I think there are still worse chess moves than those of Tim’s problems though. I saw a master doing one: _after_ making a blunder which would have caused his opponent to administer mate in one, and setting the opponent’s clock in motion, he realized what he had done and, thinking he was not being seen by the opponent who was at the other side of the large tournament room, took the move back, setting back his own clock in motion.

That move did not even cause the master to lose the game: incredibly, the arbiter was rather soft and only gave him a time deficit. However, the shame follows him everywhere he goes now.

Cheers,
T.

indeed, the chess board is the theatre of artistic works, both in case of a grandmaster playing an original plan, or in case of a composer conceiving some spectacular clockwork manouver.

How to call, if not art, the composition of a Babson task ? (see Tim’s web site for examples, but a Babson task is a problem when to white’s threat of mate black responds by promoting a pawn to either a queen, a rook, a bishop, or a knight: to each of these promotions it corresponds an answer whereby white himself promotes a pawn to the same piece as black, in order to deliver another forced mate).

I think computers are a long way from “solving” chess, although they do play better than humans nowadays. But if they did, we would still enjoy chess, because we would NOT understand their solution of the game.

There is a proof of what I say. Indeed, some endgame positions with 5 or six men HAVE been solved. If you play through the “best possible moves” found by the computer, though, you utterly fail to understand them. The moves often remain mysterious until the very end. See again Tim’s site for endgames solved by computers: in the site you can actually play them over on a java interface.

Cheers,
T.

That reminds me of the artist Marcel Duchamp, who has been quoted as saying something like:

“When artist and spectator play a game of chess it is like designing something or constructing a mechanism of some kind.
The competitive side of it has no importance. …”.

That in turns reminds me of chess and the minimax theorem.
From some web sites (I don’t link to them here so that I avoid spam filtering):

“… The Minimax Theorem: If a Minimax of one player corresponds to a Maximin of the other player, then that outcome is the best both players can hope for. So if there is the possibility of a tie game, then that is the most likely outcome. This outcome is called a Saddle point. …”.

“… In 1928/9, Kalmar … proved a minimax theorem for chess, a zero-sum game with perfect-
information. … Kalmar, L. 1928-9. “Uber Eine Shlussweise aus dem Endlichen ins Unendliche.” Acta Universitatis Szegediensis/Sectio Scientiarum Mathematicarum. 3:121-130. …”.

The fact that the minimax-optimal chess game is not yet known seems to me to be a function of the limitations of current computers, like what Tommaso said in his blog entry “On the significance of mass bumps”:
“… a so-called toy Monte Carlo technique – a powerful tool only possible thanks to our friend, CPU. Note that this is no joke: when I started my career as a particle physicist, toy Monte Carlo techniques were seldom used, because a meaningful answer usually required too much computer power. Now these things can run in background on your PC while you play DOOM …”.

Maybe in a few years we will know the optimal chess game. Until then, artists like Duchamp can play to try to approach it, and competitors can play competitively.
Discovery of the optimal chess game would probably please Duchamp’s ghost, but what affect would it have on competitive players?

Tony Smith