Introduced to Horde Chess, a chess variant where Black plays as normal against a White side with 36 pawns, handily available to play online at lichess.org. (White wins by checkmate, Black wins by capturing all the White pieces.)
[Read More]Book Opening Lines Quiz (May 2020)
A quiz to identify 32 books from their openings - the well-known and the slightly obscure, the literary and the popular, with a dusting of SF/fantasy
I recently compiled a quiz based on the openings of a variety of books on our bookcases. It is a mixture of the well-known and the slightly obscure, the literary and the popular, with a dusting of SF/fantasy sprinkled in.
This page has the questions only: when you’re ready, there is a version of the quiz with answers also available.
[Read More]Book Opening Lines Quiz (May 2020) - with answers
I recently compiled a quiz based on the openings of a variety of books on our bookcases. It is a mixture of the well-known and the slightly obscure, the literary and the popular, with a dusting of SF/fantasy sprinkled in.
This page includes the book openings and the answers: there is a spoiler-free version with only the questions also available.
[Read More]Maths jokes from Alexa, Google, and Princeton
When deciding which home assistant is best, a key test might be “OK Google/Alexa, tell me a maths joke”. (OK, your priorities may vary.) Alexa has a variety. Google has only one, and that is “How do you keep warm in a cold room? You go to the corner, because it’s always 90 degrees.”
[Read More]Droidfish the Nihilistic Android chess app
Why a computer chess engine falls back on apparently pointless moves when it's in trouble
I played a bit of chess at school, up in the eaves of the maths department, but hadn’t touched it in years before recently installing the Droidfish app (powered by the Stockfish chess engine) on my phone. Trial and error - and a bit of reading to refresh rusty tactical basics - soon discovered the (still embarrassingly low) percentage strength setting to result in a fair-ish game rather than a wipeout.
But I was puzzled to find that, on occasions when I ended up in a hopefully-winning position in the endgame, Droidfish started making arbitrary, pointless moves rather than trying to make life difficult. (Puzzled, but amused when it means I can effortlessly get a bunch of pawns promoted and checkmate with three queens or the like :smile: )
[Read More]Games lengthy and historical: thoughts after "The Campaign for North Africa"
On long games, detailed rules and 'realism', and light at the end of a game's tunnel
Imagine signing up, along with 9 friends, to play a game which will could take 10 years to complete — and those years dealing with quirky, complex rules and finicky calculations. That is what Richard Berg’s 1979 WWII board wargame published by SPI, “The Campaign for North Africa: The Desert War 1940–43”, demands — as I learned from Luke Winkie’s article The Notorious Board Game That Takes 1,500 Hours To Complete.
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