Media comments on chess

[Mick Norris]

A Harvard Mathematician Has Basically Solved an Epic, 150-Year-Old Chess Problem

[Nick Burrows]

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/ ... ens-gambit

[Christopher Kreuzer]

A Harvard Mathematician Has Basically Solved an Epic, 150-Year-Old Chess Problem

Ah, the n-queens problem!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_queens_puzzle

Interesting! Thanks for that, Mick.

[Roland Kensdale]

Saturday's Daily Telegraph Review: Ai Weiwei:

"The West trying to understand China is like a soccer school trying to understand how to play a chess game, it's a completely different sort of system."

[Roland Kensdale]

From the obituary of Yvette Mimieux in Saturday's Daily Telegraph:
"She liked to play chess between scenes."

She also started her own business, wrote short stories, studied archaeology.

[JustinHorton]

Talking of chess and scenes, here's a chess scene from the 1973 Soviet TV series Seventeen Moments Of Spring. Kick off just after 17:00 and stop if you want when you get onto the long bit about Göring (about 20:40) though they are still playing, albeit briefly, when it finishes.

[Kevin Thurlow]

James Altucher writes in the latest "New In Chess" 2022#1 (Yes, I know it's a chess magazine, but it's a "favourite" subject.

"How many people play chess on this planet? A billion? 80 million people are good enough to play online and a lot more have probably never played online but know the rules."

I'm not sure all the 80 million "know the rules"...

Edited for missing word!

[JustinHorton]

Do eighty million play online? I very much doubt it.

[Roger de Coverly]

Do eighty million play online? I very much doubt it.

The main sites should know how many unique names have been allocated. That gives a benchmark of sorts if they were prepared to divulge them. Duplications where one person registers on muliple servers or even has had multiple accounts on the same server make the results difficult to interpret. There's also players who play anonymously.

Working backards from number of games played and a model of the distribution of activity across accounts is another method of estimation.

[Kevin Thurlow]

"Do eighty million play online? I very much doubt it."

I did consider starting with a warning as Justin (quite rightly) gets annoyed with this sort of thing.

I know loads of players who will not play online, so that must skew these estimates, well, figures plucked out of air thinner than that on the moon.

[Tim Spanton]

I know English is not the first language for everyone who uses this website, especially for those living outside of the UK, but when did "80 million people are good enough to play online" become understood as "80 million people play online"?

Come to that, what happened with this 'quote' - was it miscopied or did it really originally appear thus: "80 million people are good enough to play online and a lot more have probably never online but know the rules"?

[JustinHorton]

I know English is not the first language for everyone who uses this website, especially for those living outside of the UK, but when did "80 million people are good enough to play online" become understood as "80 million people play online"?

I guess at the point where the subsequent qualifying clause appeared.

[Kevin Thurlow]

"Come to that, what happened with this 'quote' - was it miscopied or did it really originally appear thus: "80 million people are good enough to play online and a lot more have probably never online but know the rules"?"

Sorry - missed a word out! Edited up-thread.

[Matthew Turner]

I would strongly suspect that the 80 million figure comes from something like this

"Chess.com had 30 million members before the pandemic broke out in March 2020. This grew to 57 million within the span of a single year. The number is currently over 75 million as of November 2021."

https://www.thegamer.com/chess-booms-in ... -pandemic/

[JustinHorton]

Now do we really believe that chess.com has eighty million indivdual members, or do we think there are a lot of duplicated accounts.