I read "It's All a Game" by Tristan Donovan and the chapter on chess was definitely one of the most fascinating. There are so many little bits of human history frozen in amber by the rules.
I had no idea the game had middle eastern origins for instance. The rooks used to be war elephants hence how they "charge" across the board in straight lines (they were adapted into rooks as the game was Europeanized). Also the reason you never capture the king, which used to be the shah, and resign instead is because killing a rival shah was a big no-no!
So many interesting tidbits in that book. Highly recommend.
I have a friend running a cryptocurrency company and wants me to come work for him. I'd be more attracted if it weren't so far away but either way it's still just so sketchy to me.
Thanks for the catch! We're still fine tuning our redirects from archive to the new article locations. We no longer have print pages so we'll need to redirect those to the new posts. At least the actual post (i.e. http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/1.02/crypto.rebels.ht...) is redirecting correctly at the moment.
Also you can see at the bottom of the actual article on WIRED.com we did add tags to archived magazine content, like the article you mentioned, to group content together a bit. Thanks!
Thanks! I was the lead...well only dev on this project and wrote this article. I tried to build the tool to be as flexible and reusable as possible but some compromises had to be made. I hope to, eventually, make the changes necessary to have it be truly adaptable so we can open source it. Fingers crossed!
Ok now I want to "hear" one of these trippy neural network things using a speech/language recognition neural network! Or perhaps if there's a music based one? I'd love to hear a computer's auditory hallucinations!!!
I had no idea the game had middle eastern origins for instance. The rooks used to be war elephants hence how they "charge" across the board in straight lines (they were adapted into rooks as the game was Europeanized). Also the reason you never capture the king, which used to be the shah, and resign instead is because killing a rival shah was a big no-no!
So many interesting tidbits in that book. Highly recommend.