Donkey Kong Plays Chess Only For Gold Stars ~ Mnemonic

For remembering: domain kingdom phylum class order family genus species

 Metagame

Metagaming refers to the relationship between the game and outside elements, including everything from player attitudes and play styles to social reputations and social contexts in which the game is played. Post-game locker room conversations about the match are metagame interactions. Memorizing words in the Scrabble dictionary is a metagame activity, the honing of in-game skills. The typical playing strategies of a particular Go master are metagame information, useful if you are playing agai...

 Dice Rolls are Suspect

It is true that every aspect of the role of dice may be suspect: the dice themselves, the form and texture of the surface, the person throwing them. If we push the analysis to its extreme, we may even wonder what chance has to do with it at all. Neither the course of the dice nor their rebounds rely on chance; they are governed by the strict determinism of rational mechanics. Billiards is based on the same principles, and it has never been considered a game of chance. So in the final analysis...

 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...

 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 circl...

 China to Rate Online Behaviour in Social Credit System

Chinese internet firms are definitely interested, as Ant Financial, a subsidiary of ecommercegiant Alibaba, recently showed. To its popular app Alipay it added a new service which rated a person's credit worthiness on a scale of 350 to 950 points. This score is not only determined by one's lending behavior, but also by hobbies and friends. If friends have a poor lending reputation, this reflects badly on the person, just as prolonged playing of video games. Buying diapers indicates responsibi...

 The Universe as a Game Where the Rules are Hidden

‘I talked to a woman of the Kaminari once,’ he says, ‘before the Spike. Don’t give me such a look, it wasn’t like that, we were just friends. But one night on Ganymede, we got philosophical. The Universe is a game, she said. It makes us into players. We can’t see the moves that are not allowed. Like in chess. There is perfect freedom in the black and white, except that the rules make invisible walls. Two squares forward, one left. One left, whole row forward and backward, one right. That’s al...

 Nettlesomeness

...Carlsen is demonstrating one of his most feared qualities, namely his “nettlesomeness,” to use a term coined for this purpose by Ken Regan. Using computer analysis, you can measure which players do the most to cause their opponents to make mistakes. Carlsen has the highest nettlesomeness score by this metric, because his creative moves pressure the other player and open up a lot of room for mistakes. In contrast, a player such as Kramnik plays a high percentage of very accurate moves, a...

 Freestyle Chess

In fact, the best game of chess in the world right now might be played neither by man nor machine.47 In 2005, the Web site ChessBase.com, hosted a “freestyle” chess tournament: players were free to supplement their own insight with any computer program or programs that they liked, and to solicit advice over the Internet. Although several grandmasters entered the tournament, it was won neither by the strongest human players nor by those using the most highly regarded software, but by a pair of...

 The Difference Between Average and Great Chessmasters

Great players like Kasparov do not delude themselves into thinking they can calculate all these possibilities. This is what separates elite players from amateurs. In his famous study of chess players, the Dutch psychologist Adriaan de Groot found that amateur players, when presented with a chess problem, often frustrated themselves by looking for the perfect move, rendering themselves incapable of making any move at all. Chess masters, by contrast, are looking for a good move—and certainly i...