Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Chess in Google Books

I must tip my hat, so to speak, to Mig for this one. In a recent post Mig talked about Google Books, a service from the search engine behemoth that allows users to search for books, read scanned pages and, in some cases, even download a book as a PDF. For obvious reasons the service has been the subject of various lawsuits from publishers and authors alike. Anyway, whatever one may think about this service - it is rather intriguing and, after trying it out for a few minutes, I found it quite useful.

For instance, searching for "chess" I immediately stumbled across these 3 books which I thought might be of interest.

The first is Mathematics and Chess by Miodrag Petković. That one should provoke interest from some our maths aficionados. And then there's this, Thought and Choice in Chess by Adrian de Groot. Well-read readers will recall that de Groot presented the so-called "Position A" to participants in the famous 1938 AVRO tournament, in the Netherlands. Below is that same diagram. See if you can do better than Salo Flohr who was apparently the only one amongst the matters who missed the win. de Groot passed away a couple of years ago aged 91.

White to move and win

Finally, roughly along the same lines as de Groot's book is Chess Player's Thinking by Pertti Saariluoma. This one seems like a heavy read, but a quick glance at some chapters tells me that this could be quite interesting.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

ha ha nice puzzle.

I finally worked it all out but too slow for a tourney game even if I twigged there was a tactical possibility on.

I kept looking at the wrong first move !!!

cheers
Garrett.