New Scientist article on Correspondance Chess

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  • New Scientist article on Correspondance Chess

    An interesting article about the history of various forms of correspondance chess using the latest network technology, from 1845 until the present appears on the New Scientist website today.

    Such articles usually end up in an issue of the printed magazine, which may take a week or to to go on sale in NA.

  • #2
    Re: New Scientist article on Correspondance Chess

    Yes, the two-page article is in the April 18th printed edition of the New Scientist.

    The article states that one of the reasons that chess by telegraph came a cropper was the cost, that the move "1 Kt 1 to KB3" was billed as six words. Of course there were codes developed to deal with that. "Uedemann" sticks in my brain, but that name may not represent the best coding. It is not rocket science to think up a coding that would scrunch a move, together with its board designation, into one English word. After all, two decades ago the NiCBASE and ChessBase people figured how to scrunch a move down to less than one byte (on average).

    So, instead of "Board 7 stop 1 Kt 1 to KB3 stop", the transmission might be a single word, such as "contumely" or "phlogistine".

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    • #3
      Re: New Scientist article on Correspondance Chess

      what I liked was correspondance billards. Or in chess notation ?!!?

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      • #4
        Re: New Scientist article on Correspondance Chess

        Originally posted by Jonathan Berry View Post
        The article states that one of the reasons that chess by telegraph came a cropper was the cost, that the move "1 Kt 1 to KB3" was billed as six words. Of course there were codes developed to deal with that. "Uedemann" sticks in my brain, but that name may not represent the best coding.
        I missed that bit - I do know there was a specialized telegraph notation developed for this purpose, because I have seen it explained in old chess books. Of course just "a1a8" would encode a move in one word.

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        • #5
          Re: New Scientist article on Correspondance Chess

          Regarding notation, how and when was the ICCF numerical system introduced? (Italian Game = 5254 5755 7163 2836 6134 6835 etc.) Jonathan?

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          • #6
            Re: New Scientist article on Correspondance Chess

            Originally posted by Dan Scoones View Post
            Regarding notation, how and when was the ICCF numerical system introduced?
            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICCF_numeric_notation
            The system was devised about 1803 by German professor J. W. D. Wildt of Gottingen. It was used 25 years later by Johann Koch, and is sometimes named after him. Ivan Savenkov supported its use in 1877 and it bears his name in Russia.

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            • #7
              Re: New Scientist article on Correspondance Chess

              Originally posted by Jonathan Berry View Post
              Yes, the two-page article is in the April 18th printed edition of the New Scientist.

              The article states that one of the reasons that chess by telegraph came a cropper was the cost, that the move "1 Kt 1 to KB3" was billed as six words. Of course there were codes developed to deal with that. "Uedemann" sticks in my brain, but that name may not represent the best coding. It is not rocket science to think up a coding that would scrunch a move, together with its board designation, into one English word. After all, two decades ago the NiCBASE and ChessBase people figured how to scrunch a move down to less than one byte (on average).

              So, instead of "Board 7 stop 1 Kt 1 to KB3 stop", the transmission might be a single word, such as "contumely" or "phlogistine".
              "Rutherford code, a telegraphic code devised by the English player Sir William Watson Rutherford (1853-1927) in 1880 and first used in matches between Liverpool and Calcutta. Its purpose was to enable moves in two games to be sent as a single Latin word (numbers or ciphers were not accepted by the Post Office), and is estimated to have saved more than 75 percent of the potential cost.

              Having selected the moves, coding is in two stages. Working to a plan, every possible move is counted until the chosen move is reached, the position in the sequence giving a number that identifies the move. Two numbers, of one or two digits each, represent the moves of each game. The first number is multiplied by 60 and the second number added to the product, preceding zeroes being added if necessary to the total to give a four-digit number.

              To convert the four digits to a word, the thousands and hundreds digits, which will be in the range 00 to 39, are represented by 40 Latin roots given in a table, the tens by 10 prefixes, and the units by 10 suffixes. Thus 2231 is broken down: 22 = rog, 3 = de, 1 = as = derogas.

              Decoding is the reverse process. Rutherford believed that there would never be more than 50 legal moves in any position.

              After regulations were altered to allow ciphers to be transmitted, the simpler Gringmuth Notation became the popular choice." [Oxford Companion to Chess, 2nd ed.]

              I'm not sure I understand the method completely, but it must have taken a long time to code/decode a move. Uedemann Code was an earlier attempt with a fatal flaw - the transposition of two letters, a common transmission error, could result in a plausible move. Gringmuth notation avoids this possibility, and is recognized by FIDE. However, in one of those ironies of nomenclature, FIDE called it Uedemann Code anyway.

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