Chess

What Hacker News says

1. nileshtrivediAug 2013
   > when most mathematicians look at a set of abstract symbols they don't "see" the symbols per se, they see what those symbols are meant to represent.

   Might we benefit from a different set of symbols that actually convey the geometrical meaning behind them? If instead of π, we used a glyph that shows a circle over a diameter, instead of x for a variable, we show an empty rectangle that shows that it's a placeholder for a value?

   > Students who said the answer was 44, how did the students who said 26 arrive at their answer?

   I came across a great example of this approach in Chess: The Complete Self-Tutor by Edward Lasker. Instead of just showing the right answer for a chess puzzle, he tells you what you did right in your answer and what you missed in getting an even better answer. This was a printed book that was completely interactive.

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2. vmilnerFeb 2022
   Well, the chess one is still in print:

   https://www.amazon.co.uk/CHESS-COMPLETE-SELF-TUTOR-Self-Tuto...

   and i can see several of the others on secondhand sites (eg ABE books) for varying prices, but often not too expensive, if you don't need to deliver outside of the US.

   If the chess one is any guide, they may have lost the explicit TutorText branding (and changed title slightly) if and when they moved to other publishers so best to search by author.

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3. EdwardCoffinDec 2018
   The chess problem described in item 70 always surprised me. It just didn't seem worthy of inclusion. A few years ago I happened across the book by Lasker that it was drawn from and found that they'd made a typo in their description of the problem (bishop should be at KB8, not KB7), one that still makes it a mate-in-3 as described, but nowhere as interesting as what it should have been.

   I wrote it up in /r/chess: Problem 66 from Chess for Fun, Chess for Blood by Lasker: white to mate in 3 [1]

   [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/73h23o/problem_66_fr...

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4. EdwardCoffinSep 2017
   Item 70, The chess problem "stolen from Chess for Fun, Chess for Blood" by Lasker is problem 66 from that book [1]. The problem as stated in the memo is wrong: the white bishop is on the eighth rank, not the seventh, so it should say Bishop on KB8, not on KB7. The problem in FEN is then:

   5B2/6P1/1p6/8/1N6/kP6/2K5/8 w - - 1 1

   The version from Lasker's book is much more interesting. It happens that the version from HAKMEM is also a mate-in-3, but kind of a mundane one, relative to Lasker's anyway.

   [1] Lasker's book is on Google Books, and you can see the relevant page (page 145) https://books.google.ca/books?id=y90UTQeLeeIC&pg=PA145 (spoiler: the solution is described on that page).

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5. EdwardCoffinDec 2015
   I think there's a typo in HAKMEM: item 70 is a chess problem purportedly stolen from Lasker's Chess for Fun, Chess for Blood. As far as I can tell, it is problem 66 from Lasker's book, on page 145 [1]. However, there's a crucial mistake: the white bishop is supposed to be on QB8 (f8), not QB7 (f7). HAKMEM's version [3] is still a mate in 3 like advertised, but the original problem as Lasker has it [2] is much more interesting.

   [1] You can see it on Google Books https://books.google.ca/books?id=y90UTQeLeeIC&pg=PA145

   [2] FEN for Lasker's version: 5B2/6P1/1p6/8/1N6/kP6/2K5/8 w - - 1 1

   [3] FEN for HAKMEM's version: 8/5BP1/1p6/8/1N6/kP6/2K5/8 w - - 1 1

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