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Chessbase and Christmas Puzzlers 84

Posted by Hemos from the using-the-noggin dept.
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.
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Chessbase and Christmas Puzzlers More

Chessbase and Christmas Puzzlers

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  • 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 [www.cwi.nl] seems OK. For obvious reasons it's quite hard to do a good web search for information about Go.
  • I like the idea of puzzles (or has been suggested by many, a puzzle section). I'd just like to add in a plug for my favorite classic game, backgammon. The fun thing about backgammon problems is that there often is no one right answer, and hearing other people propose different solutions and justify them often makes me think about my own answer more.

  • I feel really ignorant now. (Score:3)

    by Azog ( 20907 ) on Tuesday February 22, 2000 @02:58PM (#1252490) Homepage
    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)
  • I think puzzles, brain teasers and the like are excellent, but I realize that some may not agree. You should give puzzles their own icon so that they can be filtered out, but I would definately say go for it.

  • It's not the puzzle, it's who you're up against (Score:4)

    by intmainvoid ( 109559 ) on Tuesday February 22, 2000 @02:59PM (#1252492)
    Surely the attraction of puzzles on Slashdot is not the puzzle itself, but the chance to solve in the company of, and hopefully ahead of, the rest of the Slashdot audience - the assumption being that there are some bright minds around here.

    It's really just about ego - who wouldn't kill to tell their grandchildren that "I solved the Slashdot Christmas Chess puzzler of 2000".

  • The family of puzzles in which you are given and "end position" and have to reconstruct what happened are called retrograde analysis, a facinating sub-genre of puzzles. Chess is perhaps the best known for retrograde puzzles, but I have seen puzzles for checkers, bridge, Scrabble and other games. A classic "retrograde" question regarding chess is given some board position, can you demonstrate either (1)all the pieces on the board are the original piece or (2)some piece on the board has been promoted from a pawn. Other typical questions might include "Has white castled?"

    I don't have any puzzles at my finger tips, but I'll try to see if I can post some later.

    ---
  • So that's why we couldn't finish our game last week...
  • > What is the game theoretic value of Chess? { 1 = White wins, 0 = White loses, 0.5 = Draw }

    Uhm, puzzle implies "a challengle solveable within our lifetime" and I dont see Chess being solved within the next 100 years.

    Besides, Go is a much more interesting game ;-)

    Cheers
  • Sorry for the pun :-) (For the uninformed, Go pieces are called 'stones' )

    I too find Go more challengling. Chess seems to be "static" while Go seems more dynamic.

    > For those of you not familiar with it, Go is a Japanese equivalent to chess.
    I was going to write a Go game, until I realized the complexity is WAY PAST chess. Sure, Go only has 2 pieces, but on a 19x19 board, the number of legal moves after a few turns is ridiculously large. THEN throw in strategy, and you can get the picture.

    Anyone know of a free Go-Online service? It would be great to be able to play with people around the world 24 hrs/day.

    Cheers
  • Go is a Japanese equivalent to chess

    Not strictly true. The Japanese equivalent of chess is a game named shogi [shogi.net], a game that is much more "deep" than chess due to the fact that captured pieces can "parachute" back onto the board at almost any position. It's a very interesting game, although arguably not as deep as go.

    I'm a Go fan as well but often can't get into it because the popular consensus is that your enjoyment of Go is proportional to your expertise at it. (Beginners dislike it, experts revel in it) This is opposite that of the typical Chess experience :-) Anyway, I get frustrated at the deep strategical thought required for successful Go-playing... I'm a much more slash-and-hack kind of person who enjoys Chess better. :-)

  • the two places you can play go online that i know of are igs [joyjoy.net] and yahoo [yahoo.com]. igs uses different clients or even telnet to play on their servers, yahoo as you may expect is web-based play with java.
  • While I don't agree with gid-foo (simply because I suck at math ;-), I would love to see a section devoted to puzzles, provided they weren't all the same type of puzzles all the time. Variety is good.

    (As if I need another reason to waste time online...)
  • Puzzles are good... however, they shouldn't be in some other language such as chess-speak :-)

    - 8Complex
  • I agree...trying to solve de Xmas puzzle while being in slashnet was lots of fun, specially the two times I thought I had the answer :)

    Anyway, I'm all for the puzzles :)

    Vox

  • Refreshing (Score:3)

    by 348 ( 124012 ) on Tuesday February 22, 2000 @03:16PM (#1252508) Homepage
    Now that was refreshing. With all the hooplala about /. this and /. that, VA's goin' ruin it, yadda, yadda, yadda. To have someone of the stature of Friedel say

    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.

  • Word puzzles and chess puzzles are fine, but I agree that they should tailor to the Slashdot crowd.

    Short C programs or some nice Perl scripting challenges would be interesting. But even if it were just regular puzzles, I think there would be many /.'ers who would figure out a way to turn them into a programming challenge :)

    And either way, one of the best things about puzzles is sharing the experience with others. I would expect the puzzle stories to have a massive amount of comments, as we try to figure out how to solve them bit by bit.

    And like everyone else said, it should definitely have its own topic, or maybe even its own section. And catchy titles like "Puzzle Master" are always a plus :)

  • I agree. Go is far more interesting than chess. To me, chess is just one big tree search problem. Go is far more beautiful than that.
    There are two main online Go servers:
    IGS http://igs.joyjoy.net/ [joyjoy.net]
    NNGS http://nngs.cosmic.org/ [cosmic.org]
    The best way to use these servers is with a client program. There are several clients available which run under Linux. My favorite is CGoban. kgo is also quite good.
  • Bring on the puzzles, but not too many, to quickly. Each one should be given ample time to be savered, solved and discussed.

    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!
  • The pretty young girl turned to him and said "I'm a boy!"
    The answer is at the bottom of this year's (well, last year's now) chess puzzle.
    -Chris Andreasen
  • 1.d3 e5! 2.Kd2 e4 3.Kc3 exd3 4.b3 dxe2 5.Kb2 exd1N!! mate

    The way of this solution is that mandatory
    criteria are that black plays only with
    one pawn and the white king should be on
    2nd or 3rd rank to receive a check. We find
    out that it's impossible just to stalemate the
    king ready for a mate and we have to join in
    some other pieces.

    By analogy with previous puzzle we attempt to
    join in the queen and use the d-file. Alas,
    it won't help. Then we try to use other
    pieces and when we get to bishop on f8, it
    finally gets there.

    Roman
  • Send me mail, Joel. Maybe we can get something cool together. [frederic@chessbase.com]

  • Heh. If that's the best story you end up having to give your grandkids, I think your primary regret will be "I should have left the house occasionally..."

    (*grin)


    --
  • I think I emailed CmdrTaco about this in the past, and I repeat my sentiments. A puzzle section would be simply awesome!
  • zugzan (n): pronouced TZOOK-zvang (at least where I come from). This is any position in which the player who must moves is in an apparently reasonable position, however all of his legal moves result in death. Basically it means that the player is forced to screw himself over.
  • You can play Go at playsite.com I think it's a little more fun than chess.
  • You'll provide me with more ways to waste time on slashdot while I wait for my current software project to compile? That's fantastic! Hmmm, I feel a "Rebuild All" comming on... Heck yeah, I'm all for puzzlers.

  • 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...)
  • If you make sure there is a checkbox for it in the Preferences, I don't see why any(non-troll,non-flaimbaiter)body would complain.
  • I like puzzlers, but I think that all types of puzzles should be considered, not just chess. As fas as time wasters, I have seen many good java rubbicks cubes. Time wasters are great.
  • 1 vote for "yeah"

  • Sure (Score:1)

    by niekze ( 96793 )
    Yea....Sure....beats that goddamn Dilberito crap we're getting lately.
  • Math puzzles, lots of math puzzles.

  • Please keep them smart. (Score:3)

    by Xerithane ( 13482 ) <xerithane.nerdfarm@org> on Tuesday February 22, 2000 @02:39PM (#1252528) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • I like puzzles (Score:5)

    by limpdawg ( 77844 ) on Tuesday February 22, 2000 @02:35PM (#1252529) Homepage Journal
    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.
  • What kind of puzzles? Chess puzzles? I can get those out of the newspaper. Same with the bridge puzzle, the crossword puzzle, and the word Jumble. I really don't need to see these on Slashdot. IQ testing kind of puzzles aren't really that interesting either. (I personally believe that IQ tests don't prove anything except how well you take IQ tests, but that's just me). Posting stories about new kinds of puzzles, something with originality and some thought, that would be worth a post and a link.

    Or something like the online version of Chu-Chu Rocket [lfx.org]. :)

  • 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.

  • Yes, I love puzzles.
    You could mix then up.
    Chess, physics, logic, then some code perl, c.
    You could even have a contest for the best submitted puzzle.

    I would love a logic puzzle on a regular basis.

  • That would be wonderful!
  • 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.

    :)
  • I think puzzles would be a great addition to Slashdot, just as their own section so they can be filtered.

    The real challenge would be to find tough puzzles, or better yet, puzzles with multiple solutions, some easy, some more challenge.

    And I suppose the bonus question could always be "Code a program to solve/demonstrate this puzzle", if it is such a puzzle type.
    --
    Evan Jones http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/Students/ejones/
    "Computers are useless. They can only give answers." - Pablo Picasso
  • I'd love to see puzzles on slashdot. Here are two you might enjoy - one C++ and one regular.
    • How do you implement function overloading by return type in C++? solution [varatek.com] (From an article in comp.lang.c++)
    • One day two mathematicians, Igor and Pavel, meet in the street.
      "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 [varatek.com] (From The Chicken from Minsk by Yuri Chernyak & Robert Rose)

    If you like puzzles, you may like my page <shameless plug>Playful Thoughts [varatek.com]</shameless plug>.

  • Go lends itself much more naturally to
    standalone "puzzler" problems. Also, the
    proportion of Go players is higher -- and
    growing -- in hackerdom than in the general
    population, so it's not as off-the-beaten-trail
    as one might think for Slashdot.

    The immediate readership for Go problems may
    be smaller than for chess, but those readers
    will be much more passionate participants,
    proportionally, and their numbers will be increasing all the time...

    Vote Go! :-)
  • 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.

    That sounds like a real bad idea. I know, many slashdotters are young, and they see slashdot as the only source of input, but if you just go to rtfm.mit.edu (that's an FTP site) and download the archive of the newsgroup rec.puzzles, you'll get thousands of classical puzzles, including the answers. It would be utterly pointless to use up more bandwidth. (Well, unless you sell banner ads of course - the puzzles archive are commercial free).

    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?

    Just to proof you can cut-and-paste? Besides, who's going to judge? The utter nature of slashdot is "wrote once - forget forever". Its interface seriously obstructs meaningful discussion. Now, if only slashdot has an NNTP interface - but then, rec.puzzles has existed for over a decade, so you might as well join the existing group.

    -- Abigail

  • Go is far more interesting than chess. To me, chess is just one big tree search problem.

    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.

  • Yes, but Go is far more difficult for a computer to play. The best chess programs/computers in the world can play at the level of the best human chess players. On the other hand, the best computer Go programs in the world can only just barely play at the level of an average amature (about 5-10 kyu) human player. This is partly due to more attention being placed on writing good computer chess programs, but also it's due to the complexity and subtleties of Go. If you're interested, here an interesting paper on programming computer Go. http://www2.psy.uq.edu.au/~jay/go/ CS-TR-339.html [uq.edu.au]
    For all you programmers, there is currently a prize offered by the Ing Foundation of Taiwan of about $1.5 million for any Go program that can beat a top professional human in The Ing World Computer Go Congress.
  • And while you're at it, find other ways to make all my time dissappear. Maybe some /. Flash games where Tux runs around and kills the Backstreet Boys or something. Sharkey
    http://www.badassmofo.com [badassmofo.com]

  • Logic puzzles (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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.
  • Why not a weekly puzzle, with the answer given the next week? But not just chess puzzles. If your looking for a puzzle editor, I'd be honored to take a run at it!
  • Am I the only one around here who prefers Go to Chess?

    Nope, there are at least two of us. I like chess, but go is just a lot more fun.

    That said I don't think go-puzzles should be on /.. I believe chess-puzzles could be enjoyed by a lot more of the slashdotreaders. Unless you want two add two sections of course...

    Maybe there should be a poll to index which kind of puzzles are liked best?
  • I like puzzles as much as anyone. However, the last time I played chess... Well let's just say I suck and leave it at that. However, wht I think would be very fun is something like the Programmer's Challenge [mactech.com] from MacTech Magazine. They would put out a programming problem and you had a month to come up with a solution. Then they picked the fastest (usually) correct solution, and printed it. ( Sometimes the criteria were different. like speed - space used, or something. ) Anyway, I sure think something like that would be cool for slashdot.
  • Right on. Go is perfect for us nerds: by remembering only a few simple rules you can regenerate the whole game from first principles, so you don't have to remember a whole lot of useless crap, and you can fill your brain with more interesting stuff like how exactly *are* you supposed to use thread cancellation in POSIX threads?
  • I'd definitely prefer algorithm based problems to langauge specific type problems. something like the ones in Programming Pearls [programmingpearls.com] by Jon Bentley.

    It'd be interesting to see how maybe someone struggles and turns out a page of C++ code and someone else does it in a couple of lines of Haskell (or whatever).

    Oh yeah, and I want prizes:), first (correct) post would actually mean something :)

    -----------------------------------
  • I don't know how many American Football fans are among the /. crowd but does anyone remember when the Super Bowl was started? As an afterthought aside, they charged about 1$ admission for that first championship game. How much will it eventually cost to have your ad placed on the veritable reigning king of web sites? For their annual Puzzle Bowl?
  • The puzzlers should have varying levels of dificulty within each puzzle. So that part 1 can be easily solved but part 3 probably won't be solved without some colabrative effort on the message boards. It's that sort of interactivity that would make these puzzles better then just buying a puzzle book.
    I'd rather have puzzlers that aren't solved at all (until the answers are given out next week) but provoke a lot of discussion rather then an easy puzzle that's solved in the "first post" and every other post after that.
  • Yeah, I agree. Post whatever seems appropriate -- as long as it has it's own section, people who aren't interested can filter it out. Of course, we'll still hear complaints, but hey: what can ya do?

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • Just curious (Score:3)

    by Amphigory ( 2375 ) on Tuesday February 22, 2000 @02:50PM (#1252566) Homepage
    Am I the only one around here who prefers Go to Chess?

    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.

    --

  • I parsed that s/Chess/Cheese/g. I suggest re-reading the blurb doing the same.
  • "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.
  • Or something like the online version of Chu-Chu Rocket. :)

    UGH! One of my friends just gave me the link to that game earlier and I lost nearly an hour and a half playing it through to the end, when I really should have been doing work. That link is pure evil, but now I can't wait for the game to come out in the US. :-)

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