Growing old and demented May 17, 2006
Posted by dorigo in chess, games.2 comments
That is how I feel today…
I have been a chessplayer for more than 20 years, and I have learned that a good measure of my ability to concentrate, to think fast, to entertain logical thinking in a pure form is provided by my chess game more than by my programming skills or by my physical intuition.
It is just like measuring your physical shape by timing how fast you run around the block. You do not get a complete picture, but for sure if you get a lousy score you know there is something wrong.
The thing is, I played two chess games last Saturday at the second and third round of the playoffs for the Chicago Industrial Chess League. And I lost the first in a very bad way. That is, I thought I had let the game go once, by blundering a piece in a balanced position. But I let it go twice, and only realized it today, when my friend FRITZ 8 analyzed the game for me.
After blundering a knight, and then sacrificing an exchange to unbalance the position and make it sharp, I did manage to mess things up a bit. Of course, the game was objectively totally lost -I was playing with a rook for a queen- but since this was a team tournament I felt obliged to play on and keep the hope alive…
In fact, the strategy did work well, because my opponent somehow lost his thread, and we arrived in the following position with still 10 moves before the time control (and I had some 10 minutes left):
Before reaching this position (it is black's move), I had been dreaming of combinations based on Bh3 followed by Ra2, which would force a draw in some variations - or even mate to the white king. My opponent was a good player, though, and I did not expect him to fall for those cheapos. But here, with ten minutes to spare, I looked at Bh3 and got scared by a ghost variation, where in the attempt to threaten mate I got mated myself. I totally messed up two variations together, but it was really not difficult to calculate:
1….Bh3!! 2.Qe5+ f6!
and white has to give up his queen to avoid getting mated!
What I missed is that on 1….Bh3 2.Nf5+ black does not fear to play 2…gxf5 3.Qg5+??? Kf8?? 4.Rb8 mate, because of 3….Bxg5!!! DEMENTED ME!
The only excuse I can bring is that it would have been too good to be true: I really was not believing any more I could save the game…
After Bh3!, the resulting position would see black an exchange up for two connected passed pawns, and a draw would be the most probable result, with slightly better chance for black!
This morning FRITZ gave me the horrible news: I had blundered twice, not once. I would have been proud of saving such a totally lost position, because it would have given me credit for continuing to play a rook down for fifteen moves!
Instead, I feel all my age plus twenty years tonight. Dementia is making its way through my nervous cells…
Prodi presents his ministers May 17, 2006
Posted by dorigo in news, politics.add a comment
This morning Romano Prodi, soon-to-be Italy's Prime Minister, presented a list of ministers to Giorgio Napolitano, the newly elected President of the italian Republic.
I am quite happy with his choice of a team of politicians, who with only a few notable exceptions are all members of the center-left parties. Prodi would have surely liked to choose more "technicians" to form a competent team; but, having to reckon with a very narrow majority of votes in the Senate, he did the right thing: he secured as much support as he could from all his allies by committing them to institutional charges in the new government.
The government, this way, will be more solid, and hopefully will not suffer from insider blackmailing: small parties threatening to leave the coalition and force a crisis, that is.
I believe that being a Minister is very un-demanding to the intellect ("those who know, do; those who don't know, teach; those who can't teach, supervise; those who can't supervise, they are made ministers"), and therefore I am not too worried to see politicians sit as ministers. A notable exception is the Ministry of Economy - a charge that requires some vision. Fortunately, that is one of the few chairs that Prodi assigned to a "tech", Padoa Schioppa.
Let me note, in passing, that the intelligence required to cover the charge of Minister of Economy is the main reason why Tremonti did such a lousy job when he had it, in the former government.
The Hyperball algorithm May 17, 2006
Posted by dorigo in Blogroll, computers, internet, mathematics, personal, physics, science.add a comment
Ok - I promised I would write something about the work my students Mia and Diego are doing for their Master's thesis.
The subjects of their theses are different, but the tool they are using is in fact the same, the algorithm I developed three years ago and then specialized last year during my appointment as convener of the Jet Energy and Resolution working group: the Hyperball algorithm.
The algorithm is, in a sentence, not much more than a fancy way to compute an average. The fact that one is working in a N-dimensional space (with N easily larger than 30, say), and that the algorithm determines the most fruitful way to make the computation, given N, and given the base of data available, is only a unnecessary detail. But details, for physicists, are fun. So here is the rest of the story. You find a very detailed and (hehm!) clear explanation at the following link:
http://qd.typepad.com/6/2005/06/the_hyperballs_.html
An example of what happens when you apply the algorithm to correct hadronic jet energies is instead given in
http://qd.typepad.com/6/2005/06/a_powerful_new_.html
Both are blog entries from last year's Quantum Diaries blog… Enjoy!
