I asked some friends for IF suggestions for children and one of them pointed me at this recent poll: http://ifdb.tads.org/poll?id=z9shyw6mdia3jdud. Note that the reference to “Grunk” in the text at the top refers to the game Lost Pig. As far as teaching goes, the main thing I’d suggest is the language Inform 7, which is a good newbie language as far as being quite interesting from a computer science point of view, as I’m sure you’ll notice if you take a look – http://www.inform-fiction.org/ is the place to start.

On an unrelated topic, given your experience with Interactive Fiction (I enjoyed “For a Change” a while back), do you have any recommendations for specific examples of IF that would be of high quality and suitable for a 9 year-old? Also, any recommendations for teaching IF programming to that age group (for those with some programming experience)?

I agree that those kind of tablebase positions have no semantic content in the sense I mean, and therefore aren’t interesting to me as a human chessplayer. Not all chess thinking maps easily to words, but the “thinking” required to win one of those positions is so structureless and alien to me that it becomes devoid of “meaning”.

I’m sure that for someone with a religious bent, the way that this example illustrates the differences between what the human intellect is capable of and what an intellectually omnipotent being could handle (does God “understand” how to win K+R+B vs K+N+N the way that I understand how to win K+B+N vs K?) is pretty interesting food for thought.

Funny that I stumbled across your (relatively new) blog around the same time that I’ve had a renewed interest in chess. I know from experience exactly what you’ve described about the semantic content of chess positions.

I had a related train of thought after spending some time walking through some ridiculously long winning lines (http://www.xs4all.nl/~timkr/chess2/diary_16.htm – see post #311 and #316 in particular) from those infamous Endgame Tablebases (http://www.k4it.de/index.php?topic=egtb&lang=en).

When these difficult endgames appear over the board, especially in speedchess games, an interesting question arises. Can mere mortals win these technically-won positions over the board, and if so, how?

For an example of a speed chess game of R+B vs. N+N, see # 369 at http://www.xs4all.nl/~timkr/chess2/diarytxt.htm – The graph of “Distance to Mate” from move to move in these positions showed that the R+B player did make progress over time, but then slipped back, and eventually gave up.

I think the frustration of these “fringe” positions is precisely that the standard semantic content of chess (such as king safety, pins, piece activity, piece coordination, etc.) is either absent, no longer applies, or is transcended by yet deeper semantic content that only a different kind of mind could recognize.

For instance, if one takes two position snapshots (200 moves apart) from Bourzutschky & Konoval’s 517-move (Distance to Conversion) win in QN vs. RBN, humans can’t recognize in which position white has made more progress (see #370 at the above link).

Watching anyone play such positions correctly would prompt one to say, “He plays a game with which I am unfamiliar” (Bobby Jones, commenting on the golfing of Jack Nicklaus).

P.S. Yes, this is the Terry from MIT ’89, Xtank, etc. Long time no see! I enjoy your blog.