January 25, 2005
Chess Players give 'Check' a new meaning
Excerpt: (NYT) JAY BONIN, an international chess master who lives in New York, is one of the busiest players in the country. He takes part in face-to-face tournament matches every week and also regularly participates in games of speed chess at chessclub.com, the Internet Chess Club. He estimated that he has played more than 20,000 games online in the last three or four years.
Mr. Bonin is much more active than most elite players, but he is doing what most serious players have long thought is necessary: playing frequently to stay in peak form. Now, however, because of the widespread availability of databases of games and the growing strength of chess software, such activity may actually be making it easier to beat him.
Mr. Bonin said that he recently lost a tournament game to a weaker player who had not competed in years, but who had sprung a surprise move on him in one of Mr. Bonin's favorite openings.
''The line he played reeked of preparation,'' he said.
[maybe this is why my rating never goes up despite 40,000 games of ICC bullet chess in the last 7 years]
Turing Train Terminal
Nice idea, but it's really just a finite automaton, if I understand it correctly. They need to add the little barrels that the train can pick up and put down on a long track, the "tape."
Chris Ashley: Look, See
An admirable effort to find art in simple blobs of HTML: link
Added later: Here's Ashley's thinking about this technique. This stuff is very nice, I like it a lot. Some excerpts:
The making of any visual arts, or any art for that matter, is always about solving problems. Whether it's how to depict an object, how to use color, how to convey meaning through an image, or even what to make art about, an artist is is alway confronting problems, asking questions about what to do, and posing possible solutions, which leads to more questions and, hopefully, more solutions....
I already knew how to make hand-coded HTML tables, but given the potential complexity of code required to make an image I knew that I could make these drawings fairly quickly in an HTML editor. For all their supposed simplicity, it's not as easy as it looks; the hardest part is, of course, the question of what what to make.
I have found that a weblog can be a very effective work space that, for my purposes, became a studio, gallery, and archive...
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