Temposchlucker

From the New Scientist : WANNABE rock stars: keep practising. Yet more evidence has emerged that musicians are made through training, not born with the gift. We already know there is something special about the way musicians' brains react when they hear music. Now new scans have revealed that specific regions of the brain dedicated to musical syntax and timbre become even more animated than usual in musicians when they hear recordings of their own type of instrument. Elizabeth Margulis at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville and her colleagues noticed the distinctions when playing music to flautists and violinists: only when the musicians heard their own instrument did these areas show this boost in activity. ...

Phaedrus provided the following diagram which usually shows a clear correlation between rating and solving time. Michael Adams did this knighttour in 1.5 minutes while an 1800 player usually needs more than 20 minutes for it. For this knighttour you have to move the knight before your minds eye from a1 -b1-c1 etc. h1-h2-f2-c2-a2- a3-a4 etc. all the way to a8. Visiting all the free squares in the right order. The black pawns and the squares they cover are tabu. The black pawns remain stationary. I solved this problem in 3 minutes and 50 seconds, which equals to a 2600 player. When I tried to figure out why I could solve this problem so fast, I realized I had played a lot of Troyis . Which basically trains the skill to move a knight in a restricted area of random shape. The motorskills I trained with Troyis provided the speed and the visualisation you need to solve this problem. And that is exactly what you get for free when you train your motorskills: speed and visualisation. The mo...

Please all give a warm welcome to Phaedrus . He is not exactly going to be a Knight, but he acted as a soundboard for me the past weeks. The advantage is that we can speak in Dutch. I can express more subtleties in my native tongue. Take for instance the title of this post. Even after consulting a dictionary I didn't find a satisfying translation of the word. Other words and expressions like ijzerenheinig and "laten we elkaar geen mietje noemen" are not translatable either. Or even worse, their meaning is changed during translation. The overhaul of my ideas the past weaks seems to boil down to the hypothesis that the difference is made during the scanprocess in the first minute or so. In order to optimize this scanprocess extended assistance from complex motorskills is needed. To test this hypothesis we are designing exercises to train the motorskills needed. The so called extended scandrills. I tried this road in the past , but due to lack of consistency of ideas and un...

DG has decided to hang his pencil in the willows. He sounds more serious than the previous time. He has done a good job. Filling a blog with what you can find in the blogosphere is much more difficult than to fill it with your own ramblings. Over the years the blog developed. At first it was pretty much a national thing. The moment I joined the club it became more international. And lately it has become more regional. Which is logical since we copy the physical world into the virtual, where it can be manipulated easier. After all a man is, due to physical limitations, mainly a regional being. Since the internet with a global dressing. It was interesting to see how the tone of the comments developed over the years. Gifted with a democratical sense, he allowed everybody to use the blog as mouth-piece. While only censoring the extreme. Allthough his posts sometimes stirred up controversy, he remained unshaken, sticking to common sense. A rarity these days. During the past years he has be...

Maybe you think I'm not writing about chess lately. You can't be further from the truth. I'm overhauling my complete set of ideas with the aid of Phaedrus. We exchange e-mails in dutch, so it is possible to express myself more clear. I have no time to translate everything on the fly for my blog. And it will be more readable after things become more crystallized. Thanks Mark Weeks for mentioning me as a blog worth reading and nominating me for the chess blog awards 2007. I'm quite honoured. Thanks to Susan Polgar to put me on her list as number two, the most importance place to stress number one. It created a spike in visitors of this blog.