Slashdot Mirror
Chessbase and Christmas Puzzlers
A number of you might remember our Christmas Chess Puzzler. Frederic Friedel and I have stayed in contact over the last couple of months and he recently put together a piece talking about the puzzler and Slashdot, as well as narratives of other chess puzzlers. Frederic runs Chessbase, one of the best chess resources I've seen. That leads to an interesting question: Would you folks like occasional puzzlers like this? Post your feeling on it below.
Chess is a fine game though I find the rules to be a little ad hoc and for me this makes the game less than elegant. Go, on the other hand, has a tiny set of very elegant and natural rules and yet it has some of the richest gameplay that can be found on a board. For those who haven't met the game yet it's played with a large rectangular grid. Players take turns in placing stones of their colour (black or white) one by one on the board. Two neighbouring stones are considered to be connected. A connected group is an army. Free grid points adjacent to an army are called liberties. An army with no liberties is considered captured and is taken from the board. That's basically all there is to it - the rest are details. It appeals to a lot mathematicians because of the topological nature of the rules! It's the national board game of Japan with a big following there. It seems less well known in the US which is a great pity. Another cool thing about Go is that in a few days a human get up to the standard that computers are at. It's an amazing challenge to write a good Go program! I had a quick look for links with introductions. This seems OK. For obvious reasons it's quite hard to do a good web search for information about Go.
-- SIGFPE
I went and read the Chessbase stuff. Wow, do I feel ignorant now. "reciprocal zugzangs..." WTF??
I like puzzles, but I think I would do better with little programming puzzles - like, write an ANSI C program to do "X" using only the standard libraries that is no longer than 250 characters... for various interesting hacks "X".
That I could tackle. But this level of chess is like high-energy physics - I don't even have the vocabulary.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
It's really just about ego - who wouldn't kill to tell their grandchildren that "I solved the Slashdot Christmas Chess puzzler of 2000".
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
you should definitely pay the site regular visits if you are interested in science, technology, computers, programming and weird stuff in general.
Sort of makes you step back and realize the site never really lost the wide ranging appeal wich brought most of us here in the first place. Of note " Weird stuff in general. sort of sums it all up.
Great article, Although I never even came close to finding the correct solution.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Good puzzles of all kinds are great ways to excersise the mind.
There should be two simple ground rules:
All puzzles should have answers that the poster has verified before hand. There is nothing worse than the puzzles floating around the internet that have no answers. Major brain drain.
Puzzles should not be too easy (nor too hard) for the slashdot crowd. If the puzzles can be answered in 5 minutes, then where is the challenge. Likewise, if they can't be solved, why bothered.
Good Luck
Steven
Yeah, Mr. Smullyan is great for logic puzzles. He's one of several prof's that I would *love* to take a course from!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I liked the Christmas puzzler. Just put 'em in their own category, so those of us with accounts can filter 'em if we so choose. And remember: make sure they're suitably geekish. Chess is definitely a good place to start.
(Humming "One Night in Bangkok" for some reason...)
-W-
Is it all journey, or is there landfall?
--Ellison & van Vogt, 'The Human Operators'
I love the puzzlers on a lot of the websites, even some question of the day type things.
But please, please, keep them relatively intelligent, and perhaps find a way to ban comments from appearing on them for a brief period of time so you don't have people shouting out the answers. And then whoever submits the first post (Still have the comments, just hide them) wins a "Slashdot headline" award, where it says they're name and their solution. Please deposit $0.02 and drive through, thank you.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
I think that these types of puzzles should get their own section on slashdot. That way all the people who hate them can ignore them and the rest of us can try to figure them out. Also there should be more than just chess problems, there should be a good variety. This way different people can apply their skills. Not everybody is good at chess and not everybody is good with words.
Nascantur in Admiratione. (Let them be born in Wonder)
Or something like the online version of Chu-Chu Rocket. :)
What might be a nice idea would be to have some ongoing puzzles, of the 'classic' variety, like the knight's tour and such. These sorts of puzzles have been around forever and a day, and it's not so much a matter of solving them, as all the implications of the solution.
In a book I read recently, there were quite a few connections drawn between chess and chess puzzles, and the mathematics behind things like the knights tour and the mathematics behind other forms of 'entertainment' like classical music and such.
These sorts of puzzles are likely to inspire conversations on those related topics, and many of them could be quite enlightening..
Perhaps there could even be a small karma reward (like 1 point) for each regular puzzle, and some random awards for contributions to the ongoing puzzles?
B.
keep that in mind when picking the puzzles. i wouldnt mind if they were some times programer based but i would also like(and i am sure others woudl too) some other topics for puzzles. how about:
chemistry (organic systesis)
math (proofs, logic, calc)
etc...
Basiclly keep it geeky and keep it changing.
:)
"How are you? How are your sons?" asks Igor. "You have three sons as I remember, don't you? But I have forgotten their ages."
"Yes, I do have three sons," replies Pavel. "The product of their ages is equal to 36." Looking around and then pointing to a nearby house, Pavel says, "The sum of their ages is equal to the number of windows in the building over there."
Igor thinks for a minute and then responds, "Listen, Pavel, I cannot find the ages of your sons."
"Oh, I am very sorry", says Pavel; "I forgot to tell you that my oldest son has red hair."
Now Igor is able to find the ages of the brothers. Can you do it?
Solution (From The Chicken from Minsk by Yuri Chernyak & Robert Rose)
If you like puzzles, you may like my page <shameless plug>Playful Thoughts</shameless plug>.
Well, any game with complete information is just a big tree search problem. Be it chess, go, checkers, tic-tac-toe, reversi, connect-four or many other games. Both go and chess have rather large search trees - for both games, the search tree from the start position is too large to ever fully traverse, hence both games need to be played by evaluating positions.
-- Abigail, who likes chess, but prefers bridge.
Anyone into logic/chess puzzles should check out the books by Raymond Smullyan. His best ones are set in some famous literary environment (e.g. Alice in Wonderland, Sherlock Holmes, Arabian Nights, etc.) in which he writes a clever story filled with logic and/or chess puzzles. His chess puzzles are sort of the reverse of the usual in that they ask you to figure out what happened, not figure out how to win. Pretty cool stuff.
For those of you not familiar with it, Go is a Japanese equivalent to chess. Some claim that Chess is a distant descendant of it. It's much more artistic than Chess -- you can tell a whole lot about a person from their Go playing.
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-- Slashdot sucks.
"Mastroid": have discovered a truly marvellous solution to this problem, which however this textbox is not large enough to contain.
Now that's a classic.