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via Joho one morning. Thinking Machines 4. "visual explorations of culturally significant data" "how people participate in physical and virtual space" "making the invisible visible"
I was maybe eight years old when I first saw a game of chess. It was in the neoprehistoric era before interstate highways and cable TV, when there was little distraction that didn't involve personal effort. The grownups had a bottle of whiskey and a set of small wooden chess pieces. They played late into the summer night, past bedtime, past the extra time they let me stay up as long as I was quiet. Next morning my brother and I dug out the the chess set, played a fair facsimile of the game for some quiet hours. ( It was even more important to be quiet that morning although I would be much older before direct experience would teach me the correlation between late Saturday mornings in bed and empty whiskey bottles. )
played a lot of chess for just fun, competitive puzzling. later I discovered that chess was serious fun for some. ( the owner of a small company I worked at ) had an Elo rating of 2000. The rating system is named for its inventor, Arpad Elo, awards points based on the ratings of the opponents you beat, and deducts by the same formula. Defeating a higher rated opponent awards many more points than losing to the same opponent deducts so the system serves as an effective handicapping tool. A 400 point rating difference means the stronger player is expected to win 11 of 12 games. a 700 point difference and the stronger player should win 99 out of 100.
The Elo system was adopted by the United States Chess Federation in 1960, by the world body Fédération Internationale des Échecs in 1970.
a computer program doesn't play chess in any real sense of the word. it is mostly an accounting system optimized to evaluate chess positions. it projects and analyzes as many possible outcomes of moves as time permits assigning each projected position a value. this value becomes the fitness function in a scenario of extreme trial and error, millions of positions tried each turn. the move producing the highest chess value is selected at each turn.
the programmer tries to coerce effective chess play from the program by manipulating the values assigned to in-game assets. typically these assets are chess pieces and the program tries to manuever situations that harvest valuable opponent pieces for free or exchange of lesser pieces. positional goals such as occupying the center, castling, and occupying open files with rooks have values that will encourage the program in these important, if less tangible, directions. much programming effort goes into "pruning" the search tree, identifying and culling unproductive lines.
the simplicity of the game ( an eight year old can pick up most of the rules just by watching ) supports the reasonable notion that chess can be dominated by a perfectly calculating machine. the practical obstacle is the sheer number of possible positions available at each turn. much programming effort goes into identifying and eliminating nonproductive continuations early ( pruning the search tree ) so the program can evaluate promising continuations to deeper levels.
At the start of a game White has twenty possible moves, move any of the eight pawns one or two squares or choose one of four squares open for knight moves. Black then has the same twenty options yielding 20 × 20 = 400 possible positions at the end of the first turn. From there possibility increases exponentially and the curve is steep. By the start of move 4 there are tens of millions of potential positions. It is estimated there are 10127 possible chess game positions. This is an absurdly large number, written out as a 1 followed by 127 zeros. ( For comparison: light travels so fast a beam of light could orbit the earth eight times in a single second. In the estimated 15 billion years of the Universe that beam of light would travel about 1027 feet. )
Experience has simplified the theoretical (infinity of possibility) into a manageable body of convention. Expert chess games tend to follow a relatively small number of offensive and defensive systems. so simplified that by (end of the Great War the Scientific School based on dominating the center squares with pawns) was the rule. Future world champion Jose Capablanca is putting forth an enhanced chess game, more squares, new pieces, more complexity. He felt there were too many draws in master chess play. (By making the game harder, superior players could differentiate themselves with wins.)
( the Scientific School "makes sense" "seems natural" becomes status quo, gets current world champion Jose Capablanca talking about boredom, putting forth an enhanced chess-like game with more square, a couple of new pieces, more complexity ) The Hypermodern School picked up the challenge of the Scientific pawn center. ( these pawns became targets, counter attack instead of defend ) ( the New York International Tournament of 1924 is where the Hypermodern School became known to the world. )
Yugoslavian Grandmaster Alexsandar Matanovic playing against leading Soviet chess players in the 1960's noticed "one of the reasons for their absolute supremacy in the world was that they had better information." To counter this advantage he created a constellation of publications around the Chess Informant, now an official publication of the world chess organization FIDE. Among these publications is the five volume Encyclopaedia of Chess Openings, ECO, the definitive source on best play in the first moves.
The ECO system identifies chess openings with three character designation, a letter A-E ( corresponding to five volumes ) and a number, ( 00 to 99 ). Some of the opening systems are hundreds of years old and extensively developed. The Ruy Lopez system dates from at least 1490 and is covered by ECO codes C60 through C99, a good chunk of the third volume. ( the granularity is fine ) B38 expands to Sicilian, Accelerated Fianchetto, Moraczy Bind named after a tight spot played into by Geza Maroczy ( Monte Carlo, 1904 ).
At the front of the ECO, volume A number 00, included in the Uncommon Openings, is 1. B4, the Polish, the Sokolsky, the Orang-Utan. In the famous New York international tournament, round 4, March 21, 1924, the same G Maroczy would find himself playing Black against S Tartakower, facing an A00 opening – 1. b4.
Dr Tartakower was born in Russia, studied law in Vienna, served as an officer in both world wars. His parents were murdered in a pogrom in Rostov-on-Don (in Russia, at the very northern tip of the Black Sea). He has been described as a writer, poet, and gambler. He became a citizen of Poland in 1918, represented Poland in several Chess Olympiads. After World War Two when Poland disappeared behind the Iron Curtain he became a citizen of France. A founder of the Hypermodern School of Chess, writer, ...
the 1924 New York International Tournament boasted an exceptional field including the current world champion Jose Capablanca, his predecessor Emanuel Lasker, and his successor Alexander Alekhine. Capablanca hadn't lost a game in eight years the first public appearance of the Hypermodern School, NY International Tournament, 1924.
long quote on Susan the Orangutan
| a | b | c | d | e | f | g | h | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| a | b | c | d | e | f | g | h |
1.b4 Nc6
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