Dreamed last night that I was struggling with a particularly persistent and inventive band of car thieves desperate to get their hands on my poor innocent Clio. I walked up to my car to find them lurking around it and obviously trying to figure out how to get in. I shouted ‘OI!’ at them, but they just looked at me briefly and ignored me. So I pulled my mobile out and called the police. They watched me with amusement for a few moments, then casually sauntered off down the street. After they were out of sight, a police car turned in to the road. I sighed with relief and unlocked the car. Policeman promptly jumped out of police car, sat in my car's driving seat and started the engine, then turned to me to reveal that he was one of the same group of car thieves. I somehow managed to open the driver's door, kick him out and drive away, whereupon my car developed some sort of fault and he came after me in his phony police car.

At about this point I woke up, thankfully. I often have strange dreams, but very rarely have actively bad ones; but that was definitely one. It wasn't so much fear for my own skin; the bad guys at no point gave the slightest indication that they had any interest in causing me physical damage. It was the sheer feeling of helplessness at the thought that everything I could think of to get rid of them had been anticipated and prepared for.

I think I preferred the previous dream, which was much more fun.

I don't play chess. That is, I know how to play, but I'm really pretty bad at it and don't like it much, so I hardly ever try.

Part of this is because I find it difficult to do the planning-for-all-eventualities kind of strategic thinking. It just seems to be a blind spot in my intellect. I'm an engineer type, who will do a competent job if given plenty of resources and a good safety margin; strategy in a fair fight is more a question of squeezing every last bit of juice out of the limited resources you've got, and that's not my forte.

But also, chess specifically annoys me in one particular way, and that's the uniform vulnerability of the pieces. I'm much happier playing games like Starcraft, in which the more powerful units are generally better armoured as well as better armed, so although a high-value unit can still be mobbed by enough small pieces, it's not usually possible for (say) a single marine to take out a battlecruiser. But in chess, the powerful pieces can be captured exactly as easily as the feeble ones, and this paradoxically makes the feeble ones more scary due to the concept of piece exchanges; a knight protected by another knight, for example, has little to fear from the lightning strike of the opponent's queen (if he wants to swap his queen for one of my knights that's fine by me) but is likely to run like hell from a slowly advancing pawn (his pawn for my knight is much more in his favour). It irks me that the powerful pieces are so circumscribed by this sort of consideration that it's very hard to actually use them for anything worthwhile. My intuition as to how battle games ought to work is much more in the Starcraft mould than the chess mould, and as such I've always felt this feature of chess to be counterintuitive and somewhat artificial.

It occurred to me recently, though, that in fact the chess model can apply worryingly well to less military aspects of life, because some vulnerability models aren't as linear as they are in battle. Suppose, for example, that you believe yourself to be good at doing something because you've never failed to do it yet, but that a lot of what makes you good at it is precisely the confidence that comes from a 100% track record. Suddenly your vulnerability is increased in proportion to your success so far: if you fail just once, you know your confidence will be badly shaken and you're likely to start failing a lot more in future. So although you have this theoretical great strength, in practice you often don't want to have to risk using it.

This annoys me just as much in real life as it does in chess. Except that in chess you can always say ‘oh, this is a stupid game, I can't be bothered’ and walk away from the board.