by scribe | Mar 15, 2018 | current news, people, PRO Chess League, ruminations
This week the PRO Chess League playoffs started with a rash of upsets. In five out of eight matches the team with the lower seeding beat the top-seeded team, and in one more match the favored team only managed to squeak through to the next round by virtue of their...
by scribe | Jan 2, 2018 | off-topic, ruminations
Happy New Year! Here’s our first chess problem of the year, which doesn’t look like a chess problem:How many acorns do you see in the picture? Yesterday I went hiking with my wife and one of her friends in a state park near Santa Cruz, and toward the end...
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 6, 2017 | current news, literature, openings, ruminations
Today, like many people, I was shocked by the news in my Facebook new feed. AlphaZero beats Stockfish! For those who (like me) had never heard of AlphaZero, let me explain that it is a new deep-learning algorithm created by the same folks who gave you AlphaGo, the...
by scribe | Nov 28, 2017 | current news, literature, off-topic, people, ruminations
I hope that everybody reading this will check out the new video about the 2016 Chess Olympiad at YouTube! I apparently cannot embed it in this post, but here is a link to the video. I really don’t think that people outside the chess world appreciated what a...
by scribe | Nov 22, 2017 | games, people, positions, ruminations
A few days ago my chess friend and correspondent, Larry Smith, sent me a position from a game he had played against his computer. Larry was White: White to move. FEN: r1b4k/pp2N2p/4p2Q/3pP2B/3b4/P7/KP3r2/8 w – – 0 1 First of all, let me say I’m glad...
