Category Archives: chess and language

Obama as Chess Master, Part Two

Posted on July 9, 2009 by

This week, Spiegel Online published an interview with Henry Kissinger (see “Obama Is Like a Chess Master“) that featured the following headline-grabbing exchange: SPIEGEL: Do you think it was helpful for Obama to deliver a speech to the Islamic world … Continue reading →

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U.S.-Russian Diplomacy as Monopoly vs. Chess

Posted on September 1, 2008 by

For the past two years, I have been following a series of stories that depict U.S. – Iranian diplomacy as the story of poker-playing Americans trying to out-bluff Iranian chessplayers (see Texas Hold’em and Chess and Diplomacy). Spengler of the Asia … Continue reading →

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Indian Naming Practices

Posted on April 4, 2007 by

As I’ve mentioned before, chess is a great vehicle for learning all sorts of things, including how to pronounce and spell rather unusual names (such as “Dzindzichashvili”) . ChessBase has a piece today about Anand (based on a Rediff News … Continue reading →

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Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (a.k.a. "Artificial Artificial Intelligence")

Posted on March 25, 2007 by

The New York Times reports today (in an article titled “Artificial Intelligence, with Help from the Humans“) that Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos has created a service dubbed the “Mechanical Turk,” in which humans are given lowest-bidder pay for solving problems … Continue reading →

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Chess and Evolutionary Theory

Posted on February 12, 2007 by

Today is Darwin Day, which honors Charles Darwin (February 12, 1809 – April 19, 1882). So I thought I’d say a few words on the topic of chess and evolutionary theory. I began thinking about the subject of this essay … Continue reading →

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Patzer Etymology

Posted on February 8, 2007 by

I recently came across “Patzer: An Etymological Study” by Dr. Helen Weissenstein (Chess Review, April 1961, page 117), which may be of some interest to the many chess bunglers and bloggers out there who like to use that term in … Continue reading →

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