Guaranteed to cause mental breakdowns
Chess is the greatest of board games. But, personally, it lost its charm
years ago.
It is warfare in a strait jacket, or, cie vous plait, in suits of armor.
Choice is
severely limited and, despite the very wide range of possible moves,
regardless
we are discussing a bounded set. Which is why a computer can play chess
even at a Grand Master level.
Anyway, there are severe limitations to traditional chess. To mix metaphors
again,
try playing soccer on a field 20 feet square.
Years before Bobby Fischer came up with a new version of the game called
Shuffle Chess, I had an idea which never took hold, called Napoleon.
Seems to me it is far superior to Fischer's idea, but you be the judge.
Also called "Fischer Random Chess," his 1996 idea was that pieces in
King's row
should always be randomly arranged at the start of each game, with only
one restriction, one Rook should be on the Right half , the other Rook
somewhere on the Left half. His idea was to nullify the many, many
studies of chess openings that , by then, had exhausted all
possible logical first moves and optimal responses. That is,
all chess game openings have already been scripted.
And who needs that ?
Napoleon
The first time I tried to promote my version of chess was in Albuquerque
in 1983. There were a couple of subsequent attempts also with no results.
In chess all pieces have point values :
Q = 9
R = 5
Kt = 3-1/2
B = 3
P = 1
Total points on board at start of game = 40, although some people
regard Knights as equal in value to Bishops, in which case the tally is 39.
Because the game has not been "field tested" the possibility exists that
a new design for a board might be the best alternative, say a board
which is 12 X 12 instead of 8 X 8 squares. ( 144 squares vs 64 squares )
Also, some kind of optimal rules which can only derive from experience
might need to be agreed upon for initial set-up of pieces.
But here is the idea, which ought to be very playable from the start :
Use two chess boards ( 128 squares ).
Each player sets up in secret before start of game. This is accomplished
by use of a large box lid or piece of plywood, etc, placed upright
in the middle of the field of battle ( between the 2 chess boards )
while players arrange their forces as each sees fit.
Three chess sets are made use of, that is, three sets of chess pieces.
Each player has 100 points at the start of the game.
Each player can choose any combination of pieces he ( or she ) desires,
adding up to 100 points, taken from available chess pieces from the 3 sets.
First, each player makes selections of pieces adding up to 80 points
in value. These pieces are then displayed to his opponent. In other
words,
1/5th of each player's choices are made after this initial "display of
force" and
are a military secret until the start of the game.
This provision is designed to have give either player workable defense
against
radical selection strategies like one player choosing nearly all rooks or
bishops.
The final 20 points in value of pieces are then selected by each player.
Each player then positions all of his pieces.
The pieces can be positioned any place on one's half of the field of
battle,
but initially at least 4 rows back from the dividing line
between the two chess boards
The King is always placed on the back row, but can be anywhere on that row.
When each player has chosen and positioned his pieces, the game commences.
Time limit per move = 30 seconds.
A player may take up to 1 minute but as soon as 30 seconds is exceeded
he must remove one pawn from the board at a location of his choosing.
This should be done immediately following his move, before his opponent
takes his turn.
10 "special times" ( time outs ) allowed per game in which a player may
take
up to 2-1/2 minutes to make a move.
Possibly these time limits might need to be modified, and in "gentlemen's
games"
simple courtesy might be better than clocked time moves, but at least to
give an idea.
May the best field marshal win.
Respectfully submitted -
Guderian
===========================================================
Political Pundit Whose Passion is for the Fate of Kings
By DYLAN LOEB McCLAIN
Published: October 9, 2010
*
Charles Krauthammer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The
Washington Post, occasionally takes up his pen and instead of lashing liberal
causes
writes about one of his passions: chess.
The New York Times
Krauthammer, in a recent interview, said he had written many columns on
chess, including one each year _for 20 years in Time magazine_
(http://www.time.com/time/columnist/krauthammer/article/0,9565,1054411,00.html)
. When he
was nominated for the Pulitzer in 1986, he said one of the 10 columns
submitted to the judges was about one of the world championship matches
between
_Garry Kasparov_ (http://www.kasparov.com/) and Anatoly Karpov. (He did not
win the Pulitzer until the following year, when all of the submitted
columns were political commentary.)
Krauthammer became hooked on the game _when he was 20_
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/opinions/biographies/charles-krauthammer.html)
— he is
now 60 — and visited a friend in Cambridge, Mass. He found his friend’s
roommate sitting with a chess set and an unfamiliar device.
“I said, ‘What is that?’ ” Krauthammer recalled, “And he said, ‘That is
a chess clock.’ I had just come in from the plane. It was 10 o’clock at
night, and I sat down to play and didn’t get up until 5 in the morning. I had
found something that I loved, and I was in deep trouble.”
Krauthammer has chess boards in his office and a “chess room” at home. For
a while, he held a small, informal chess club every Monday; members
included the liberal scourges Charles Murray (co-author of “The Bell Curve”)
and
the writer _Dinesh D’Souza_ (http://www.dineshdsouza.com/) . Krauthammer
said they called it the _Pariah Chess Club_
(http://townhall.com/columnists/CharlesKrauthammer/2002/12/27/the_pariah_chess_club)
.
During the 1990 World Chess Championship _match between Kasparov and
Karpov_ (http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chess.pl?tid=55223) , Krauthammer
traveled
to New York, where the first half was played, and found himself in a room
full of grandmasters, including Mikhail Tal, a former world champion, who
were analyzing Game 8. Krauthammer _wrote about the experience in Time_
(http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,971689,00.html) : “It was
like
watching the World Series with five Hall of Famers parsing every pitch and
Cy Young correcting them.”
Five years later, when Kasparov played Viswanathan Anand in a match _atop
one of the World Trade Center’s twin towers_
(http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chess.pl?tid=55522) , Krauthammer again came
to New York, this time with
Murray and José Zalaquett, the Chilean human rights lawyer, who was living in
exile in Washington. “It was such great fun,” Krauthammer said, adding
that as they tried to follow the grandmasters’ analysis, “we were
desperately trying to keep up intellectually.”
Krauthammer entered his first and only tournament in 2002. “I found the
concentration and exhaustion almost unbearable,” he said. But he did win $150,
which he framed and hung on the wall of his chess room. “It was worth more
to me than the money.”
For a while, he also played online, but had to stop. “It was an addiction,”
he said.
Krauthammer says he is a tactical player who is always looking for
combinations and knockouts. “I’ve never been able to play strategic chess,” he
said.
Among his regular sparring partners these days are Zalaquett, who is now
back in Chile, and Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident, who lives in
Israel and is a master-level player. “Whenever he is in town, he comes
over to my office and we play,” Krauthammer said. “The problem is that he is
so much stronger than me that I have to give him practically no time on his
clock.”
One of Krauthammer’s favorite columns was one he wrote for The Weekly
Standard after Kasparov _lost to the computer Deep Blue in 1997_
(http://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/) . It was headlined, “Be Afraid: The
Meaning of
Deep Blue’s Victory.” It wasn’t just that Deep Blue won, he wrote, but how it
won, particularly in the second game, when the computer appeared to play
in an almost human fashion.
In that game, Kasparov resigned in what an analysis showed was a drawn
position. But the _experience shook him_
(http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,984175,00.html) , and he
later admitted that he played scared
for the rest of the match. In The Weekly Standard column, Krauthammer said
Deep Blue had passed a threshold of artificial intelligence, which should
worry people.
“The fact is that we will instead be creating a new and different form of
being,” he wrote. “And infinitely more monstrous: creatures sharing our
planet who not only imitate and surpass us in logic, who have perhaps even
achieved consciousness and free will, but are utterly devoid of the kind of
feelings and emotions that, literally, humanize human beings.”
--
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