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Vukcevich speech on future forms of Chess appears in 'Chess Life' October 1998. Vukcevich: ''Finally, Chess will be a completely different game in a decade or two. Sports only teaches you team play, but Chess can do much more for the soul of society. Those who have difficulty believing in the evolutionary connection of Chess to Backgammon should remember that Chess was once played with dice, that Shogi pieces are flat stones, and that birds came from dinosaurs.'' ''At that time, chessboards had only lines -- all squares were the same colour. Arabs introduced the checkered board to help their children learn the game, and the children soon found the Alfil piece too simple. The Alfil moved like a Bishop but only over two squares. With the checkered board it became easy to follow Alfil's motion over the entire diagonal, and it soon evolved into the modern Bishop.'' ''Where does this Chaos lead? Today mathematicians recognize that the likely outcome of any chaos is self-organization.'' -- Vukcevich
Vukcevich concluded the address 1998: ''One day, with or without our help, our offspring will select something out of all this Chaos, and revolutionize our ancient game. They may even put it into permanent turmoil. They may adopt different Rules for different rounds. Let us accept the unorthodox. Let us bring the visionaries home. True, some will be certifiably crazy, others mildly entertaining; but still others will be the true agents of change, and they will make us proud. '' --Milan R. Vukcevich, Big Island, Hawaii, August 8, 1998
Joe Joyce wrote on Sat, Mar 29, 2008 04:16 PM UTC:Thank you, George. That was very interesting. I see we've used up 10 of his '10 to 20 years'. Looking forward to the next 10.
My hope is the Chess Variant community can coordinate their efforts to be able to pick stuff out that works, but also operate in a framework where the chaos is still essential. I would like to also see a World Champion at chess variants, so it would generate needed publicity. I know this desire has been labeled as 'unwanted, unneeded and impertnent' by some, but I would disagree. As of now Chess Variants are seen as nothing but gimmicks that people play on the side as distractions, not something that is also serious an essential to the growth of chess, and the family of chess games.
At Hawaii USA in 1998 before OrthoChess audience, GM Vukcevich mentions Grasshopper, Pao, Vao, Lao, Nightrider, Imitator, Sentinel. Orphan, Anti-Circe as well as Alfil, Bishop. There are only five Comments. Vukcevich says, ''We definitely should be on the forefront of change'' and ''They may even put it into permanent turmoil.''
GM Milan Vukcevich (1937-2003) is listed as Contributor or Member yet. Of course he never contributed anything, unless someone knows of a stray anonymous comment. Too bad. It would be nice to have heard from him. One speculates he looked in around time of his Hawaii speech ten years ago and saw too much chaos. Not for me, he said, sheer speculation. Vukcevich: ''We definitely should be on the forefront of change.'' See the other 6 comments. ''Let us bring the visionaries home. True, some will be certifiably crazy, others mildly entertaining; but still others will be the true agents of change, and they will make us proud.'' --Big Island, Hawaii 8.August.1998. In the speech he not only acknowledges, but embraces Grasshopper (Dawson), Pao (Xiangqi), Lao, Vao (Dawson), Nightrider (Dawson), Imitator (Parton), Orphan (David Brown), Anti-Circe. Anti-Circe? On making a capture, the capturing piece is reborn on its initial square, and if not regeneratable, the move is forbidden.
(1^3)+(2^3)+(3^3)+(4^3)=100 //// Rich Hutnik says 1 1/2 yrs. ago this thread, ''My hope is cv community picks stuff that works and keeps chaos essential.'' Easily said, and so often expressed by the 3 or 4 prior cvpage generations too. Cvp member GM Vukcevich, world-class scientist, is dead unable to complain about commenting indirection. He's out of luck, so remaking the same point as at Nested Chess below (serendipity may be the rule not the exception), on an everyday hand calculator Mitchell Feigenbaum http://www.mathworld.wolfram.com/FeigenbaumConstant.htm discovered the major advance to that time in chaos theory, recursive regularity. Iterations and each generation of points packed ~2.5 times more densely. F's constants 4.6692... and 2.5029... That the shape of the curve does not matter: parabola, sine, scaling factors for the onset of chaos, period doubling attractors empirically discovered on a mere hand calculator: metrical universality, 45-degree angles. Rubik's cube, soma cube, quadraphages, sawtooth boards, tetrahedral-- all these taper between science and recreational math. Sounds like science and religion, but that's history and science won. Einstein may scoff at chess addiction of his mathematician friend GM Lasker, but divine Einstein happens to use the same pencil-and-paper technique in theoretical physics. Who knows what remains to be discovered (or if anything will be left since we hit 7 billion concentration in the one most dangerous species year 2011, I read the news today oh boy.) http://www.grinningplanet.com/review-lyrics/beatles-a-day-in-the-life-lyrics.htm
Vukcevich was physicist like Richard Feynman, so 'Six Easy Pieces' by F.
can go here for interconnectedness. To CVers, Chess and Physics mostly
means Neto, http://www.chessvariants.org/other.dir/physics.html,
who also coined ''mutator.'' The Feynman
lectures 1961-1963 turned out to be more for graduate students than
intended C.I.T. undergraduates, as summaries were needed after the two
20th-century revolutions in Physics. Feynman's Preface admits that
failing, and one early retrenchment 'SEP' culls just 6 of them from all
of 'Lectures on Physics'. A lengthy Chess metaphor makes the cut to
'SEP' at pages 24-26 inclusively, and it was obviously occurring to
Feynman that old standard Chess is six easy pieces. Continuing more than this one comment, under copyright full
direct quotes from 'SEP'(1963 Perseus): ''What do we mean by
'understanding' something? We can imagine that this complicated array of
moving things which constitutes 'the world' is something like a great
chess game being played by the gods, and we are the observers of the game.
We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is
to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may
eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are
what we mean by fundamental physics. Even if we knew every rule, however, we might not be able to understand why a particular move is made in the game, merely because it is too complicated and our minds are limited. If you play chess you must know that it is easy to learn all the rules, and yet it is often very hard to select the best move or to understand why a player moves as he does. So it is in nature; only much more so; but we may be able at least to find all the rules. Actually, we do not have all the rules now. (Every once in a while something like castling is going on that we still do not understand.)...''
''.... Aside from not knowing all of the rules, what we really can
explain in terms of those rules is very limited, because almost all
situations are so enormously complicated that we canot follow the plays of
the game using the rules, much less tell what is going to happen next. We
must, therefore, limit ourselves to the more basic questions of the rules
of the game. If we know the rules, we consider that we ''understand''
the world. How can we tell whether the rules which we ''guess'' at are
really right if we cannot analyze the game very well? There are, roughly
speaking, three ways. First, there may be situations where nature has
arranged, or we arrange nature, to be simple and to have so few part that
we can predict exactly what will happen, and thus we can check how our
rules work. (In one corner of the board there may be only a few chess
pieces at work, and that we can figure out exactly.)
A second good way to check rules is in terms of less specific rules derived from them. For example, the rule on the move of a bishop on a chessboard is that it moves only on the diagonal. One can deduce, no matter how many moves may be made, that a certain bishop will always be on a red square.
So, without being able to follow the details, we can always check our idea
about the bishop's motion by finding out whether it is always on a red
square. Of course it will be, for a long time, until all of a sudden we
find that it is on a black square (what happened of course is that in the meantime it was captured, another pawn crossed for queening, and it turned into a bishop on a black square). That is the way it is in physics. For a long time we will have a rule that works excellently in an overall way, even when we cannot follow the details, and then some time we may discover a new rule. From the point of view of basic physics, the most interesting phenomena are of course in new places, the places where the rules do not work--not the places where they do work! That is the way in which we discover new rules. ....'' -- 'Six Easy Pieces'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feynman_Lectures_on_Physics
Einstein's birthday 14.March.1879 is also informal Pi Day as 3.14. He ridiculed Lasker's Chess obsession. What is the harm playing CVs with Capablanca? --compared to, say, chain saws or atomic weapons. Did Einstein never fianchetto a Bishop? For self-improvement, ever even run a mile, bluff a straight, or perform in some square Chess/Boxing ring countering a right cross with power combinations? Round 3.14 is thankfully lots closer to pi than Indiana Legislature's hopeless proposed 3.0 for convenience in 1897 that recent era. Three as first approximation. Many many trials it takes to get it right be it pi, relativity, evolution, opening theory. GM Vukcevich (1937-2003) of this very chosen thread once was on actual list for Nobel Prize consideration in field of Physics too.
Here's the Chess allegory of Feynman, http://www.chessvariants.org/index/displaycomment.php?commentid=25108, brought to current life by Chessbase: http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=6240.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Evans, American gm Larry Evans died recently collaborator with Fischer
GM Larry Evans died in November 2010 the last comment here noted. Also historic Chess deaths: http://www.chess-poster.com/english/notes_and_facts/deaths_of_chess_players.htm. And article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chess-related_deaths, shows Chess is one of those fields, like horse racing or culinary participation, that has legendary terminations. In some stubborn quarters you could die of, or for, a misprint.
Http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7317 is link of article current at Chessbase. ''Bringing back'' something that they no longer have in OrthoChess resonates with their probable recollection of Harding's same wording below at the sister orthodox bastion. Http://www.chesscafe.com/text/kibitz31.txt, the old article at Chess Cafe by Tim Harding is one of few including chess variants by supposed chess insiders. They're getting boxed with less wiggle room, where no newbies are going to want to be memorizing their rote openings and so on the 2020s.
The CV Losing Chess and Helpmates are a first at Chessbase: Helpmates, Selfmates article. Selfmates of old are based on a form of the cv Losing Chess. F.i.d.e. problem/fairy department actually has sanctioned certain few cv pieces for problems, and this same Vukcevich thread has more information. Knowing them is necessary to get grandmaster title in problems like nobel-candidate Vukcevich's. Now Helpmates they all officially made Orthodox a couple of decades ago, but the form of Losing Chess examples of mates in 3 and 4 Chessbase posts, problem-theme Selfmates, are still pure Heterodox, or Fairy, and unsanctioned. Their publication is about equivalent to acknowledging CVs generally or a step that way. As problems, they are two excellent ones by other composers from meister T.R. Dawson's 1930s,
T.R.Dawson. In the C.V. department take a look at several of the many MultiRex Selfmates Dawson composed. That is for instance, two White Kings, sound familiar? ///// Note that Spartan Chess immediately below and above ties in both for the problems to solve beyond rules-set and Spartan's one side having two (Black) Kings.
Http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7353. ''The Federation was created in great haste and almost without preparation.'' The landscape included Dawson's great output in fairy and Lasker's and Capablanca's experiments in reform, so the rules had to be codified post haste. The above and the other two recent Chessbase articles, those on problems and problemists, are all current summer 2011.
In substantiation of Rich Hutnik's ''reducing the clock'': http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7387. Or put another way, remarkable consistency of topic from Lasker's circa year 1915 stalemate as win, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalemate, to Capablanca's circa 1925 ''draw death,'' fully disproved by subsequent events. Http://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/lasker.html.
Steve Giddins' excellent ongoing series: http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7423. Concealing Grimshaws, Novotny, or double Novotnys are Mates-in-two or maybe -three and not fairy. Helpmates are no longer fairy by their fiat a couple decades ago, but recently shown Selfmates by the same author at Chessbase are still heterodox, unsanctioned, or typically out-of-bounds for formal chess sites like Chessbase, Chess Cafe and F.i.d.e. Novotny: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novotny_(chess). Http://www.chessvariants.com/index/displaycomment.php?commentid=27910.
Readers react at Chessbase, http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7430, to proposal for getting a sure win regardless classical, rapid or blitz rated the same. http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=460&start=30
More classical problem-theme interference Grimshaws and Novotnys: http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7460. The Organ Pipes were first composed by Sam Loyd in 1859. A direct-mate moremover double-side Novotny/Grimshaw by Hans-Peter Rehm.
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