“Regularly Ig Nobel awards ceremony for the curious scientific studies were originally considered an insult, today they mostly proudly awards (recently including our domestic scientists). Analysis of mortality individual chess pieces and related research by this award could aspire too.” —from the article “Kdo přežije?” in the January 12, 2015 issue of Hospodářské Noviny, [machine-translated […]
Tag: Chess
Beauty slays chessmen [study]
When chess players go head to head, the outside of one of the heads can influence the inside of the other head, suggests this study: “Beauty queens and battling knights: Risk taking and attractiveness in chess,” Anna Dreber [pictured here], Christer Gerdes, Patrik Gränsmark, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, vol. 90, June 2013, pp. […]
Computer beats a top human in Japanese chess
Investigator Shoichi Fukayama alerts us to news in the ongoing battle between humans and computers. Reports from Japan say that for the first time a computer has defeated a top-rank shogi player. Shogi is a game related to chess, and believed by many players to be of greater difficulty. A network of 169 computers bested […]
Re-envisioning the Chess-bot
Robotic Chess Players are not new. But robots which play Chess via a touch-screen are. For this reason, the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology has just received a US patent for their ‘Board Game System Utilizing a Robot Arm’. The emphasis on the ‘arm’ part is perhaps […]
Medical Games Mystery
The question ‘Which games and pastimes should medical students play?’ was answered on Sunday nov 9th 1823, in one of the very first editions of The Lancet, ‘A journal of British and foreign medicine’. It was founded, edited (and often written) by the eminent surgeon, member of parliament and radical political reformer Thomas Wakley MRCS […]
Anna Rudolf, recent cheating-smear victim
The latest (false) cheating scandal in international chess soiled the Vandoeuvre Open in France during the last week in December. Latvian grandmasters were fazed by the strong performance of Anna Rudof, who was unexpectedly leading the tournament. The disgruntled GMs accused the Hungarian phenom of cheating. The pattern of these nebulous accusations is often the […]