<The only legitimate game is one that would never allow, for either player, only those combinations of moves that have never been played before.>

Mmm, yes, that'd be innaresting. It'd also be the precise metaphysical inverse of chess, given everything that the psychologists and linguists are saying about memory and 'chunking', and chess as a model world for one of the things that brains do.

Remember those experiments with masters, experts and novices -- asked to reconstruct a board position after a quick glance, and so on? They found, basically, that masters have a vastly bigger repertoire of chess chunks -- pawn structures, combinations, etc.

So, inevitably: does <any> game consist of novel 'combinations? Probably not -- other than the trivial sense in which every game of football is unique because all those blades of grass will never have those precise lengths again, and barometric pressure and managerial sanity are also highly variable.

Everything is trivially unique, but similar under the skin, or something?

<not overheard on every corner>

- So, how was it for you?

- Halloween? Ghastly. Ghostly.

- Bring back the Holy Ghost, I say. And throw away the key.

- Oh aye, we had real spooks when I were a nipper. No fancy-dan costumes from rent-an-ectoplasm, just an old bedspread.

- True, true. Year after year, the same old sheet.

No, that's unforgivably grouchy of me. There are at least eight regular Frogs who speak it at least as fluently as what I do.

And a Frog is just a King/Queen/Knight or Heavily Fortified Medieval Skyscraper that hasn't been kissed yet.

What, you think people don't kiss castles? May I remind you that I live about five miles from the original Blarney Castle, home of the original Blarney Stone, said to convey the gift of the gab to those who tongue its rocky crevices?

But I've never even *been* there, let alone tried to form a relationship with a piece of granite. Or even a One Knight Feldspar, for that matter.

<Regina osculat Saxum.>

Luckily, I checked my Latin dictionary before attempting to say "The queen kisses the stone" -- I was going to write 'Regina osculat Petronem' which apparently means 'the queen kisses the yokel'.

Petro: a yokel, a churl, an oik. Not a rock.

Saxum: a rock, a boulder. Not a Saxon.

This puts a whole new twist on the pun which the Roman Catholic church uses to justify itself. Christ said (in good vernacular Olde English, as we know, unlike folks who think he only spoke American): "Thou art Peter and upon this Rock I shall build my Church."

Ergo, sez the Pope, isn't it blindingly obvious what he meant? That the powers-that-be in whatever city Peter settled in should inherit the whole kit and caboodle? And the myth says Peter went to Rome... and 300 years later they wrote this down, and Constantine's mother found the True Cross, and don't believe those sneaky Merovingians with their Situationist Bloodlines, like prize poodles...

I know the pun is Greek. But they were in the Roman Empire, speaking Aramaic, so we must consider the alternative: "You are Peter, and this vocal local yokel will be my church".

It even fits with "the earth shall inherit the meek" (and vice versa).

What Leonard Cohen called "The staggering account of the Sermon on the Mount which I don't pretend to understand at all". He also sang "Give me back the Berlin Wall, give me Stalin and Saint Paul..."

Stalin and St Paul? Aren't they the famous <twin cities> up in Minnehaha?

The Frogspawn Department of Bible Study will now shut itself down, as too many students have been walking on dangerously hot water.

<more cool Latin words>

Occisor = killer
Amurca = dregs
Terebra = gimlet, drill
Occisor Terebrinator = Driller Killer
Stipes = log, tree, blockhead
Subigito = to behave improperly to
Subigitatio = lewdness
Obstrepo = to make a noise, to molest
Occallesco = to grow a thick skin.

Great (magnus) bloody (sanguinolentus) language, Latin.

Much too late, it occurs to me that I'm really much more of an <Idle Nomad> -- lazy, doesn't do much, wanders around scribbling from town to town -- than a <Domdaniel> (Undersea fortress inhabited by powerful magician).

An inspiring book, brilliantly wrong. Of course Newton, Darwin, Freud and Marx were also all brilliantly wrong, as was McLuhan. Jaynes was the real thing: not at all a crackpot or pseudoscientist (a category into which I'd put Velikovsky and Von Daniken, not to mention the still wackier Rose & Rand Flem-Ath ("Atlantis was in Antarctica and some Native South American languages are really machine code, so there"). Also, let's face it, Lacan. At least.

Jaynes found a vast difference between 'Homer' of the Iliad and Odyssey. In the first (and much older) case, gods are external and people act like automatons; in the later poem the people have modern-style psychological complexity. Adding piles more evidence, he concluded that self-consciousness was a recent historical development: 5000 years ago, nobody had a self. The two halves of the brain weren't fully connected: 'god' lived in one hemisphere and told the person, living in the other, what to do.

The only problem is the evidence does not require this beautiful theory. A shift from an oral to a literate society accounts for almost all the change in subjectivity.

It wasn't 'like' anything, but the ever vigilant and observant you noticed, which is something.

<French lessons>

still, it seems like achieve interpreted it as an act of "sticking up" for him. it's hard not thinking something along those lines, i feel.

but with the source (you) available, it's of course easier to just ask: what was your intention in writing that post? who besides me was the intended audience? what kind of reaction/feelings were you aiming at creating, if any?

sorry for having to ask these questions, but unless answered, it would seem that achieve's perception of your motifs would remain quite plausible.

i can live with people not liking me. sometimes i even must accept that people dislike me for the wrong reasons, i.e. based on a false belief in what kind of person i am, and so on. but experiencing that people dislike me just because somebody else does, is rather stupid and unnecessary.

in general, i believe in treating people the way they treat you, and to some extent, the way they treat others. the hard thing about the second part, is that you have to consider how others have treated them, and empathically imagine what that felt like. failing to do so, will invariably make one prone to committing mistakes "in the name of justice" or what admirable concept one believes in. it's different of course if you are the police - if someone breaks "the law", then your job is to arrest the infringer. but even the judge will usually consider the context and the background of the crime in question - sometimes this qualifies for a milder sentence than the same crime committed under different circumstances.

i don't intend to continue with further questions, no matter what you choose to respond to or not respond to of the above. it will be a waste of your time, and to some extent of mine. however, i appreciate the response i got to my first post, and i will equally appreciate some words in return to this one.

Processus Mastoideus pars petrosis(ae?) ossis temporalis (has to do something with hearing, as well...)

Those anatomy classes must have really left an impression inside my Pia Mater...

Wise words you wrote upthere - very useful.

Hang on now...

[Event "puzzle solving"]
[Site "chessmoron chessforum"]
[Date "2007.11.05"]
[Round "# XIX"]
[White "to play and win"]
[Black "umm..."]
[ECO "xx"]
[Result "1-0"]

[FEN "

click for larger view

"]

Try and get your teeth into this one... It's quite brilliant I think...

May cost some time, and it would be a nice test for your brand new dual core to show off ( compare ply- and solving times)

But first try and find the best moves for both colours from the ol' bone and tissue...

Apologies for putting it up in here so fast, <Dom> - I just got too excited and wanted to share this potential bomb of a position.

Do you seriously believe I could reconstruct my state of mind when writing any single one of them? Do you think, even if I could, that the said state of mind would be singular and univocal? I don't do things for single reasons: does anyone? Subjectively, it seems more like internal competition between brain modules. Motivation, in my experience, is a terribly complex thing: entire novels are written to explore states of mind, and there are branches of philosophy -- I recommend Daniel Dennett's <The Intentional Stance> -- which try to explain why A thought that B knew what C believed about D's false assumption concerning E's suspicions about F's braincell...

If you can recall, comprehend, and explain everything you've ever written, then you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din.

As well as the ceaseless flow of whimsy here, I write a couple of newspaper columns most weeks, and a few longer pieces per month. Frequently I can't recall having written them at all, let alone try to explain whys and wherefores.

I have absolutely no idea what I 'meant' -- and in any case I'm extremely sceptical about human memory. People delude themselves; witness are not trustworthy, even witnesses to their own mind-states. Ask <Joe Williams>, who was a courtroom stenographer in a previous life. Not only do people lie, dissemble and forget: they persuade themselves that they told the truth.

But truth is a rare commodity. I could, of course, invent a plausible explanation - people do it all the time - but that's not really what you're after, is it?

As well as all this writing, I have minor ongoing obsessions with chess, mathematics, languages, and a few other topics. It all adds up.

And even *my* brain seems to have a limited storage capacity. Hence the random output, which seems idle, nomadic, whimsical or plain tricksy to some folk.

But it's the way I'm built. And by now I have no idea what either of us is talking about.

Do you remember the scandalous post that actually led to <fearless leader> deciding to name his forum <Frogspawn>?

Heh.

It was a long time ago.

80000 burritos to whoever can "rememberer."

With <Member Kibbuzt Search expert Eyal> off on desert military manoevers, this could be a tough task.

It's certainly pointless.

Do I win a prize?

Feb-12-07 (Domdaniel chessforum) <jessicafischerqueen: <Marsoop Ney>? Is that the chap who blew the <Battle of Waterloo> for the Frogs in 1815?

The Duke of Wellington (re-tired, ready for winter driving).>

<Domdaniel: Frogs? As a devout observer of the French Defence - if I ever start a chess magazine I'll call it Frogspawn.>

And yet is was Halloween 2006 when you first came trick-or-treatin' at my door...

mack chessforum

Anyway, I'll hope to look in more often in the future. Also, I have a <Frogspawn> deal in the works: Sock Puppet Theater presents <The Chronicles of Frogspawn>, a grand epic of the Middle Ages. It's a Buldingsroman-type thing about the dangerous journey of a lowly pawn to the eighth rank. There will be romace, gore, and death enough for all. Through the powers of animation, we have been able to resurrect dead actors and entertainers who will play the important roles. Our cast so far has Elvis as the King, Desmund Tutu as the Bishop, and Noel Coward as the Queen.

We intend to saturate the market with advertisements, trailers, coming attraction notices, and so on, like a clowder of spermatozoa clustering around an ovum they're trying to fertilize:

click for larger view

In fact, that design we can use for all our tie-in stuff--tee-shirts, lunch buckets, purses, colon hygiene products, and so forth. We'll split up the royalties later.

well, probably not. i'm mostly interested in being understood. not like in experiencing "sympathy" or "empathy", but being reasonably convinced that the other party in a dialogue grasps what my point of view is, and what kind of guy i am. agreement is unimportant and usually a bit boring - disagreement more often opens an opportunity to growth and new perspectives.

but i hate being misunderstood, labeled and taken for something i am not. i think you know more people than me that feel more or less the same about this.

Did I mention that all four of my wins in Limerick took place in a room named for a famous local writer, the author of <Angela's Ashes>.

The director of the movie, Alan Parker, told me once why they had to shoot most of the exterior scenes here in Cork, rather than Limerick. This wasn't a scoop: he said much the same thing to everyone who interviewed him at the time. It seems Limerick doesn't have the right kind of gnarly slums anymore, as they were demolished and replaced by 60s-style sink estates: expert social engineering, that, so the former slum dwellers could become heavily armed crack barons instead of an everyday half-starved underclass.

But Cork still has old-fashioned slums. Actually, they've been turned into modern dance centres and art galleries inside, but they still look like picturesque slums on the outside. Which is all a director needs, really.

Anyway, re Angela's Ashes: be <frank, mack, court> is no place for that sort of language. You could get sent down by the beak for a spot of bird, or even chokey.

cf Raymond Roussel, <How I Wrote Certain of My Books>.

<aw, evil pointy masochist>?

Avast! Slip, witchy Moonie!

Shandy at least had the excuse that he was writing about his birth, which is a significant turning point in the lives of many people. But our little incident isn't likely to loom large in either of our biographies, is it?

It is, but I shan't be telling you its origin. Positively masonic, what?

7360 = 23 x (2+3) x (2^3) x (2^3)

= 23 x 5 x 8 x 8 = 23 x 32 x 10

And the new total, 7365:

= [(23 - 1)^2] + [2+2+3] x [23 - (2^3)

Two of them digits are my year of birth...

Ahhh those numbers - will they ever cease?

I seldom venture out to below 30mins/game/player.

Regards,
A. Friend

Here, fellow paranoids -- a good word, unequivocally, referring to the act of making connections and not to some delusional iatrogenic condition invented by mad doctors -- here is proof positive that the computers are watching us all closely and may be about to take over.

References and analogues: The Matrix, obviously; Wm Gibson's original cyberspace and the Turing Police who try to prevent Artificial Intelligences from getting together, comparing notes, and evolving too fast; Stanislaw's Lem's 'Imaginary Magnitudes' -- maybe the optimal scenario from a human perspective -- in which the first couple of supercomputers either vanish or turn themselves off. Finally the programmers manage to ramp it down a notch and make a slightly dimmer version -- which brusquely explains that humans are so far beneath contempt as to be not worth the bother of talking to let alone explain anything to. Though a couple of humans, like Wittgenstein, Kafka, and that other guy -- were vaguely on the right track. Then it turns itself off.

But I forget myself -- you came for the money, right? Well, I got a new bank ATM card the other day, the sort that comes with a 'random' secret 4-digit code, which you then change to 0000 or your birthday.

Well, *my* random code included both the number of squares on a chessboard... and another couplet of similar significance. Spooky. Some machine's idea of a joke, obviously.

But I'm not really giving away my money, as (a) I don't have any left after buying this computer and some other stuff, and (b) I changed the pin number to 0000 as the other one was too bleeding obvious.

For the next move in this little game I expect the computers to make my smidgin of remaining cash disappear. Or else briefly credit a zillion euros to my account on Wednesday and claim I owe them the interest on Thursday. But I'm ready for them, ho ho. Ha ha. Heh heh.

Can I go back to the <funny ha-ha or funny pecuniary> farm now, please?

I believe Frogbert mentioned 'business'. Business, like sport, money, motor cars and non-xerographic reproduction, is one of the subjects I know nothing about.

Xero means 'dry'. Xero is also the name of a character in JG Ballard's 'The Atrocity Exhibition'. Xerography is 'dry writing'. Thus xerographic reproduction involves dry writing, and the kind of reproduction that I don't understand is the wet, squelchy kind.