I know chess and programming are commonly analogized, but I've always thought it was a terrible analogy. Chess is a very, very closed game; for all the big numbers you can generate by talking about how many permutations there are, it's still a very small game. Programming is a very, very big game, as it routinely invokes the full mathematical chaos you can only get from the realm of the Turing-complete and invokes arbitrary combinations of humanity/politics and other disciplines. (There are many games just as big, but none bigger.) I find analogies that try to cross the chasm from one to the other are inevitably strained; that's an awfully lot to ask of an analogy.