Fear not scholastic chess

Tom Braunlich initiated a spirited debate about scholastic chess with his article "Scholastics and the Soul of Chess" (and this subsequent update). For those who share Tom's point of view, all may not be lost. Consider this account from Neil Steinberg's column in the Chicago Sun-Times:

My oldest son belongs to Chess Wizards, a program that comes into public schools and sets up chess clubs, pairing interested students with experienced teachers.

Some schools, I am told, resist. They don't like chess.

Any idea why?

Think hard.

In chess . . . someone wins, usually.

Can't have that. The losers might feel bad.

Of course, these particular school administrators would hail Peter Leko as a hero. (Hat Tip: Mental multivitamin)

The middle six

There are currently eighteen Knights, so I decided that reviewing six at a time seemed like a reasonable approach. Here's some of the goings on in the center of the list:

• CelticDeath offers more details on the aftermath of his wisdom teeth extraction than most people probably care to read. Of course solving chess problems won't seem so painful in comparison.
  


• Tempo proves unequivocally that drinking alcohol should improve your chess. Now that's something to cheer about! Later, he posed the question about when one should accept draw offers. I offered the following:

  One of the players in our club, a master, has a simple rule "Only offer or accept a draw when you think you are losing". While I don't follow this rule myself, I think it is good advice.
  
  Of course, once your opponents know this is your strategy they can use it against you. See an example here.

• Spill takes on Sil.
  


• Fatboy wins Jen's challenge.


• Way back when, Yet Another Patzer asked "will I be really improving?" If his blogging is any indication of his commitment to chess improvement then I would say probably not. I'm sorry to say that this blogger has followed the trail originally blazed by the Orange Knight.
  
  Everyone sing together -- 18 Knights Errant blogs on the wall, 18 Knights Errant blogs, take one down, pass it around, 17 Knights Errant blogs on the wall.
  

Chess - The Musical

It's been dubbed a thinking man's musical -- which may explain why it bombed on Broadway....

Inspired by the world-was-watching contest between American chess genius Bobby Fischer and the Russian champion Boris Spassky in 1972, the fictionalized face-off isn't about the game. Rather, "Chess" mirrors the way the players were manipulated by the Soviet and American governments during the Cold War....

"Chess" opened in London in 1986, where it ran for three years. It debuted on Broadway in 1988 and closed after just two months.

Read "'Chess': A stage musical that makes crowds think" from the Staten Island Advance.

Interesting new blogs

You might want to check out A patzer's quest...to a distant paradise. Fraktál is from Romania and this post entitled "Is it worth doing tactics exercises?" certainly suggests that he is not a Knights Errant candidate. Nevertheless, he has several interesting posts including these free chess software suggestions.

Another relatively new blog is Patzer's Mind -- "Yet another chess improvement blog." Bahus hails from Finland, and in case you were wondering here is his analysis of the strength of Finnish chess players. Bahus' improvement plan is broad in scope but is influenced by the MDLM method. He also includes some nice diagrams with arrows in his game annotations.

Tim Krabbé and Martha Stewart

Chunter opines that Tim's suggestion that "...Joop van Oosterom, the Dutch billionaire/new World Correspondence Chess Champion, is operated by Jeroen Piket" (Open Chess Diary #277) could run him afoul of Britain's libel laws.

I can imagine a whole new line of trading cards -- Chess Prisoners 2005 Edition.

Knights of Emotion

Elation: Don completes the seven circles, a remarkable achievement!


Contentment: Sancho shares his new path -- a balanced approach but still heading for the same destination.


Despair: J'adoube calls it quits from MDLM and the Knights (but see the comments for the remaining Knights' efforts to keep him in the fold; I'll await the outcome before making any changes to my sidebar).

In Don's honor I have dug deep into the archives -- my first post about the Knights Errant De La Maza. And while the celebration remains in full swing, the chess improvement ecosystem marches on. Welcome the birth of a new Knight, Viking Sword.

Chess and Cars

Here's a metaphor that never would have occurred to me:

Selling cars is a lot like playing chess. It is the same interaction played out a billion different ways all of them similar to the unaided eye, but drastically different to the trained professional.

Even more chess crime

For the Emory Chess Club, it was clear from the rules of entry that last Friday’s chess tournament was different from any previous competition.... To reach their opponents, club members had to walk through two large metal gates, two remote-operated sliding doors and a courtyard lined with security cameras and barbed wire.

Are chess tournaments now considered high priority targets for Al Qaeda? Hopefully not; in any case, this was something very different.

While the members of the club wore blue collared shirts that said “Emory University Chess,” their opponents wore white jumpsuits with blue lining that said “State Prisoner” or “Dept. of Corrections” in all capital letters on the back.

Read "Emory's latest stop on chess circuit: penitentiary" from The Emory Wheel.

Chess and Music V

Link

Silicon Chess

No, this isn't about computer chips optimized for playing chess (and my apologies in advance for possibly violating my self-imposed PG standard for this blog).

Unbecoming Levity provides a list of 101 Uses for a Used Giant Breast Implant:

74. Play chess with it. Don't feel bad if it wins, chess is hard.

Chess Stamps

Stamps from around the world with chess-related themes.

Another chess joke

Here is further evidence of why there are so few chess jokes. From easier than writing by hand...:

Q. what does the terminator say when challenged to a game of chess?

A. (in a austrian accent) "i'll be black!"

Alternative Realities

Music Box Girl responds to the question, " If you were a chess piece, which would you be? Why?":

Well, admittedly, I don't know how to play chess. I have dated more guys that seem to love it and vow to teach me how to play at some point in the relationship. That never happens. Perhaps we're too busy kissing or something. I don't know. So most of my chess knowledge comes from that Pixar short before Toy Story (or is it A Bug's Life) and the first Harry Potter movie. So my answer is the Queen? Just cause it sounds cool....

All of a sudden I'm daydreaming about how nice it might have been to grow up in Kentucky.

A Chess Story

A financier recalls a friend named Smoggs who was on the road to becoming a brilliant financier until he got sidetracked by chess.

"It came gradually at first: he used to play chess with a man during the lunch hour, when he and I both worked for the same firm. And after a while he began to beat the fellow.... And then he joined a chess club, and some kind of fascination seemed to come over him; something like drink, or more like poetry or music... he could have been a financier. They say it's no harder than chess, though chess leads to nothing. I never saw such brains wasted."

"There are men like that," agress the prison warden. "It's a pity..." And he locks the financier back in his cell for the night.

Hat Tip: I only did this to be popular

Chess and the Meaning of Life

Canuck in Asia quotes from Viktor Frankl's "The Doctor & the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy":

...In the light of existential analysis there is no such thing as a generally valid and universally binding life task. From this point of view the question of "the" task in life or "the" meaning of life is -- meaningless. It reminds us of the question a reporter asked a grandmaster in chess. "And now tell me, maestro -- what is the best move in chess?" Neither question can be answered in a general fashion, but only in regard to a particular situation and person. The chess master, if he took the question seriously, would have had to reply: "A chess-player must attempt, within the limits of his ability and within the limits imposed by his opponent, to make the best move at any given time." Two points must be stressed here. First, "within the limits of his ability"; that is to say, the inner state, what we call temperament, must be taken into consideration. And, secondly, the player can only "attempt" to make a move which is best in a concrete situation in the game -- that is, in relation to a specific configuration of the pieces. If he set out from the start with the intention of making the best move in an absolute sense, he would be tormented by eternal doubts and endless self-criticism, and would at best overstep the time limit and forfeit the game...To ask the meaning of life in general terms is to put the question falsely because it refers vaguely to "life" and not concretely to "each person's own' existence...

Classic chess movie lines

From SuperMovieChick's Top 10 Movie Quotes From The Year 2004:

Movie - Day After Tomorrow [as Brian works on a radio]

Police Officer: You should get some help with that.

Brian Parks: Sir, I'm the president of the electronics club, the mathematics club, and the chess club. If there is a bigger nerd in here, please point him out.

Brought to you as a public service

"Chess is the most elaborate waste of human intelligence outside of an advertising agency."

From "whats up with quotes???" on Your Own Reality.

Polgar on the Lawrence Summers Question

...But Ms. Polgar is not someone who sees the two sexes as the same. "I think women are built differently and approach life very differently," she told me. And in a 2002 column for ChessCafe.com, she took on what might now be called the Lawrence Summers question. "If we talk about pure abilities and skills, I believe there should be no reason why women cannot play as well as men," Ms. Polgar wrote, but she went on to list various reasons that more female players have not reached chess's highest ranks--among them their biological clocks, narrower opportunities to compete, cultural and gender bias, and the fact that "for years, women have set much lower standards" for themselves in chess than men. "If you do not put in the same work, you can't compete at the same level," she said then...

http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110006356

More Chess Songs

The folks at Deep Chess (a German chess website) informed us that they also have a chess-related song. Listen to Deep Chess Song. Since I don't understand any German, I don't know whether this is serious or a joke. Perhaps some of the readers can help?

Dennis Monokroussos also posted a few chess song links.

The Great Debate - Goldowsky Responds

I'd like to thank Dennis Monokroussos for perpetuating our debate on whether or not chess is a sport. While he's been arguing "no", I've been taking the stance that it is.

For the better part of the past week, I've been stuck a few miles from the middle of nowhere in Fairbanks, Alaska (on business), without a personal internet connection. (You can find chess in Fairbanks, but only if you head on over to the University on Saturday afternoon, which I couldn't do.) I feared that people might interpret my lack of response to Monokroussos' impressive debating skills and his super-tight argument as agreement. But this is not so! His debating skills are impressive, but his argument is not, and I'm back to defend my position. Heck, I needed something to think about during my 28 hours of travel time.

To recap our debate so far: Monokroussos argued in his post that chess is not a sport because, in his words, "...it's a necessary condition of some activity's being a sport that it has an irreducibly physical component." This, all sane non-steroid-taking chess players agree, chess does not have. However, I argued in my first post that any activity CAN be defined as a sport if it satisfies the jointly sufficient condition that its practitioners rely on both timing and pattern recognition for success. Monokroussos improved on this definition by adding to it the jointly sufficient condition that the activity be competitive. (This would automatically leave out driving to the store, walking to the bus stop, brushing your teeth, cooking for dinner, playing chess with your grandma, etc...) I agree with this improvement, and will also add an additional jointly sufficient condition that success be determined without any intrinsic luck within the rules of competition.

To summarize, here is my definition of what a sport is. To be a sport, an activity must satisfy all four of these jointly sufficient conditions:

1. Success is based on the practitioner's pattern recognition abilities.
2. Success is based on the practitioner's timing of their actions.
3. The activity must be competitive.
4. Luck is not inherent within the rules of competition.

Based on this new definition (minus the luck requirement), Monokroussos went on to state that he remained skeptical about certain activities being a sport: mainly the activities of writing poetry, making music, and cooking.

OK, now here's my argument against Monokroussos': Monokroussos just plainly says, "I remain skeptical about [these activities being a sport]," without giving much reason why. In my mind, these activities, if they are performed in a competitive environment, no matter how unpopular this may seem, ARE sports. This may seem weird, but if one creates a definition, one must stick to it, no matter what society might think. Poetry competitions represent the sport of poetry, most poets going unpublished their entire lives. The TV show American Idol represents the sport of making music. Iron Chef (on the Food channel) represents the sport of cooking. Competitive poetry can be classified as a mental sport, and American Idol and Iron Chef are physical sports just as valid as any other. In each of these activities there is a set of rules, competition, pattern recognition, and timing requirements. And the fact that the competition is based on subjective judges does not disqualify these activities as sports, either -- figure skating and gymnastics are based on subjective judges, and nobody would deny their sports status.

Monokroussos' second argument was that computers (or a super being) play (or could play) chess without pattern recognition, using a purely brute-force approach. I say that even a brute-force computer program requires pattern recognition. I can easily think of two reasons for this off the top of my head:

1. IF/THEN statements in computer code are pure pattern recognition. (If the computer sees the conditional, THEN do this, etc.; it must recognize the conditional.)
2. Number crunching binary data IS pure pattern recognition, too. The computer must recognize the mathematical operations to perform for each line of code. The required operations are directly related to the chess positions on the board.

In sum, both of Monokroussos' arguments need to be strengthened for me to change my mind. I still believe that any activity requiring pattern recognition, timing, and competitiveness (without luck), can be labeled as a sport. Chess, in my mind, is a mental sport. An activity that satisfies Monokroussos' "physical component" is labeled in my mind as a "physical sport". My definition of sport is a much broader definition than Monokroussos', one that can be divided into separate mental and physical sub-categories. I will be happy to settle the debate on these terms.

Finally, in case you're wondering, I believe that the Olympics should be limited to physical sports.

Posted by Howard Goldowsky