A Quantum Diaries Survivor

Ok, I seem to be in a good vein lately with blitz games on the Internet Chess Club. I play at home, after a hard day at work (oh well, ok, I do not carry lead bricks around, but I do feel tired nonetheless when I get out of the evening train), and I am not supposed to have much inventiveness left. It does show from my results: my Elo rating for 5-minute blitz is floating at around 1850 points lately, which is at least 150 points less than it used to be. But still, I can salvage a good game for annotation here every once in a while.

So here goes today’s game: a nice 19-move attack.

1.e4 d6 2.d4 Nf6 3.Nc3 g6 4.f4 Bg7 5.Bd3 0-0

This is called “Pirc defence“, and the setup chosen by white is called “austrian attack“. (more…)

I know, I am growing old… Do not get me wrong though - I still believe chess comes second as a means of providing pleasure to me. But this evening it came a close second indeed.

I was playing blitz chess on the internet - 5 0 games on the internet chess club (my handle there is tonno, by the way), which means five minutes for all your moves, and no move-by-move increments. After a French advance opening rather sloppily played by both of us, we reached the following position:

I am white, and black is to move. Can you see that white is better ? It should not be difficult to acknowledge, given the dominion of the c-file, the space, and the venomous “bad” bishop on g5 - a bishop which in similar positions white would love to get rid of, but which is instrumental in creating a bind here.

In the diagrammed position the correct continuation would have been 26. … Rc7 27.h3, Rhc8 28.Qb2 and the game could have gone on for many more moves. But I counted on the enticing position of my queen on c3, which had been only apparently placed there to hope for 26….Qxa3?? 27.Nc5+ (winning the black queen), as probably black thought, but to prepare a much meaner trick.

As black moved his knight with 26…. Na7, I felt a deep, deep wave of pleasure as I slid my queen up the c-file, only to stop it one square short of capturing black’s c8 rook: my move was played instantly, as if I were in a trance. I had not calculated the details in any way: it HAD to be the correct move. In these instances, which happen extremely rarely to me, I feel like a complete idiot savant: I do not have to compute, I see the solution.

27.Qc7!!!! is one of the most brilliant, beautiful, and esthetically pleasing moves it ever happened me to play in 23 years of “serious” chess practice. The queen stops en prise of the rook, immortal and yet certain of its own sacrifice. It can’t be taken, and yet it must be.

After 27….Rxc7 28.Rxc7+ Ke8 29.Rxa7, black paused and thought for a while. It is clear that he is utterly lost, but it is not easy to resign such a position. So he played 29…., Qd7 - a counter-queen sacrifice which is obviously not giving any hope. I replied 30.Ra8+, and black resigned. There follows 30….Qc8 31.Raxc8 Kd7 32.R1c7 mate.

Putting the position into Fritz 8 only diminishes my joy very slightly - everything is correct, there is nothing to blame about white’s play. But the fact that the silicon monster sees Qc7 in a fraction of a second is kind of annoying: it is just as if beauty was of no interest to computers: that move is worth 10 pawns, but it needs no more than a very quick look to them.

I now recall the last time I had such a vision during a chess game - and I reported about that experience in my Quantum Diaries blog too.

Here are some highlights of blogs I visit that feature new interesting content:

• David Orban has been recently discussing new features in Second Life and other news in the world of innovations.
•  Tim Krabbe’ has an interesting post about the Rxc3 sac in the Sicilian defence. Only for chess addicts.
• The quantum pontiff has been on a diet as of late. Check out his graph…
• Peter Woit has resumed his blogging after a trip to Italy. He has a few interesting links out in his latest post .
• My friend Helge is now blogging from a wordpress site - I will update the link on the right when I have the energy!
• Alex Janssen has a quite interesting post out about ssh .
• My friend Jeff has not been stuck to the relativity post as me and other dumbos who just clicked on the link on the right column here thought… I now fixed it .
• Louise Riofrio’s site is always active and entertaining, worth visiting on a daily basis.
• The same can be said about the Backreaction site…
• Resonaances has a few nice posts out about dark matter.
• Last but not least, Kea’s M theory lesson series has reached item number 30. I admit I do not understand much, but I am notoriously dumb… It is great study material.

Chess is fascinating enough as a game, but as a brainteaser it is arguably even more so. Unfortunately, the world of chess problems is not as well-known. While everybody knows what a “mate in two” stipulation is for a chess problem (”white to move forces a mate in two to the black king“), or even a typical study (”white to move and win“), many would be surprised to know that there are dozens of different meaningful stipulations.

The best known ones, beyond the simple mate in two or three, are those involving things such as white taking back one move and mating in one, black and white collaborating to mate white, or white forcing black to mate himself. But there are many more, and each of them is interesting and artistic in its own right. Artistic in the sense that by composing problems with such stipulations, one can conceive manouvers which possess a beauty of their own.

I know a bit about that world, since I have composed chess problems myself in my youth. But today, as I checked the chess diary in Tim Krabbe’ site , I stumbled into a kind of problem I had never heard before: the worst possible move.

Basically, the idea is to put together a position where all but one of the legal moves white can make mate black in one move, while there is one, and only one (the worst possible move, that is), which totally turns the tables, forcing black to mate white.

In the position shown on the left, taken from Tim’s site (the problem is by Noam Elkies, 2006), white has 28 legal moves available. 27 of these mate black, by the twenty-eight (1.Qxc5?? - one should invent a new symbol, stronger than the question mark, to tag such a disastrous blunder) forces black to administer mate to the white monarch: 1….,Nxc5, mate. 

Here there is a shift of paradigm from the brainteaser itself to the brain-teasing activity of putting together such a composition. Chess problem composers know quite well that it is much, much harder to put together a beautiful chess problem than to solve one, but in the case of the “worst possible move” stipulation (as in a few others) the problem by itself is usually quite easy or even trivial to solve, and the point is exclusively about putting together the position which brings the stipulation to the extreme.

The extreme is finding the position where the number of possible moves that white can make, all but one of which mate black, is the largest. So far, the record is 50. You can keep up-to-date on the developments of this new idea in the world of chess problems at item #334 in http://www.xs4all.nl/~timkr/chess2/diary.htm .

A chess match played between Moscow and London by two chess prodigies - the 7-years-old russian Konstantin Savenkov and the 8-years-old british Darius Parvizi-Wayne - ended in a draw the other day due to a hitherto unseen reason.

The match was being played in Pushkin Square in Moscow and Trafalgar Square in London. Moves were broadcast between the two locations as soon as the players moved giant chess pieces made of ice on walk-on chessboards. The two players had none other than Anatoly Karpov (left, in a Reuters picture) and Nigel Short as trainers. Everything was set for a nice entertaining game, but weather played its part this time.

The temperature was too warm in both locations: 13°C in London and 5°C in Moscow. Speeding up the time control to only 30 seconds a move did not help, and after a few moves the two players had to agree to a draw due to the meltdown of the pieces.

I am happy to have been tagged by Andrew Jaffe (http://www.andrewjaffe.net/blog/) for a silly blog-game, consisting in posting five things you might not know about me. As with most die-hard bloggers, I think most of myself is here for anybody to read already, but let me see… I unfortunately have to dig deep in my personal life. Here is my list.

1. I played several tournament chess games against grandmasters (among them Delchev, Vogt, Dizdarevic, Godena), losing every single time, and a dozen or so against international masters, drawing once (against Deev). I won simultaneous display games against Wojtkiewicz and Skembris, drew against Karpov, Ehlvest and Benjamin (plus a few more I can’t recall). Online, I won several times against grandmasters in blitz games.
2. I have not spent even a single night in a hospital as a patient. It did happen once when Ilaria was born, but I was just little more than a by-stander then.
3. I practiced discus throw in the nineties, never making it to the 30 meters line.
4. According to a recent estimate, I had about 15,000 orgasms in my life - roughly two thirds of which without external help. 20,000 seems a quite reachable goal if I live long enough.
5. I can’t eat cheese.

Ok, so I now need to tag three blogger friends. Let’s see. Ok, be it Pietro (http://pietrovischia.altervista.org/blog/), Louise (http://riofriospacetime.blogspot.com/), and Helge (http://cow-gone-mad.blogspot.com/).

Not kidding.

After a few weeks of absence, I went back to pay a visit to Tim Krabbé’s refreshing Open chess diary, http://www.xs4all.nl/~timkr/chess2/diary.htm . Tim is a web-friend of mine, a strong chessplayer, and inexhaustible source of chess trivia of the highest level, besides being a talented writer of novels (many of you have probably seen the movie “The Vanishing”, featuring Sandra Bullock and Jeff Bridges: it is based on one of his novels, although he is unhappy of the movie).

If you visit his site, besides getting hooked, you will find item 330, which is a jaw-dropping demonstration that indeed, computers -even the strongest ones in circulation, that is, including Fritz 10 and Rybka 2.2- cannot play chess. In two ways: first, by not seeing a mate in one or a queen en prise. Second, by showing they do not know the application of one of the most important practical rules of the game.

If you love chess, you are strongly encouraged to check Tim’s diary. If only to claim we humans are still superior to machines… However, the problem is in the way we humans program the darn silicon beasts!

Below is a report of my game with Alex Pehas, played yesterday on board 2 of the Dragons-Fermi match for the Chicago Industrial Chess League.

Alex Pehas (Dragons) - Tommaso Dorigo (Fermi), Chicago Industrial Chess League, 12/5/061.Nf3 d5 2.c4 c6 3.g3 Bf5This early sortie of the lightsquared bishop is playable although not best. It is a move I often employ with black in these kinds of positions to avoid the main lines where knowledge of theory (which I do not possess) might prove a factor. It’s a bit like saying “now we’re both on our own, pal”.

The Fermi team was hosted by the Lucent Technology Dragons tonight, for the fourth round of the 2006-07 Chicago Industrial Chess League (see http://www.chicagochessleague.org/ ). I played as black on board 2, and won a complicated game. We won the match by the score of 5-1, with wins by Gustavo Garzon, myself, Irwin Gaines, Brian Degraf and Herman Cease on the top five boards.

I will report about my game later… For now, I just post a few pictures of the match below.

This is Brian (black) during the opening phase of his game.

Irwin (white) is thinking deep…

Herman (white) just out of the opening.

Me and my opponent are both in deep thinking in a complex middlegame.

And finally, Gustavo, our top board and a player of great class, is writing down his move in a dominant position.