Lermontov 200 MT (announcement)

International Competition "M.Lermontov-200"
section #3.  Judge V.Vinokurov (Russia)
section H#2-6. Judge V.Gurov (Russia)
Theme free

Send entries until December 25, 2014 to:

Vadim Vinokurov, vkv-1953@mail.ru 

Classification of chess problems

 Per Olin makes a great proposal on the MatPlus forums on how to change the current classification for chess problems. I support this!

http://matplus.net/start.php?px=1414162980&app=forum&act=posts&fid=gen&tid=1548&pid=12926#n12926

How German chess profited from a nation divided

The special status of Germany as a country divided during the Cold War era was an important step towards the publication of informations from Soviet Russia in the western civilization after the fall of the German Democratic Republic.

The Soviet books were available to East German citizens, who in turn learnt Russian at school. So after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the addition of the East German territories to the Federal Republic of Germany it was easily possible for former citizens of the German Democratic Republic to provide informations from those books - including the Russian chess composition books - in the west. The frugal cooperation of the Soviet and East German presses made it also available for books to be translated, for example many chess books from the Soviet Union appeared in the Sportverlag Berlin.

Those, of course, found their way to the west.

Is it possible to change the past as long as it is unknown?

Recommended reading:
Yakir Aharonov, Eliahu Cohen, Doron Grossman, Avshalom C. Elitzur:
Can a Future Choice Affect a Past Measurement's Outcome? 5th version, 18 September 2012
http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.6224

Pins, batteries and their antiforms

In a heated discussion on MatPlus, Nikola Predrag writes:

 An occupied square (or a set of squares) might be emptied by some move.
If that would result with a legal check, we call it battery (of some kind).
If that would result with an illegal selfcheck, we call it pin.

The opposite case is when an empty square might get occupied by some move.
If that would result with a legal check, we call it antibattery.
If that would result with an illegal selfcheck, we call it antipin.

Antibattery/antipin are NOT the kinds of battery/pin, they rely on the opposite effects on some square.
Battery/pin are related to the legal/illegal effect of emptying a particular set of squares.

There's a lot of features which could be related and these relations perhaps could make a well described system.

We would love to have opinions on that. Feel free to comment here, if you're not a MatPlus user.

Bernd Gräfrath is new Schwalbe president

At the Schwalbe meeting this month, Bernd Gräfrath was elected the new Schwalbe president. As was announced before by Hans Gruber, he did step back from this office.

Thank you, Hans, for your great work as a president! Thank you for making me a member!

Bernd Gräfrath is a German philospher, born 20 October 1958. According to Wikipedia (DE) he has the core work in ethics and philosophy of Technik, which could be translated to engineering or technology. He invented the word Zukunftsphilosophie (most likely philosophy about the future). According to the same article, he also is a chess historian, although not one I worked together with yet for several reasons, including different research fields and simply having no contact to each other.

I know him only from being an avid chess composer, and I will be curious into which direction the Schwalbe will be lead by him. I hope the social approach of Hans Gruber (who is a professor for pedagogy) will be continued unter Gräfrath.

Impressions from Bern 2014

Mikalai Sihnevich shares his valuable memories of the WCCC in Bern 2014:

http://matplus.net/start.php?px=1412365681&app=forum&act=posts&fid=gen&tid=1513&pid=12772#n12772

SEPA Problemas 10/2014 (no.8)

The new issue of SEPA Problemas contains an article by Yours Truly about the year 1914. I'm not sure how controversial it is, but you might want to read it.

http://sepa64.blogspot.com.es/p/revista-problemas-nueva-epoca.html