My favorite theme was Japanese terms from the game Go (wei-qi). Joseki, fuseki, sente. It was educational as well as distinctive. The spellings are also easier than my other theme of Polish delicacies.
I whipped up a little demo illustrating Carlsen's decisive rapid game 3. It transposes the move sequence to show white's 13-move opening (Karjakin) followed by Carlsen's 13-move response as black, and so on through the game - using the longest possible sequences consistent with legal positions from the original game.
hey that's incredibly clear! From your description I thought it'd be practically pointless - but actually you can see each sides strategy developing quite interestingly.
I actually saw people play out of sequence - some buskers or homeless or whatever people - just used to playing so many games against each other they'd get through the openings quickly by each person making several moves. It seemed too fast for me to see that they kept a correct pace, but maybe. I believe the games were very rapid. they stopped and started switching turns normally as soon as they were out of the opening. (so this refers to just a handful of moves at most.)
so with a bit of sportsmanship it's possible to actually play that way over the board with somebody who's cooperating with you to get through the opening quickly.
Thank you! I was inspired by something I read about the early history of chess:
"In order to save time, and to prevent useless exchanges, it was agreed that the first player should make his (let us say) fifteen moves all at once, without, however, crossing the middle line of the board; after which the adversary was entitled to play up at once an equal number of counter moves... these preliminary maneuvers the Arabs called Ta'biyat, which signifies 'the drawing up of troops in battle array'."
(quoted from Duncan Forbes "Observations on the Origin and Progress of Chess", 1855 - I first came across the variant in Edward Lasker's "The Adventure of Chess".)
thanks! that's also really interesting. (though in what I saw, there wasn't "after which" the other player made their first few moves - instead they moved over each other, like two people talking over each other. I couldn't figure out how they kept track of the turn or that they made the correct number of moves each - it was all much too quick. I even suppose that it's possible they didn't keep strict track and one player may have made 1 more move than the other or that sort of thing. Really bizarre!)
Thanks for the heads up - I contacted Avast and asked to be removed from their blacklist. I'm not a customer of Avast, but it may help if you submit a false positive report to them (based on what I read in some forum posts):
tl;dr Individual Computers launches a new plastic case to house either an original C64 mainboard, or the "C64 Reloaded" board released by hardware designer Jens Schönfeld last year.
Strictly retrocomputing. I loved my C64 back in the day, but it is completely outclassed by pretty much every modern computing platform no matter how humble.
If you like the idea of working on this kind of research project, you might check out a local Baseball Hack Day (held annually at the beginning of the season in March or April).
