Archive for the ‘chess’ Category
Chess Music
February 25th, 2011
A gentleman of the Internet decided to map algebraic chess notation to musical notes. He includes mp3s for a few classic games (including Fischer’s ‘72 match against Spassky), and also reverses the process to set Ode to Joy to chess. Neat idea!
Also it’s my birthday and I’m a quarter of a century old. I’m pretty sure I’m wise now.
Linear Chess
November 22nd, 2010
If you like chess but think it has too many dimensions, one of these one-dimensional chess variants might be the game for you. You might also want to avoid certain other variants, unless you’re a pretty serious Star Trek fan.
I’ve seen references to four- and five-dimensional chess (which look like they might still be borderline-human-playable games), but a search for “n-dimensional chess” shows that not a lot of progress has been made for the general case. It seems like it wouldn’t be too hard to develop rules… rooks could move an arbitrary distance on paths parallel to the basis vectors, bishops could move diagonally on any plane, etc. Certainly the number of pieces would have to scale up, and it might be tricky to prove that checkmate is possible for all n, but someone who wasn’t prepping for finals could probably develop a consistent set of “playable” rules without too much trouble.
The real trick, of course, would be a consistent set of rules for chess in Hilbert space, which I think I should leave to the real mathematicians.
chess, games, math | No Comments »
Chess City
October 4th, 2010
I was originally going to do a well-researched write-up of this situation, but honestly I can’t phrase it any better than Andrei Codrescu, so I’ll just quote him verbatim:
There is still a Lenin statue in Kalmykia. After the death of communism and leninism, Kalmykia’s dictator, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, a bona fide Grand Master of Chess [and current FIDE president], conceived of the idea of lifting his desert people in Southern Russia from poverty into 20th-centry affluence by means of chess. Like a Pharoah using the entire country’s resources, he built Chess City in Elista, the capital, to host a World Tournament of Chess. The teaching of chess was made obligatory for all school grades, and chairs of chess were established at the university. He intended, as he told a journalist, to make chess “the religion” of the Kalmyk people. The Kalmyk religion is Tibetan Buddhism, and the Kalmyk lamas are appointed directly by the Dalai Lama, who visited Kalmykia in the 1990s. For six decades of Soviet rule, Buddhism was dismissed as a superstition, but the religion revived with great fervor after the USSR dissolved. Ilyumzhinov’s effort to replace both communism and Buddhism with the religion of chess was met with derision, but that response was quickly silenced by the brutal suppression of critics. Lenin’s birthplace, after the death of leninism, rose from the ashes as a dictatorship of chess.
- The Posthuman Dada Guide
If you didn’t get the idea, Kirsan Nikolayevich Ilyumzhinov is crazy.
Nerd Problems
July 28th, 2010
While conversing with an attractive lady, our chess-playing protagonist finds himself in the following situation:
He sat leaning on his cane and thinking that with a Knight’s move of this lime tree standing on a sunlit slope one could take that telegraph pole over there, and simultaneously he tried to remember what exactly he had just been talking about.
- Vladimir Nabokov, The Defense
books, chess, games | No Comments »