[CURTAIN]>

Hello Alan,

I saw

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and thought ... Qxh2+ immediately. Then it occurred to me that the white king could escape through g3 but then I saw the other black rook

click for larger view

and that was all. Instead of these details I prefer to type just 'pattern recognition finds ...'.

This process is mainly a memory recall operation, not a complex network of conjectures/deductions/conclusions. Therefore, your Sherlock Holmes (who obviously was experiencing a physical urge) mystery ending does not quite seem to apply.

Kind regards,

I haven't read it in I suppose 25 years. I was inspired by events in a small and beautiful village of Holt in Norfolk. http://www.theguardian.com/books/20... I am afraid I have not read a novel in quite a while and my comprehension is shocking; I had to read the same passages over and over again. Hopefully I'll get back in the swing again soon. It is not a big book.

Today, after I began reading it, I watched a series of Hancock's Half Hours on YouTube via Chromecast. One of them was called The Poison Pen. Hancock had been sending letters to himself. Very funny. Live TV.

It is understood that The World side is just a load of computers - that's fair enough. But I suspect that Naiditsch, a very busy man, has probably plugged in his computer as well. Why not?

So what is the end result? Loads of chess programs battling it out at incredibly slow speed.

My dear <offramp>

Pardon the barging in, but I saw your comment on the chessforums kibbutzing list and it caught my eye.

I thought exactly the same as you in your last post here, and I said as much- in way, way more insulting terms- on a WORD vs A GUY or GIRL game a few years ago.

Since then I don't think that so much. I think that Centaur Chess- people/person+ engines vs. people/person + engines- is so different from mano a womano OTB chess that they should be considered different games.

More different than the difference between <BOBBY FISCHER TRADEMARK SHUFFLE 960 DEGREES IN THE SHADE CHESS> and classical chess.

It's not just people plugging in moves given by engines- there is a skill set here. It's trying to manipulate and predict what a bunch of different lines from a bunch of different engines might make the position look like way down the line.

I think that a voting crowd of enthusiasts + engines is stronger than a single person + engine(s).

But of course there is a real skill to manipulating the engines - and apparently that is the enjoyment they find over there; just not for me. Personally, I think its a sign of the end-times for chess, but then I may just be a grumpy old man.

<Colleagues>

I should also point out that Centaur chess isn't just about manipulating engine evaluations. It's also about human knowledge, understanding and intuition about what positions with winning chances look like.

There are several master class punters on the team who prefer to "eye up" the possibilities without using engines.

<Z-dawg> Did you ever read the biography of Dirac, "The Strangest Man Who Ever Lived"?

Dirac is a hero... and there are some good stories about how he meet and courted his wife (Wigner's sister I believe).

E.g. that there is an optimal distance to observe a women. Or when he introduced his wife as "Wigner's sister".

I love physics, even though I think some of this modern stuff has gone off the rails (no experiments).

For instance, the reason I don't believe in the multi-verse theory, is that it would mean that in some universe Feynman would think quantum mechanics boring.

"Last night I was playing over Johannes Zukertort versus Berthold Englisch, London 1883 with a coworker after work. There were these two pretty, but kinda fat girls drinking at the bar and being loud. They had what I could have sworn was an Irish accent. I'm a big fan of girls from the UK, so I struck up a conversation. I asked them, "So... you two ladies are from Ireland?" I could see immediately that I had offended them. The brunette said, "WALES!"

<Frederic Friedel
Editor-in-Chief of the ChessBase News Page. Studied Philosophy and Linguistics at the University of Hamburg and Oxford, graduating with a thesis on speech act theory and moral language. He started a university career but switched to science journalism, producing documentaries for German TV. In 1986 he co-founded ChessBase.>

He graduated with what?? <"A thesis on speech act theory and moral language.">