Temposchlucker

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mmmm, merlons and crenels, now where can I find an example?:) . To write in english, I still use a dictionary every now and then. Often just to check if a word I plan to use indeed means what I think it means. But a dictionary doesn't tell me of course how common a word is in english. Maybe you use a word that is more commonly used like battlement or so? . I'm sorry to say that I feel too handicapped without my tools to write a serious post on this subject. I'm not going to invest time to install my tools on this laptop I'm temporarily using so that has to wait untill my new computer arrives. (I hate the primitive keyboard of a laptop and the way to use a mouse with a sort of rubbing pad. Yikes. Where has voice recognition gone?) . BTW why is blogger throwing my empty lines away?

I have been offline for some time due to computer failure. In happy expectation of a new system I found a temporary solution. So I'm in the air again, but without all my handy tools which I have gathered over the years. In the next few days I will share my experiences with the merlon and crenel metaphor.

Enough about memorization for the the moment. I know the technique, now it's first time to define what is actually to be memorized. I'm still plugging through SOCES, and it is evident that this book will be my bane for the next few years. I first read it without going through the variations to get an idea what it is all about. Then I will start to reread it and to work out each chapter. I'm halfway with the first read. But first I will dive in another subroutine. For a few days or a few weeks. No worries, at the end of a gosub there is always a return which will lead me back to SOCES. From the generalisation of my treatment of the king and pawn endings, the metaphor of the crenels and the merlons emerged. This seems to be a good guiding principle for the opening and the early middlegame, in order to keep complexity below my threshold. So I have a chance to reach an endgame without being in time trouble. I already played two games according to this principle, both against st...

Ok, time to summarize. Clue. First you must have a clue. You must understand what a position is about. Second you must have the skills to perform the tasks that arise from the clue. Active attention. From our debates about skill-building the picture emerges that active attention is paramount. I dare to say that active attention cuts back the necessity for repetition dramatically. Active attention supplies the feedback for your efforts. No active attention, no feedback. No feedback, no adjustment. No adjustment, no learning. Putting the body to the equation. The comparison with physical tasks like swimming or Tae Kwon Do is always a bit tricky. The human body adds a factor of its own. It has its own impediments which one must overcome. Precision. From experience with singing I can add that active attention translates to precision. There are always new aspects to discover when singing tone ladders. When you add these aspects as seperate details to your exercise it makes every repetition...

There are 3 layers that play a role when writing a blog. First there is what I'm trying to say. Sometime it's right, sometime it's wrong. Sometimes it's contradicting. Then there is my vehicle, a sort of pseudo scientific techno-babble. This causes me the most headaches. The terminology I use has a scientific meaning of itself. Thus time and again I sin against scientific knowledge when using such terms. The problem is that I have no alternative. I tried to introduce many terms of my own, like duplo-attack and so, but that didn't catch on. Third there is the science. Cognitive science is in it's very infancy, so at times some of its idea's now thought to be right will proof to be wrong. It is not done to write flat out in contradiction with scientific idea's, though. So when such idea is actually wrong but now thought to be right, it becomes an impediment in itself for expressing myself. Since I don't have scientific ambitions I want to treat it with...

Allthough I'm working my way through SOCES I can't prevent my mind to think of matters that are only slightly related to the endgame. Not slightly in my line of thoughts, but measured against common standards. To free my mind, I fixate the thoughts in this post. Please bear with me, more about the endgame is to come. A few days ago I wrote a pos t about a certain point of complexity beyond which the chessgame becomes a gamble. Hence the word gambit , which is a deterioriation by chessplaying members of the Italian enclave in Stoke-on-Trent of the expression gamble-it . In the past I wrote a series of posts about the chaos theory applied to chess here . Which disturbed some dust in which the original idea's were lost. But those idea's are closely related with what I'm writing now. Of course you must become as best as possible in the chaotic part of the game. But once you can't make any easy progress in that area, you have to ask yourself: do I want to continue to...

My invention of the ideal game, in which gain of wood and mate played no role, has proven to work counter productive. So I must try another way to get rid of the disturbance caused by thinking about gaining wood, mate and other distracting bric-a-brac. Dear reader, please ignore them, for the moment. Let's focus on simple things. Later is early enough to add complexity. The role of the pawns seems to be a moving wall. The pawns are the merlons, the pieces are standing behind them with kettles of boiling oil to prevent the enemy from penetrating through the crenels. Alekhine's guns are shooting a breach in the enemy wall. Then all of a sudden you blow your horns and flow out of the gates in order to storm the barricades. Once you entered trough the breach you try to obtain a bridgehead from where you can attack the enemy from inside. But are there openings where you keep your pieces behind your pawns? Is there any game theorist who adviced this? Did anyone advice to move the paw...