Chess as Recursive Evaluative Hunting

In chess, concentration usually unfolds in quick succession through perceiving, desiring and searching. But it’s recursive, so I often find something I didn’t expect in a way that leads me to see my position differently and want something else from it. My perception is pre-patterned through years of experience, so I don’t see one square or piece at a time. Instead, I see the whole position as a situation featuring relationships between pieces in familiar strategic contexts; a castled ki...

 How Computational Review of Chess Games Revealed Narrativ...

Paradoxically, when other top players wrote about games in magazines and newspaper columns they often made more mistakes in their commentary than the players had made at the board. Even when the players themselves published analyses of their own games they were often less accurate than when they were playing the game. Strong moves were called errors, weak moves were praised. It was not only a few cases of journalists who were lousy players failing to comprehend the genius of the champions, or...

 Asymmetrical Psychology: Computers Use Knights Better Tha...

e. Chess players have the most trouble visualizing the moves of knights because their move is unlike anything else in the game, an L-shaped hop instead of a predictable straight line like the other pieces. Computers, of course, don't visualize anything at all, and so manage every piece with equal skill. I believe it was Bent Larsen, the first GM victim of a computer in tournament play, who stated that computers dropped a few hundred rating points if you eliminated their knights. This is an ex...

 Games Exist in Symbols and Syntax

Consider the game of Chess. Typically it's played with a collection of Chess pieces on a chessboard consisting of black and white squares. We can all agree, I think, that these are indeed real-world objects. Moreover, the game involves a set of rules specifying how the pieces can move, what constitutes a legal position on the board, how one piece captures another and so forth. This is the real-world version of the game of Chess. But there is another version, one existing purely in the world o...

 Gamification Pattern Building Mechanic

Ms. Forsythe divides her class into four teams (Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome). Each team, over the course of the unit, learns about all four artistic cultures but becomes an expert in one. For a 20- to 30-minute exercise in discerning and judging the difference among these artistic cultures, Ms. Forsythe displays a piece of sculpture from each of the four cultures onto a large piece of heavy paper or cardboard and then cuts that image into smaller tiles and tosses all of the pieces to...

 The Magic Circle

Game rules, therefore, create a kind of artificial reality in which those rules exclude other equally valid or defensible rules. In other words, there is no place for a chess piece in backgammon, baseball isn’t played with a hockey puck, a player can’t die in Candy Land, and there are no sugarplum fairies (to date) in World of Warcraft. The way each game’s rules and equipment combine to define the unique experience of playing that particular game is referred to by theorists as the magic...