Tag Archives: chess

Missing Refutations

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It looks like the opposing all-human team is winning the exhibition game of me and my it's-not-chess engine (as White) versus everyone in the office who (unlike me) actually knows something about chess (as Black). I mean, naïvely, my team is up a bishop right now, but our king is pretty exposed, and the principal variation that generated one of our recent moves (16. Bxb4 Bf5 17. Kd1 Qxd4+ 18. Kc1 Ng3 19. Qxc7 Nxh1) looks dreadful.

Real chess aficionados (chessters? chessies?) will laugh at me, but it actually took me a while to understand why Ng3 was in that principal variation (I might even have invoked the engine again to help). The position after Ng3 looks like

    a b c d e f g h
 8 ♜       ♜   ♚   
 7 ♟ ♟ ♟     ♟ ♟ ♟ 
 6                 
 5           ♝     
 4   ♗   ♛         
 3 ♙           ♞   
 2   ♙ ♕     ♙ ♙ ♙ 
 1 ♖ ♘ ♔     ♗   ♖

and—forgive me—I didn't understand why that wasn't refuted by fxg3 or hxg3; in my novice's utter blindness, I somehow failed to see the discovered attack on the white queen, the necessity of evading which allows the black knight to capture the white rook, and preparation for which was clearly the purpose of 16. ..Bf5 (insofar as we—anthropomorphically?—attribute purpose to a sequence of moves discovered by a minimax search algorithm which doesn't represent concepts like discovered attack anywhere).

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Ideas Have Expirations

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One often-overlooked aspect of the crime of not-writing is that the harm isn't just about the things that deserve to be said that you never get around to saying because you don't put in the time and effort. It's also about the things that you can't say anymore even if you suddenly had the will, because the opportunity to say it was bound to a particular time, and trying to recapitulate the thoughts months or years after the fact would be irrelevant, or impossible.

This phenomenon comes in degrees. Start with irrelevance. Often the inadmissibility of tardy words isn't absolute: you could say things late, but the product would be less valuable than if it were timely—especially in a medium like blogging, where the posts being dated and displayed reverse-chronologically creates an expectation that the entries are associated with a particular point in time—at least, that they were written not too long before their publication date, even if the actual content isn't about the ephemera of the day or season. This has contributed to An Algorithmic Lucidity not being as good of a blog as it could be.

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