roomthily

Explorers

via xkcd

chess vs. catan

Maunsell Towers (Jonas Loh’s Anti Syn Nation project) - 

“a speculative micro nation,” he writes, supported by the “natural genetic engineering” of sea slugs. But someone should make a chess set entirely from Maunsell-tower like oil platforms and other modular microutopias at sea—or perhaps just a student thesis project presented using custom-milled chess pieces, with elaborate spatial rules governing the resulting game.

via BLDGBLOG

Fractal Chess

via Neatorama

medieval:

Chess Piece in the Form of a Bishop with Two Attendants
ca. 1100
Carved in England
English
Walrus Ivory

via www.metmuseum.org

Destin strate… : jerome pierre

Think. Question. Pickle Tee shirt. from Horman’s Best Pickles

proofmathisbeautiful:

cloois:

The distribution of opening moves in chess has been shown to follow Zipf’s law (a linguistic model of the occurrence of words in written English):

We perform a quantitative analysis of extensive chess databases and showthat the frequencies of opening moves are distributed according to a power law with an exponent that increases linearly with the game depth, whereas the pooled distribution of all opening weights follows Zipf’s law with universal exponent. We propose a simple stochastic process that is able to capture the observed playing statistics and show that the Zipf law arises from the self-similar nature of the game tree of chess. Thus,in the case of hierarchical fragmentation the scaling is truly universal and independent of a particular generating mechanism. Our findings are of relevance in general processes with composite decisions.

also used to detect financial fraud - a person entering random numbers does not really achieve randomness.