by scribe | May 17, 2018 | chess clubs, current news, literature, off-topic
Tuesday, May 15, was an unforgettable day for me: the launch date for The Book of Why, the book I have been working on with Judea Pearl for the last three years. I’ve never been lucky enough to see a baby born, but I think that the “birth” of a book...
by scribe | Feb 13, 2018 | current news, literature, off-topic
Going off topic today! I hope that my readers will forgive me. As many of you know, for the last two years I have been working on a big, non-chess book. It’s called The Book of Why, and we are now entering the home stretch. Publication date is now just three...
by scribe | Jan 31, 2018 | Chess Life, games, literature, positions
Position after 21. … Rc4. White to move. FEN: 3q1r2/pb3pp1/1p4k1/3pP1N1/2r2Q1P/8/Pn3PP1/3RR1K1 w – – 0 22 Last time I left you with this quiz position, from the classic game Polugaevsky-Tal, Soviet Championship 1969. What should White play? Even if...
by scribe | Dec 21, 2017 | chess clubs, games, literature, people, ruminations
In the most recent meeting of the Aptos Library chess club for kids, I decided to show them a position from a game that I played against Shredder, the computer. (Usually my lessons are taken from the excellent book Tactics Time by Tim Brennan and Anthea Carson, but...
by scribe | Dec 18, 2017 | literature, openings
First let me explain the title of this post: I don’t really do book reviews in my blog. And I especially don’t do reviews of technical opening repertoire books. However, I have to make an exception when one of my friends has a new book published, a labor...
by scribe | Dec 15, 2017 | current news, games, literature, openings, positions
So far I have looked at three games from the AlphaZero-Stockfish match: #5, #9, and #10 from the ten games provided in the arXiv preprint. All three are amazingly similar, and at the same time they are amazingly unlike almost any other game I’ve ever seen. In...
