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3. Nc2-e3 is the last move here, and Stockfish 9 at depth=38 says mate in 11, but after SF9's 3...Kd6 it's mate in <7>, for a total of 10 moves from the starting position in my previous post.

The last moves 6 moves to mate are of extra-ordinary geometrical beauty, and ruthless efficiency...

from here:

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to...

(NO outside help!)

Harmonizing light pieces is really an artform on its own. Just the light pieces, no "interference" by "space munchers" like rooks... Just let the kids play and dance.

I'm not sure machines are anywhere near having intentions yet. But philosopher Daniel Dennett is an advocate of 'the intentional stance', which entails acting towards other entities, human or not, as if they had intentions.

<On the Match - Carlsen played for penalties, in a soccer analogy, knowing that he is actually better at real chess than any other human.>

True :)

<To be fair, that no longer makes him much good at the game.>

He <tripped> and fell into Goerring's morphine stash - deadly combination.

<But I don't much like geometry. Number theory and calculus, yes, but the old Euclidean rag leaves me cold.>

This may sound a bit odd, but to this day I haven't looked up a single formula, I sorta hate them, and as I said just went off exploring in any direction with an interesting smell... In fact I did create a few formulas, more like repeating patterns and ratios that I found, and to my initial surprise I could barely find a single hit on google, which I found weird, with so many Math students and designers, architects in the world.

I did contact a math tutor here in Amsterdam, an A-student in fact, and upon showing my worksheets her eyes almost fell off; she had never done anything from the ground up to the extent that I had done, and in fact could not help me with some of my queries.

But I had a great time, sometimes frustration kicked in, tiredness, but the next morning I simply sat down and worked patiently towards a solution.

That amount of patience and non-(self) judgmental attitude I developed during that time, in recovering from the illness. A first for me in that manner.

I put out well over 50 work sheets with drawings and calculations, of which quite a number is way over my current head, yet without a single book or website to advise me. I wanted to do it "all by myself", which is why it was such a fun ride, that journey. Time was available in abundance, time pressure non existent. That was my advantage over students in schools with teachers and books.

And configurations of pieces on a chessboard were often the initiator.

Acid? Well, yes, of course. Mostly in the 70s - I'm an old fart, remember?

Can't recall if I ever mixed acid and opiates. But I wouldn't, would I? A lot of chess players are prudish about 'drugs' -- "Oh, I value my brain too highly to risk damaging it"...

I'm not even sure that such a thing as 'drugs' exists. Every chemical that effects the brain is different. You can't just lump them all together.

Don't think I ever had a bad trip, btw. Though I did have both good and bad experiences.

It has been a while since I did any of this stuff. (Ironically, your original guess about the long break in my chess 'career' was partly right. Though you got the reason wrong - I was not locked up.)

Anyhow, I don't want to fall into the trap of nostalgia for something which does not deserve it.

Yeah the reason I asked you about acid is because I remember you talking about opiates and I think the stereotypical chess players see alllllllll drugs as bad. You seem a bit more open minded than most here in that sense.

<Can't recall if I ever mixed acid and opiates. But I wouldn't, would I?>

I wish I could remember the details, but I suspect it was about 1983, and a maths professor fed a high end computer of that day a rather simple geometry question regarding a triangle. The need for the computer was to prove the answer.

That computer had not been programmed with the formula that would have relatively easily solved the problem. To everyone's surprise, the computer solved the problem by calculating all 6 trigonometric functions for each of the 180 degrees, one degree at a time-and then it all gets hazy for me...

I'm muddling through somehow. Of course, things would be better if I had my B-Girls here to back me up. But Let It B, I say.

By Loudon Wainwright ...

<Used to have a red guitar, Till I smashed it one drunk night
Smashed it in the classic way
As Peter Townsend might> ...

Next Step: as a very young person, I lived in an Irish village/town named Skibbereen. Nobody was sure just where the name originated, but the prevailing theory was that (like the Danish/Swedish 'Skibby') it came from a Scandinavian word for 'boat' or 'ship'.

I have also visited Skibby in Denmark.

No? Well, it's *really* great to hear from you again! Truly. Welcome back. A couple of years is nothing. I recently took about six months off, and nothing much happened.

Just the other day I was trying to think of Lennon lines to counter my brother's idiotic claim that the Beatles were "just a boy band".

I mean, come on. Boy bands in the Westlife sense didn't really exist yet. And 60s boy bands (Walker Bros? Monkees?) weren't so bad either. I'm still a Scott Walker fan.

And then I began to think of John's writing. Like 'Working Class Hero' - ("And you think you're so clever and classless and free, but you're still firkin peasants as far as I can see" ... ")

And so on. There are many more. John was just so bloody brilliant.

Macca had some kind of musical genius too. His songs were sometimes bland, but he was brilliant at conjuring up harmonies.

So wot? Maybe it doesn't really matter much. But if you ever want to persuade people, or convert them to some other point of view, or even turn them into robotic scientologists (heh) -- well, the skills are there, waiting to be used.

Apart from those practical uses, well, you could probably write some excellent stories if you had to.

Herman's Hermits, Chad and Jeremy, Peter and Gordon.

<weren't so bad either.>

The Monkees were fantastic. The rest were pretty decent.