USA's Top Daily Chess News Blog, Informative, Fun, and Positive
hosted by Chess Queen™ & 12th Women's World Chess Champion Alexandra Kosteniuk
Wednesday, January 9, 2013
Guess Chess Queen™ Alexandra Kosteniuk's Secret Location
Chess blog for latest chess news and chess trivia (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2012 Hi everyone,
Have you been following Chess Queen™ Alexandra Kosteniuk's adventures across the globe? Where is she in the photo below and doing what? A fascinating video of the 12th Women's World Chess Champion holds the answer. Click on the photo to find out.
Your Chess Game Loss: Does Game Theory Explain it?
Chess blog for latest chess news and chess trivia (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2012
Hi everyone,
There is a scientific reason that could explain some of your losses at chess. Two researches have come up with an interesting game theory idea just released on phys.org.
Dr Tobias Galla from The University of Manchester and Professor Doyne Farmer from Oxford University and the Santa Fe Institute, ran thousands of simulations of two-player games to see how human behavior affects their decision-making.
In brief, it's what chess players often come up with: They lost because their opponent made a move that they did not expect even though the move was a weak one!
Play Chess to Keep Brain Fit: New Study by Radiological Society of North America
Chess blog for latest chess news and chess trivia (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2012
Hi everyone,
The old ‘use it or lose it’ adage may well hold some credence according to a new study presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).
Researchers from Rush University Medical Center and Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, who studied the effect of late-life cognitive activity on the brain’s white matter, have concluded that reading newspapers, writing letters and playing games like chess, do contribute to a healthier brain. The researchers used a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) method known as diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to generate data on diffusion anisotropy, a measure of how water molecules move through the brain. In white matter, diffusion anisotropy exploits the fact that water moves more easily in a direction parallel to the brain's axons, and less easily perpendicular to the axons, because it is impeded by structures such as axonal membranes and myelin.
Futuristic Chess Idea in Disney 3D Printing Project
Chess blog for latest chess news and chess trivia (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2012
Hi everyone,
We found this interesting chess idea - Chess pieces with embedded light pipes display content piped from an interactive tabletop. Contextual information, such as chess piece location and suggested moves, can be displayed on each individual piece. The BBC and several other sites have reported Disney Research is serious about mixing science with play and pushing further into imaginative results with 3-D printing. A research paper, "Printed Optics: 3D Printing of Embedded Optical Elements for Interactive Devices," talks about explorations into 3-D printing with custom optical elements for interactive devices. As such, Disney Research is thinking toward a next-step in digital printing when one will print interactive objects on the fly. Authors of the paper, Karl D.D. Willis, Eric Brockmeyer, Scott E. Hudson, Ivan Poupyrev, are all focused on future printing techniques and applications.
Interesting Chess Video - Feynman on Chess, Science
Chess blog for latest chess news and chess trivia (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2012 Hi everyone,
All those videos about chess and science or any other aspect of life bewitch us. Here is a nice compilation by Paul Schonfeld as Richard Feynman describes the process of scientific discovery to be like watching a small corner of a chess board and trying to figure out how the game works.
Richard Phillips Feynman (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist. For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman, jointly with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965.
How chess gives clues to superiority of group intelligence (by humans)!
Chess blog for latest chess news and chess trivia (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2011
Hi everyone,
All that debate about computers and aliens makes you wonder where we humans are really headed. Here's an interesting blog entry by Forbes staffer Alex Knapps. It's about how we are yet to utilise the full potential of harnessing group intelligence particularly in reference to the Internet. He writes:
"Why is mass online collaboration useful in solving mathematical problems? Part of the answer is that even the best mathematicians can learn a great deal from people with complementary knowledge, and be stimulated to consider ideas in directions they wouldn’t have considered on their own. Online tools create a shared space where this can happen, a short-term collective working memory where ideas can be rapidly improved by many minds. These tools enable us to scale up creative conversation, so connections that would ordinarily require fortuitous serendipity instead happen as a matter of course. This speeds up the problem-solving process, and expands the range of problems that can be solved by the human mind."
The chess connection
Let me give you one of my favorite examples of this, and that’s in the world of Advanced Chess. Advanced Chess is the baby of Garry Kasparov, in which chess is played between human-computer teams. The human players use their chess programs to plan their moves, which enables them to focus on overall strategy while the humans focus on tactics. What’s interesting, though, as Kasparov himself noted, is that at an Advanced Chess matchup that several Grandmasters participated in, none of them won:
The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants.
That’s the power of group intelligence – two heads are better than one, especially when they harness more than one computer. Now picture this on a grand scale – not geared towards just solving chess problems, but solving major problems. With improving computers and an ever-growing internet, there’s plenty of space for good feedback, argumentation, and collaboration. Not just in terms of writing and debate, but in action. As long as we embrace that action and openness, and avoid turning back to the walled gardens of closed systems and further specialization, I believe that we can find ourselves in a new Renaissance. Not just in the United States or Western culture, but worldwide. All cultures together, one human society, connected online, working together. Yes, despite the economy. Yes, despite the environment. Yes, despite all of the other myriad problems we face.
That’s because we have at our disposal the greatest tool for problem solving in history – human minds that can collaborate with each other no matter where they are located.
We haven’t come close to reaching our potential."
This was an excerpted part, you can read the full article at this link.
Don't be shy about contacting me
to share women's chess news
or to propose collaboration
Best chess wishes to you! Alexandra Kosteniuk
12th Women's World Chess Champion
Facebook, Twitter, Youtube
