Saturday, March 12, 2005
Farewell Garry Kasparov. Don't go too far.
Garry Kasparov, the world's top ranked chess player 20 years running, announced his retirement from professional chess after winning the Linares tournament in Spain. I'll let others cover his reasons for retiring and plans for the future, and instead share the role Garry played in the beginnings of my interest in Chess.
This is a photo of two ads I framed together while working at the company formerly known as Claris. The text on the picture of Garry begins, "How do you make a computer blink?" It's an IBM ad about, I believe, the rematch between Kasparov and Deep Blue. I didn't play chess at the time, but followed the results of the match with interest, and perhaps as a result, started playing occasionally with one of my coworkers. I think he beat me every time, but for the first time in my life, I began to get an inkling of real chess stategy and tactics.
That led to my programming of a two-humans-on-one-computer, JavaScript-powered chess program that was the precursor to my online chess playing site Chess Hounds.
The rather un-chess-like ad on the right says "A long time ago, you were told that in the future people would use computers to share information simply and effortlessly," to which I added a post-it explaining that "Now we know that the future of communications is in Post-it notes. Computers are only useful for playing games like chess." That humongous mouth yelling into Garry's ear as he concentrated on the chess board was just to funny an image for me to ignore.
Well, enough of that story. Thank you Garry for enhancing my interest in the game, and best of luck to you in your future pursuits. Don't go too far.
(1) comments
This is a photo of two ads I framed together while working at the company formerly known as Claris. The text on the picture of Garry begins, "How do you make a computer blink?" It's an IBM ad about, I believe, the rematch between Kasparov and Deep Blue. I didn't play chess at the time, but followed the results of the match with interest, and perhaps as a result, started playing occasionally with one of my coworkers. I think he beat me every time, but for the first time in my life, I began to get an inkling of real chess stategy and tactics.That led to my programming of a two-humans-on-one-computer, JavaScript-powered chess program that was the precursor to my online chess playing site Chess Hounds.
The rather un-chess-like ad on the right says "A long time ago, you were told that in the future people would use computers to share information simply and effortlessly," to which I added a post-it explaining that "Now we know that the future of communications is in Post-it notes. Computers are only useful for playing games like chess." That humongous mouth yelling into Garry's ear as he concentrated on the chess board was just to funny an image for me to ignore.
Well, enough of that story. Thank you Garry for enhancing my interest in the game, and best of luck to you in your future pursuits. Don't go too far.
(1) comments
Friday, March 11, 2005
Don't forget, that pawn is pinned!
I was playing a game against ChessMaster 8000 today, and made a little blunder. I'd been piling up pressure on my opponent's e-pawn, and with everything ready to roll, pushed a pawn to attack it. I also had a knight and my queen attacking it, while ChessMaster had a knight and bishop protecting it. It couldn't avoid the confrontation by capturing my pawn because my queen had it pinned to it's king.
The plan was that I'd capture with my pawn, threatening ChessMaster's bishop and another knight. ChessMaster would capture with a bishop or knight, and I'd recapture with my knight. It would respond with it's remaining piece which would fall to my queen, checking it's king and preventing castling. I suppose it could have declined some of the trades, but all in all, things looked good. Then ChessMaster pushed the pawn.
Okay, I should have seen that possibility. Things wouldn't go as planned, but the position wasn't that bad. Except that then I forgot that the pawn was pinned to my opponent's king, so I thought my knight was threatened. So off went my knight to the side of the board. I came up with a plan for taking it into enemy territy, forcing a rook to slide over a space, and cause some other disruption. The bad news is that ChessMaster had other plans, and a few moves and two more little mistakes later, the game was over.
The moral of this story: don't forget what you already know. The pawn was pinned. My knight was safe. I should have brought my other knight out rather than running away.
The sad part of the story: at the beginning of the game, I'd falled victim to a trap I'd seen before and lost a rook and a pawn for nothing, but had succeeded in trapping the queen that had done the damage and capturing it in exchange for a bishop, equalizing material. I think a human opponent would have seen that coming and prevented it, but ChessMaster seemed to think I was already planning the pawn attack that later went wrong, and spent all it's time trying to prevent that.
Oh well, live and learn. My rating dropped 4 points.
(0) comments
The plan was that I'd capture with my pawn, threatening ChessMaster's bishop and another knight. ChessMaster would capture with a bishop or knight, and I'd recapture with my knight. It would respond with it's remaining piece which would fall to my queen, checking it's king and preventing castling. I suppose it could have declined some of the trades, but all in all, things looked good. Then ChessMaster pushed the pawn.
Okay, I should have seen that possibility. Things wouldn't go as planned, but the position wasn't that bad. Except that then I forgot that the pawn was pinned to my opponent's king, so I thought my knight was threatened. So off went my knight to the side of the board. I came up with a plan for taking it into enemy territy, forcing a rook to slide over a space, and cause some other disruption. The bad news is that ChessMaster had other plans, and a few moves and two more little mistakes later, the game was over.
The moral of this story: don't forget what you already know. The pawn was pinned. My knight was safe. I should have brought my other knight out rather than running away.
The sad part of the story: at the beginning of the game, I'd falled victim to a trap I'd seen before and lost a rook and a pawn for nothing, but had succeeded in trapping the queen that had done the damage and capturing it in exchange for a bishop, equalizing material. I think a human opponent would have seen that coming and prevented it, but ChessMaster seemed to think I was already planning the pawn attack that later went wrong, and spent all it's time trying to prevent that.
Oh well, live and learn. My rating dropped 4 points.
(0) comments
