempt policy recommendations for every variabl