The Chess Blog of the Boylston Chess Club... The Boylston Chess Club (BCC) is a part of the Boylston Chess Foundation (BCF).
This last weekend on Sunday saw the Boylston Chess Club host the MA Go Association 2012 Winter Handicap Tournament.
Jason also invented the Grand Prix format which was the most successful tournament format introduced in a long time in both attendance and income for the club.
The current BCF Board has great talent in 11 people with tremendous experience and skills. Special notice has to be given to NM Charles Riordan (now President),
NM Carey Theil (now VP),
Treasurer Dean Robert Oresick, and Dr Jason Rihel who have created an information pipeline to explain why the BCF is so important and special to Boston chess life. So effective that the BCF raised $8K + in donations in 2011. Donations are very important to the BCF as the BCF would be in the red without the great help from its members.
(Special Kudos to Dan Schmidt who paid for the wooden sets at BCF)
But 8K means we have an opportunity do a couple of things to help entertain you chess players in addition to having heat and electricity.
Again Thank You for your service Jason and good luck in London. [ Jason will leave this week for a new research job in London, for 5 years.]
Do you have any good Jason stories or ideas as to how we might make the BCF more fun with trying more things in 2012?
Thank You
Mike Griffin
Herb Healy Open House............................................................................
Herbert E. Healy was born on July 13, 1885 and died on Wednesday, January 9, 1974 in Boston.[Thanks to George Mirijanian for providing July 13 as his exact day of birth.]
He was 88 years old and one of the original Charter members of the Boylston Chess Club at its official organization in 1919. He was Secretary Emeritus at his death.
“The Club was saddened by the death of Herbert Healy, Charter Member and Secretary Emeritus, on Wednesday night, January 9, 1974. This occurred only days after the Herbert Healy Appreciation Tournament (the 30-30 New Year’s Event) and Testimony was held in his honor. Wednesday had a 10”-12” snowfall, but Mr. Healy showed up at the Union and peeked into the Chess Quarters. [ He went to his home in the South End on Brookline Ave.] He died in his sleep. (Only Dave Hudnut, in the Providence Rhode Island area, remains as a Charter Club Member.)”
In 1980 the New Year's 30/30 was permanent dedicated to him as Herbert E. Healy Open House.Herbert E. Healy along with Harry Lyman, Irvin Yaffee, Myer Edelstein and others customarily provided food to the participants of this event.
This information was taken from minutes of the club from January 27, 1974 and talking with Mr.Harry Lyman and William Lukowiak in past years. There are more testimonies about Mr. Healy that I am omitting.
Bemardo Iglesias
December 2007 |
| Dear Chess Friend, New: Chess Developments: The Sicilian Dragon  In this book David Vigorito, opening expertise, focuses on all the critical Yugoslav Attack lines examining the most important and instructive games in recent years and highlighting the main developments and novelties for both sides.  Sincerely, Casper Pieters ______________________________________
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Duncan Graham-Rowe, contributor
Deep Blue's victory over Gary Kasparov in 1997 may have shown how computers can outsmart people, but if the game is taken into the physical world, humans still win hands down.
That's because, for all their software smarts, robots remain clumsy at manipulating real-world objects. A robotic chess competition held in August, for example, showed that even robotic arms used for precise work on industrial manufacturing lines have trouble when asked to negotiate a noisy, chaotic real-world environment.
The contest, held at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence annual conference in San Francisco, California, had a number of automatons competing to see who could best move pieces quickly, accurately and legally in accordance with the rules of chess.
Some teams used vision systems to identify where pieces were, but none attempted to distinguish between a rook and a knight, for example. Instead they relied upon remembering where pieces were last placed to identify them and move them accordingly.
The bots quickly ran into snags - their vision systems often misread moves, which led to confusion as to what piece had moved, and where the other pieces were on the board.
One approach, by robotics company Road Narrows, used a commercially available fixed robotic arm normally used for light industrial applications without any vision at all. The winner was a team led by Mike Ferguson at the University of Albany, in New York, which had a mobile robot with an arm attached. Despite the many variables introduced when moving a robot around, the droid's vision system managed to keep track of the board and pieces as it moved about, says Mike Stilman, one of the event's organisers, of Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta.
But even Ferguson's bot is a long way from earning the title "grand master" - all the teams' chess tactics came from a standard open source program that wouldn't have given Deep Blue a run for its money. But the creation of a software champion chess program wasn't just about winning, Stilman says - it was about gaining an insight into how the human mind works in order to build smarter machines. By bringing the challenge into the real world, the hope is to do the same for the physical problems of robotics, he says.
. ... Every year Harvard Economics Professor Ken Rogoff says he recieves an unsolicited letter from one of the world's top chess players. It is a different one every year but the question is the same: how can I get out of chess.
Because Ken Rogoff is one of those exceptional people who has managed to excel not just in one field but in two.
Professor Rogoff has been chief economist at the IMF, he's worked the Federal Reserve, but he had a life before economics. As a child Ken developed an all-consuming passion for chess. He left home - and school - at 15 to pursue this passion and he did very well indeed. He became an international grand master -- the highest title in chess and was once ranked 40th in the World.
Justin Rowlatt asks Ken Rogoff why he was forced to decide to stop playing the game he loved.
Listen now (18 minutes)
1957 Lyman, Harry wins US amateur championship, 6-0, in Ashbury park, NJ.
