TITLE: Curiosity on the Chessboard
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: January 28, 2017  8:10 AM
DESC: 
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BODY:
I found a great story from Lubomir Kavalek in his recent
column,
<A HREF="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lubomir-kavalek/chess-champions-and-their_b_13710900.html">
   Chess Champions and Their Queens</A>.
Many years ago, Kavalek was talking with Berry Withuis, a
Dutch journalist, about Rashid Nezhmedtinov, who had played
two brilliant queen sacrifices in the span of five years.
The conversation reminded Withuis of a question he once asked
of grandmaster David Bronstein:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 "Is the Queen stronger than two light pieces?"
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

(The bishop and knight are minor, or "light", pieces.)

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 The former challenger for the world title took the question
 seriously.  "I don't know," he said.  "But I will tell you
 later."
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 That evening Bronstein played a simultaneous exhibition in
 Amsterdam and whenever he could, he sacrificed his Queen
 for two minor pieces.  "Now I know," he told Withuis
 afterwards.  "The Queen is stronger."
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

How is that for an empirical mind?  Most chessplayers would
have immediately answered "yes" to Withuis's question.  But
Bronstein -- one of the greatest players never to be world
champion and author of perhaps the best book of tournament
analysis in history -- didn't know for sure.  So he ran an
experiment!

We should all be so curious.  And humble.

I wondered for a while if Bronstein could have improved his
experiment by channeling Kent Beck's
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/patterns/pedagogical/three-bears.html">
   Three Bears pattern</A>.
(I'm a big fan of this learning technique and mention it
occasionally here, most recently
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2016-07.html#e2016-07-28T14_37_21.htm">
   last summer</A>.)
This would require him to play many games from the other side of
the sacrifice as well, with a queen against his opponents' two
minor pieces.  Then I realized that he would have a hard time
convincing any of his opponents to sacrifice their queens so
readily!  This may be the sort of experiment that you can only
conduct from one side, though in the era of chess computers we
could perhaps find, or configure, willing collaborators.
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