CHESS ENDGAME NEWS G.M c

early adopter of FINALGEN and his reaction to a 9-man ‘draw ’ pronouncement is interesting, probably common today and therefore noteworthy. He recalls DEEP THOUGHT in The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy posing as an oracle about Life, the Universe and Everything – with somewhat anti-climactic results. The position is Carlsen-Kramnik position 41w (Chessgames, 2013d), q.v., Figure 1, line 25. There is a serious point here about the epistemology of computer simulation. Computer representations of reality’s past, present and future are merely models. They tend to produce apparently professional, authoritative and definitive output and are all the more seductive for that. The dot-matrix printer has been replaced by an abundance of fonts, colour and 3D-visualisation. However, computer models and the perception of them are based on their authors ’ and audiences ’ respective mindsets and have usually been written in imperative rather than declarative languages whose use has a chequered history (Hurd and Haworth, 2010). Financial, climate and weather forecasts have on occasion been unintentionally misleading with significant, global consequences. Models showing correlation between two random variables may imply causality where none exists. For similar reasons, mathematicians originally looked askance at theorem proofs generated by computers, although here there have been developments since 1977 and particularly recently (Hurd and Haworth, 2013). Endgame Chess is becoming what FREEZER, FINALGEN, the Nalimov (Bleicher, 2013; ChessOK, 2013), MV