Hey everyone! I hope everyone has been having a great week
of senior project!
The first day I came in to my mentor, he was teaching a
class of three (who were all better than me at chess by the way). He told me to
come over and watch the lesson. They were going over the middle of one of the
player’s game. (Of course, it was Sicilian Defense, Dragon Variation). So I sat
there kibitzing, but I was surprised at how in the world people could see so
much in depth where I was just looking at two maybe three moves ahead. The way
analyzing games work is that there is an interesting move that a player missed that
one of analyzers see during the analysis. Then comes the 5 to 10 minutes of
creating alternative lines that could have happened in the game but didn’t from
that one move. Once they beat those lines to death, they rinse and repeat
somewhere else. Anyways, it was definitely an interesting game and got me in
the mood to start working on my project.
After the three students left, my
mentor gave me a gigantic book of chess lessons (26 chapters, each chapter
containing approximately 24 puzzles and positions). He also gave me a chess
program called ChessBase 11, which he admitted had not used the latest version
of. We spent a significant portion of time trying to figure out how to use this
program, from creating our own positions to making colored tiles to creating
arrows pointing in any direction. Although getting the chess program to work
was the first thing we did, it was not the focus of the first part of my
project.
The first part, which I’ve been working hard on all week, is to analyze
the plethora of chess puzzles, and come up the best moves on my own. Each
chapter has its own theme, in which my mentor and I would go over when I got to
that chapter. Of course, the first couple chapters were pretty easy- how to use
a pawn, bishops, etc. However, once I got to actual tactics part of the book,
it definitely got difficult. Even though I’ve played chess for a while, I’ve
never done constant problems like these. I would compare it to doing a problem
set in Math, where it takes a lot of time to figure out what the right move is,
even though all the problems are based on the same concept. Not all of them are
straightforward either- for example, some of the more convoluted problems
involve sacrificing pieces to open up an attack or figuring out how to trap a
queen in a series of forced moves. Eventually, I’ll kind of find a pattern, and
a pair of puzzles will look similar and I would be able to find the solution
quickly after doing the first one. As mentally exhausting as it is, I’m
enjoying it immensely. At the end of each chapter, I would get to have a bit of
my own fun of torturing the person who will use my finalized product- I would
create my own puzzle of the theme of the chapter. The joys of trying to make a
problem as difficult as possible...
The second part of the project, which I
touch on a little bit, is using ChessBase to input the positions,
notes/explanations, and the right solutions into a single database so that it
will easily be made into an online book. This part is more tedious and more
boring in my opinion because it has less to do with chess and more to do with
getting a final product. However, there are a couple of exciting factors. Firstly,
I get to compare my answers with the solutions that the computer gives. The
computer will obviously find the solution easily, but it’s definitely a great
feeling to know I got the right solution to the puzzles. Secondly, the final
product will be used for students to use in the future. Since I’m making the
book electronic, students will be able to easily access the book after I am
done with the project.
GLHF,
Anthony
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