The word “Checkmate” in Chess comes from the Persian phrase “Shah Mat,” which means "the King is dead."
While in the starting position, there are eight different ways to checkmate in two moves and 355 different ways to checkmate in three moves. Not to mention the countless other ways to …
Well, at least building one graphically! I was working with the Quiet Learner on his new tile tower defense game. He's only in a pre-alpha stage right now, so there isn't anything playable as of yet. If you are interested, you can check out his work here: https://qlfiles.net …
Did you know that the piece with the lowest survival rate is the white queen's pawn at d2? That's right, out of 2.2 million master level games, this pawn survives the least games at only 24.5%. Conversely, king not withstanding, the one piece with the highest survival rate …
While playing with my Bluefruit Feather, I decided to build the Android app straight from the source code, so I could see the ins and outs of how it works. Unfortunately, when I downloaded the source code and loaded it into Android Studio, I noticed that it didn't compile the …
When it comes to king moves, the most interesting is castling, for which I did manage to find a few statistics on the web, based on official games:
[gallery ids="3188,3187,3186,3185,3184,3183,3181" type="rectangular"]
This Christmas, my brother was kind enough to get me a great new toy to play with: a Bluefruit Feather! It's a Bluetooth capable board with input and output pins for controlling objects, collecting information, or just about anything …
Ah, the most powerful piece in the game. The queen. She can move in eight directions over great distances, she can outmaneuver any single piece on the board, she is used in more attacks and mates (statistically) than any other piece. Very valuable. So valuable, that she is worth 3 …
I stumbled upon an interesting tidbit the other day. I was trying to take a screenshot of my Android phone while it was playing the boot animation. Of course I tried the standard adb tools:
adb shell screencap -p /sdcard/screencap.png
To which I would follow with an adb …
Merry Christmas everyone! May God bless you and yours again today, as he already did so many years ago, as we can see in this wonderful song!
Good Christian men rejoice
With heart and soul and voice!
Give ye heed to what we say
News! News!
Jesus Christ is born …
Did you know that Bobby Fischer's favorite piece was the king side bishop? Well, at least it is according to Grand Master Mihail Marin in his book, "Learn From the Legends: Chess Champions at Their Best". On numerous occasions, Mr. Fischer will hold onto his king's bishop until the very …