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Chess is often described as the game of kings. And it is. But there was a time when chess was also the game of those who were overthrowing their kings. That was a time when chess was the game of dangerous radicals and revolutionaries, writers and intellectuals. It was a time when men and women used coffeehouses, newspapers and salons as we use the internet to spread once-forbidden ideas and knowledge ideas that would ultimately shatter the old order and usher in the modern world.

In all the vast upheavals of the 18th century, chess was in the thick of things. It was played in taverns and inns as well as royal courts; played by misfits and disaffected intellectuals as well as kings and aristocrats. In 1784, five years before the storming of the Bastille, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, in an essay analyzing and defending the Enlightenment, dubbed that century sapere aude," which translates as "dare to know," "dare to be wise," or, more loosely, as "dare to think for yourself."

Sapere aude thus became the unofficial battle cry of the Enlightenment. It is also good basic advice for any chess player.

Dare to Know: Chess in the Age of Reason is the latest exhibit at the World Chess Hall of Fame examines this fascinating and little-understood era of chess history in depth for the first time, covering roughly the years from 1700 through 1830. At the beginning of the era, with few exceptions, chess was a game played primarily by kings and their courtiers, as well as the clergy. By the eras end, people of all classes played in great numbers. Chess books began to be published more widely. The saga of chess in the 19th century had begun.

What caused such a drastic transformation in our beloved game? It was a natural outgrowth of the Enlightenment, a phenomenon that likewise transformed so much of the world. This exhibit includes material from the various regional Enlightenments of Europe and America, but focuses primarily on that most central Enlightenment the French Enlightenment. Most historians define the era as beginning in the early 18th century and ending sometime much later in the century, usually with the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. Dare to Know includes the Enlightenment as well as both the pre- and post-Enlightenment periods.

Reinventing the world the Ecyclopdie

It is impossible to discuss the Enlightenment without also discussing the famous Encyclopdie of Diderot and dAlembert. The most famous, revolutionary, and subversive encyclopedia ever published, the lofty and audacious goal of the Encyclopdie was nothing less than an attempt gather all human knowledge, and yet at the same time, to fundamentally change the way people think.

But before all this, the Encyclopdie had set out to be, first and foremost, an encyclopedia. [Indeed, scholars still rely on it for authoritative answers to many historical questions related to 18th-century France.] The Encyclopdie was the work of its chief editor, the philosophe Denis Diderot, assisted by Jean Le Rond dAlembert and over 150 other authors, many toiling in obscurity. By far, the most prolific author was the Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt, who wrote over 17,000 articles, or roughly a quarter of the entire Encyclopdie. Diderot himself wrote well over 5,000 articles, the second-highest total.

To modern people, it may seem hard to believe that the writing of an encyclopedia could be fraught with controversy. But this one was written by a unique group of progressive intellectuals known as the philosophes, who could not help but infuse their articles with high-minded concepts of tolerance, reason, open-mindedness and egalitarian political ideas, all of which posed a bold and flagrant challenge to the authority of both Church and State. As a result, the philosophes or the encyclopdistes, as they came to be called worked under constant threat of censorship, arrest and even worse.

An enduring mystery: knight or bishop?

Chess is included in the Encyclopdie in two main places: First, in the fifth text volume (1755), under the Es (for checs, the French word for chess), on page 244, there is an article about the game, written and signed by the ever-prolific Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt.

And second, in the ninth plate volume (1771), there is an illustration of a chess set that has fascinated and confused chess historians and collectors for some 250 years. The set appears in the volume not because it was considered important to show what a chess set looked like, but merely because it was one of the typical products of a toymaker. Known as an Encyclopdie set, or sometimes as a Diderot set, few complete examples of this once-common set are still extant. It also gave rise to later French chess set styles such as the Directoire and Rgence.

The six different chess pieces are depicted in a sophisticated manner, giving both elevation (side view) and plan (top view), in the manner of an architectural drawing. One of the pieces, fourth from the left, is depicted as having a top cut into a crude triangle. Many writers have pointed out that this crude triangular cut was probably cheaper than employing a skilled carver to make horses heads, the rest of the set being turned quite inexpensively on a lathe.

Though one might expect the piece to be a knight, other information in this entry conflicts with this identification. On the comments page that precedes this plate, the third piece from the left is referred to as the cavalier, or knight, while the fourth piece from the left is dubbed the fou, or bishop. This does not agree with how the pieces sit on the board at the start of play. There has been tremendous debate over the years about this conundrum, but with access to a genuine first edition of the Encyclopdie, I believe (with all due respect to those who disagree) that I have solved it. The piece ordering on the comments page is a typographical error a misprint. The fourth piece from the left is indeed the knight.

The rise of the coffee house

Just as chess was the chosen game of the philosophes, coffee was their chosen drink. Because of the way coffee tended to sharpen the wits rather than dull them like alcohol, coffee was the obvious choice for all manner of thinkers, writers, philosophes, encyclopdistes, scientists, academics and everyone else intent on living what we would now call a life of the mind.

Today, it is almost impossible to find a decent chess coffeehouse anywhere in the world. It was not always so. Once there were thousands of them. Every major city in Europe and the Americas had countless options to choose from; there were some 300 coffeehouses in Paris alone, most of them allowing or encouraging chess and other sober games such as draughts. Many chess players today have heard of the Caf de la Rgence, and perhaps Caf Procope in Paris, but these were only the most famous.

Chess players today often tend to think of the Caf de la Rgence and places like it merely as places where chess was played, but this is a woefully inadequate view of history. If ever there were a place where world-shaking ideas flowed along with the flow of the black brew, mingling with the gentle click of the pieces, it was that venerable and much-mourned institution, the chess coffeehouse.

Stay tuned for the conclusion in next weeks article. In the meantime, learn more about Dare to Know: Chess in the Age of Reason," or see the free exhibition at the World Chess Hall of Fame, on view through Nov. 1, 2020.

Tom Gallegos is an antiques collector and dealer, independent researcher, and self-taught antiquary. His greatest areas of interest are the history of Western Civilization before the Industrial Revolution, the history of science, and the history of ideas. He has been a member of Chess Collectors International since the 1990s, though he collects in many other areas as well, including Greek, Roman and Medieval antiquities, and also participates in other collecting societies in areas such as playing cards, rare books, maps and prints, scientific instruments, and nautical antiques. Though no longer active as a tournament player, he formerly held a U.S. Chess Class-A rating, and still enjoys playing chess daily.

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On Chess: When The Game Of Kings First Became A Game Of The People - St. Louis Public Radio

Most chess players can find beauty in chess puzzles, especially ones with clever tricks in the solution.

Check out this thrilling puzzle from our 2019 holiday quiz.

White to play and win:

That puzzle was tough, especially if you didn't catch the critical theme right away. But this next chess puzzle is not a chess puzzle at all.

Recently a video has been making the rounds in the gaming and math circles of the internet, and many who've watched it are shocked the puzzle is solvable with its stark and minimalist starting point.

It's a sudoku puzzle with some constraints based on chess rules.

If you're not familiar with sudoku, here are the rules:

To these standard conditions, the puzzle-maker Mitchell Lee has added two more restrictions that will make chess players feel right at home:

The expert solver is Simon Anthony, who quit his job at an investment bank to solve sudoku puzzles on YouTube.

He is initially flummoxed at the seeming inscrutability of the puzzle and believes he is being trolled by his YouTube partner. He even mentions stopping the video and calling his friend to berate him for the "impossible" challenge.

It's about this time we realize the old adage is true: There is nothing more exciting than watching a man solve a sudoku puzzle in real time.

The turning point could not have been scripted any better. The solver realizes the power of the chess-based rules and blurts out, "having said that," before getting started on the solution.

The rest of the video, which is absolutely worth watching for its full 25-minute runtime, becomes less about the mechanics of the puzzle and more about the solver's appreciation for the puzzle-maker's genius. The chess-based rules actually empower the solution to the minimalist starting puzzle.

The solver's YouTube channel, called "Cracking the Cryptic," has more of these sudoku puzzles with chess restrictions if you want to go down that rabbit hole. Here's another enjoyable real-time solving video of a chess-based sudoku.

If you'd rather stick to more traditional puzzles, many are available on Chess.com, including the quite addictive Puzzle Rush.

Give them a try, and let us know your favorite chess puzzles in the comments.

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You Won't Believe This Chess-Themed Puzzle - Chess.com

Learning Chess The Easy Way

Unless youre a competitive chess player, you probably hold a number of misconceptions about the game.

You might think chess players are smart people, or that learning to play chess well is correlated with intelligence. You might think chess is hard, or that you hopelessly suck, and its an impossibly tall task to consistently beat that one friend or relative who is the reigning champ. You might think chess is boring, that its an activity youre not well suited for.

I used to think all of these things. I was wrong.

My dad taught me chess when I was five or six years old. He did it in the same boring way that most dads teach anything. First, he told me a bunch of stuff. We went through each piece and how it moves. He laboriously enumerated the rules of turn-taking and capturing and checkmate.

Next, we tried playing a game. This may have taken place many months later. I was probably too frustrated learning a million arbitrary piece movements to play a weird, annoyingly complicated board game with my father in the first sitting.

And of course, playing the game felt more like a chore than a reward. I would be absolutely clobbered on the board and frequently told I was explicitly wrong or implicitly stupid for missing obvious things. Ah, did you consider this move son? Or what happens if you try this instead? Many a dad just cant help himself in pointing out corrections a bit more frequently than others are comfortable with.

On rare occasions, I would be momentarily fooled by my dads goofy playacting. If he let me win or inconspicuously guided me to capture a piece, I felt accomplished. Id entertain brief hopes that there might be an easy road to better results. Maybe my feeble little braincouldwithstand the cold crushing complexity, the labyrinthine logic of chess. Such hopes would die as soon as I was reminded of our status roles as father and son, chess authority versus chess learner.

Finally, inevitably, I would leave the board feeling essentially humiliated. This feeling was often accompanied by a fit of childish rage, an I hate you, I hate chess monologue, and perhaps some pieces flying across the room. In hindsight, I could have skipped the chess entirely, reclaiming my precious youth instead by flinging things and smiling while gleefully shoutingwingardium leviosa!

Despite whatever tricks and treats my dad attempted to leverage for the sake of the well-intentioned chess interaction, it always felt mildly painful. And this dynamic continued foryears. I remained trapped in chess learning for normal people mode until I was twice my starting age. I guess there are far worse things out there, but still, it wasnt the bestit was the hard way.

Youve probably experienced this mode of learning in your life, whether its with a parent, teacher, student, friend, or romantic partner. The activity variescooking, painting, video games, cleaning, bird watching, golfbut the outcome rarely deviates. The teacher fails to inspire, and the student is left with a lingering sense of Id prefer if we didnt do that. Its simply not fun; its an unpleasant situation to be avoided or escaped.

I found my way out in middle school, when a group of friends started to play chess in the cafeteria during indoor recess on rainy days. We competed as peers, exploring the game together. There was a lot more pure joy, a lot more dynamism and engaged interaction, when we played. And we stumbled upon a real treasure in the team chess variant known as bughouse.

In bughouse, you pass captured pieces to your partner for them to place at leisure on their board. The game is fast-paced, exotic, and exciting when compared with normal chess. There are wild, surprising swings when a piece lands in the middle of the opponents army, as if it were an alien beamed down from outer space. Add to that the competitive aspect of middle schoolers rotating in and out on teams, king-of-the-hill style, and you can quickly see how this game was more addictive than many multiplayer video games.

MVL and Carlsen play some bughouse against Caruana and Aronian

The fun of bughouse led to my joining the chess club in high school. With a newly cemented foundation of enthusiasm, I learned to study chess in earnest and play in serious competitions. Notably, it was only after a couple years of devoted study and play that I first began to appreciate the life skills and metaphors that chess is so publicly symbolic of.

The importance of planning for the future, of evaluating options and making tough decisions, staying calm under pressure, and working hard to improve oneselfall these things do not come in a rush to the student of chess. In fact, they probably come much sooner to people learning virtually any other sport or activity!

With basketball, you learn to handle the ball, pass it around, and refine your aim towards the hoop. The mechanics can take a while, but you understand the contours of the journey fairly immediately with your body. So you enroll in the journey and learn from it within that framework. You can see how sports relate to life, teamwork, discipline, planning,et ceterafairly immediately after a couple practice sessions with a coach or training partner. Because youre not so hung up on the rules or environment.

Chess is different. You typically have to spend a ton of time learning the physics of chess first! It takes many weeks if not months for a dedicated student of the game to transition from novice to beginner level. In all my years playing chess with family as a kid, I never learned the core basic skills, let alone the full fancy rules ofen passantor castling. I would say I, like many others (and perhaps you) stayed a chess-exposed novice for a very long time without any significant progress or joy.

Reflecting on this journey, I now see how it could have been accelerated. I could have bypassed the initial years by jumping straight into the middle school peer experience of fun chess and bughouse. Then I could have moved more quickly to the high school challenge of getting intimate with the game.

Well have to save the full story of my chess career for another time, but I will mention one more interesting milestonewhen I became the father figure in high school, trying and failing to teach chess to my little sister! It was hard to convey why chess was interesting at all, and I now deeply regret crushing her without mercy through the years. I wish I had known then what I know now

So lets dive in (to this one weird secret trick that doctors hate):learning chess can be done quickly and transformatively through minigames! The starting place is Bishops + Rooks.

This is a minigame in which white moves a bishop first, then black moves a rook, and whoever captures a piece first wins. Its a draw with best play, but getting to that skill level may take a second grader a month of lessons. During this time, she will get a ton of instructive value from playing the minigame again and again.

I could say a lot more about Bishops + Rooks and how to best utilize this teaching tool. Feel free to check out my written guidehereand explainer videoshere! Theres a whole suite of such content, including follow-on minigames like knight battleship, pawn wars, zombie chess, and more. For the purposes of this essay, Ill give one additional example here then wrap up with some concluding takeaways.

This minigame teaches King Opposition, and its a good starting place for adults who are quick to master Bishops + Rooks. I dont recommend it for younger kids until they are enthusiastic tournament players, since the exercise can feel too abstract and tedious.

As with Bishops + Rooks, standard piece movement rules apply, but the objective isnt checkmate. Instead, white tries to get the king to a8, b8, or c8 while blacks goal is to block this from happening with her king. Theres a forced win for white that makes beautiful use of the real-game principle called distant opposition which I wont explain here but encourage you to exploreyou can find plenty of practice online.

Ive found playing this minigame with interested or even tentative friends to be extremely rewarding. Following up with king and pawn vs king scenarios then queen / rook checkmates usually leads to an enlightening aha experience. The most common reaction is, Ive never seen chess like this before.

Starting with a couple pieces instead of a complete set is crucial to teaching and learning chess the easy way. With these minigames, novices have a well-defined environment in which they quickly come to grapple with the fundamental skill of chess: finding options, thinking through them rigorously, and deciding on reasonable onesin a word, strategy.

The easy way isnt meant to imply that learning chess or strategic thinking is easy. Rather, minigames are more understandable bite-sized chunks to chew on and engage with, when compared with traditional rote verbal methods that try and fail to teach everything at once.

Another benefit is the level playing field minigames create. An advanced friend and her beginner friend can engage in a realm where both sides stand a chance at winning, or at least not losing horribly and ambiguously. The person with less chess experience feels comfortable making mistakes because its more obvious how they themselves can detect and learn from them. Thats empowering.

Lectures never have this tangible, experiential quality, which is why I believe its best to dive into silently playing minigames as soon as possible. The more rules there are to explain and memorize up-front, the more likely it is that folks end up in the sorry state of chess learning for normal people. Dont make people learn chess the hard way!

If youre in the teachers seat, with anybody but especially with young children, please bear in mind that they may be unfamiliar with the process of navigating on their own. Chess can be one of the first experiences in a persons life when they really get toseethe complete physics of a contained situation and to operate fully autonomously within such an environment.

Be extra patient, watch silently, and let them explore on their own as much as possible. Allow the outcome of the game to teach them their mistakes. You dont need to point out the correct answers. Give them a fun time and the opportunity to play again. Debrief with questions like what did you learn from playing today or notice that was interesting to you? Its really wonderful how many doors open with this kind of self-propelled learning journey and accompanying self-confidence gains.

The truth is that chess can and should be stimulating and fun and empowering, from the beginning. Its inherently interactive, and although its a zero-sum competition over the board, its more importantly a series of tractable challenges which provide a medium for self-improvement and social engagement.

In the era of COVID-19, humankind is riding the swelling wave of screens and isolation. Now more than ever, its especially important to have these kinds of healthy media of exchange and growth with our friends, families, and children.

Find a partner and try out a minigame! Everyone can experience and appreciate what it means when I (and others) think of chess fondly. Its all about having the right tools and mindset to get started on a rainy day in a fun, approachable way.

This article first appeared at https://andytrattner.com/chess-the-easy-way.html. Republished with kind permission.

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Learning Chess The Easy Way - Chessbase News

When Viswanathan Anand left Chennai for Frankfurt in February, the city was waiting to see M.S. Dhoni back at Chepauk. The Southern metropolis was also talking about the latest Rajinikanth film, Darbar. All those classical music and dance stages were still alive, though the season had ended.

It was an entirely different Chennai that he returned to, some three months later. The IPL had been postponed indefinitely, cinemas had been closed, dancers and musicians didnt know when they would be able to get back on stage.

The novel coronavirus has changed the world, almost unrecognisably.

Anand is relieved and happy that he can finally be home again; that he can spend time with his wife Aruna and son Akhil, after being quarantined in Bengaluru on his arrival from Germany. He is also glad that he can play chess from his comfortable, familiar workstation at his home in Kotturpuram.

Yes, the five-time World champion wants to play in a tournament again, but he doesnt know when he can do it. I dont know when chess will return to where it was before, he tells The Hindu over the phone. It seems some countries are coming out [of the lockdown], but they are not completely out of danger, while others are still in an earlier stage.

He adds: Only when the vaccine comes, can we breathe easy. A part of me hopes that by August or September we will at least be used to this and no doubt there will be a lot of precautions still. It could well be next year; I am getting used to that reality.

He is also getting used to playing competitive chess online. He had done quite a bit of that while he was stranded in Frankfurt.

And he played some splendid chess, belying his 50 years consider his 17-move demolition of World No. 4 Ian Nepomniachtchi at the Nations Cup.

I was very happy with the win against Nepo, he says. The funny thing is when I was preparing this line in the morning, this particular variation came up and I thought I should familiarise myself with it. I also liked the way I played against Teimour Radjabov, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Ding Liren.

He is not surprised that online chess really took off during the lockdown. It has been around for many, many years, like video calls or working from home, he says. We didnt imagine we would be doing those things so often. I hope those people who are introduced to chess online will stay with it.

Anand thinks the Novak Djokovic episode is a warning for everyone. I heard that Serbia was doing well and that enough people had felt the risk had receded, he says. But then you see that what happened with the Adria Tour.

The World No. 1 organised the tennis tour, but before long tested positive for the coronavirus, along with three other players.

We should never take the virus lightly. says Anand. It is like playing chess against the computer. You cant completely understand the thing. All you could is to do, sit and focus on what you are supposed to do right, make your moves and hang in there.

Even if you are doing things right, you dont get points for that, all you get is that you are not infected today, but you have to take all the precautions tomorrow. So this new world of distancing and these new habits we picked up might last longer than we think.

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Dont know when chess will return to where it was, says Viswanathan Anand - The Hindu

During a brainstorming discussion with a colleague on the value of entropy in machine learning models, specifically the models used in threat intelligence work, I mentioned that many of the threat intelligence models in use today seem to overemphasize the pattern recognition aspect of threat intelligence through the egregious use of algorithms. By contrast, they seem to underemphasize the novelty of suchaspects as intuition and chaos, both of which would be present if two malicious actors were pitted against a defensive system that is nothing more than an artificially intelligent system with lots of machine learning algorithms. Then I thought about the game of chess, which cognitive psychologists have studied with great interest for more than 70 years. I did a bit of my own research to see what aspects of chess psychologists found most intriguing, and whetherany of their findings could be used to build better threat intelligence programs.

The 1965 book Thought and Choice in Chess,by Adriaan D de. Groot, seems to have laid the foundation for the study of psychology in chess. There are several other psychologists who studied the game and its players; William Chase, Herbert Simon and Dr. Ferdinand Gobet are worth mentioning. The short synopsis of their combined research on the best chess players is as follows:

There are many more findings published on the cognitive aspects of chess, but this short list led to something researchers today callChunk Hierarchy and REtrival STructures(CHREST). CHREST,in turn, led to the design of computational models that could help psychologists understand why chess experts are so good at the game, by studying the number of moves the typical chess expert memorizes and how an expertorganizes information mentally while playing. The research into CHREST, in turn, led to the development of mathematical models for hierarchical chunking in the brain to help cognitive scientists understand how the brain ingests, organizes, stores and later retrieves information.

So what does all this research on the game of chess have to do with threat intelligence? A great deal. CHREST and the subsequent mathematical models for hierarchy and retrieval structures underpin the databases, algorithms and artificially intelligent software used for threat hunting and by the threat intelligence correlation engines today (as well as other types of technology).

Threat hunters today are much likeplayers in a game of chess where the adversary maneuvers in much the same ways as an opponent across a grand chess board. A good threat hunter can determine just who that opponent is, based on the moveshe or she makes. We consider adversarial activity as tactics, techniques and procedures just as we consider a chess opponents moves as rooted in strategy where the decisions made are based upon patterns and models. One could easily consider the science of threat intelligence as the identification of these patterns as quickly as possible to predict future action and to engage appropriate response maneuvers. However, where does the science of threat intelligence intersect the art of intuitive prediction based on skilland experience? How can an analyst derive meaning and predictive value in a seemingly chaotic engagement?

Interestingly, one of the experiments with the CHREST model showed that expert chess players havesuperior memory recall for chess positions that are considered random by weaker players. Why is this important? Because it shows that expert players are not only playing the game based upon the patterns they know or the visual representation they have of the chess board in their minds, they are also playing by intuition or gut-feeling something no mathematical model, machine learning algorithm or artificially intelligent system can duplicate today.

By allowing a team of analysts to rely on their expertise with the introduction of chaos and entropy, we can glean the actions and strategic moves that wed the science of threats with the art of analysis. Then we can truly provide a robust threat intelligence gathering effort that provides threat actor identification, activity prediction, mitigation and response strategies.

To harness the threat intelligence power enabled by chaos and entropy, we can take the followinglessons from the game of chess:

All of this analysis sounds glorious for large firms with lots of available capital. For small businesses with limited access to both financial and human capital, building a sophisticated threat intelligence team is extremely difficult to achieve.Small businesses:

What could a small business or firm do with a limited budget and no sophisticated COTS solution? Itcan hire entry-level cyber security professionals who have a love for the game of chess, because those individuals will bring with them the following capabilities:

Skills such as those needed to findOWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities within an application stack can be taught through suchsites as HackerOne. The best hackers we have ever met had something in common with the best chess players we know a love for the game.

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Management and Strategy Consultant, IBM

Kelly is a management and strategy consultant with over 20 years of consulting experience ranging from security analysis, to functional analysis to security ... read more

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A Grand Game of Chess: Entropy and Patterns in Threat Intelligence Models - Security Intelligence