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Re:Magnus Carlsen Repeats at World Chess Championship by petilon on Sunday November 23, 2014 @08:20PM (#8650607)
Imagine playing chess while blindfolded. Now imagine playing against 33 people simultaneously while being blindfolded and winning 29 games and losing none. This was done by American Grandmaster Timur Gareev, see: http://www.uschess.org/content/view/12187/709 To do this you have keep 33 chessboards in your mind simultaneously, and track the movement of 32 pieces on each board.
Re:Magnus Carlsen Repeats at World Chess Championship by bluecalm on Sunday November 23, 2014 @09:53PM (#8650839)
The record is even higher at 46 boards: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_records_in_chess#...

Playing a game blindfolded seems like incredible feat if you are not serious/competitive chess player. Playing several sounds like magic. The thing is though that at certain level almost anybody can play decent blindfolded game, especially vs much weaker opponent. Playing several takes some practice but it's mainly connected with not being confused (anchoring positions to something so it's easy to switch). It's really not that much more taxing on the brain as chess players have tons of positions memorized anyway. I am talking about 2-3-4 games. 10 is already very impressive to me and things like 20+ is insane even for competitive chess player standards.

Re:Magnus Carlsen Repeats at World Chess Championship by petegrif on Sunday November 23, 2014 @10:49PM (#8650976)
IT sounds like an incredible feat even if you are a serious/competitive chess player. And whilst it is indeed the case that 'at a certain level almost anybody can play a decent blindfolded game' that level is high.
Re:Magnus Carlsen Repeats at World Chess Championship by ghshephard on Monday November 24, 2014 @04:25AM (#8651597)
I have a colleague at work who plays blindfold chess with his nine year old son on road trips. Well, it's not actually blindfold chess, neither of them are wearing blind folds - they just are able to play games without a board, which, if you think about it, is pretty amazing.
Re:Magnus Carlsen Repeats at World Chess Championship by Tloewald on Monday November 24, 2014 @08:56AM (#8652346)
You just hope that the son doesn't make an especially brilliant move and cause a car accident.
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Re:Magnus Carlsen Repeats at World Chess Championship by muyuu on Monday November 24, 2014 @06:33AM (#8651924)
I can play blindfolded and I'm nowhere near Kramnik. I've been around 17 hundreds in ELO when I played the most. I usually beat my beginner family members playing blindfolded against them.

I don't think about individual pieces placed in a board but rather interactions and moves. Pieces are not located at random, you can remember where pieces are because you remember the plans, the threats and the moves that lead to a setup. If I had to remember seemingly random arrangements of pieces it would be a completely different story and much harder.

Might help that I also played Shogi rather intensely and after being used to Shogi, the chess board feels very small.

Re:Magnus Carlsen Repeats at World Chess Championship by hackuser on Monday November 24, 2014 @12:08AM (#8651134)
On one hand that's amazing. On the other, if you're a sysadmin, could you remember the configurations of 33 servers? It's not hard to imagine.
Re:Magnus Carlsen Repeats at World Chess Championship by rwallace on Monday November 24, 2014 @03:59AM (#8651546)
Not well enough to admin them blindfold, I couldn't!
Re:Magnus Carlsen Repeats at World Chess Championship by ap22213 on Monday November 24, 2014 @08:28AM (#8652243)
I decided to do a total re-write of one of my applications over the weekend. 30k lines later, I'm wondering if this at all feels similar.

When I'm alert, jacked up on caffeine, I can keep track of 100s of classes, 1000s of methods and member variables. When, I'm in the flow, I basically write the program in my head and let the fingers be my mouth.

Re:Magnus Carlsen Repeats at World Chess Championship by cdelsolar on Monday November 24, 2014 @01:03PM (#8653635)
You rewrote an entire 30K line app in a weekend?? I have a side project that I really need to rewrite and I keep predicting it will take me weeks. Maybe I should actually give it a try.
Re:Magnus Carlsen Repeats at World Chess Championship by ap22213 on Monday November 24, 2014 @01:27PM (#8653776)
Don't get me wrong, some of it was refactoring. So, there was quite a lot of copy-paste / text replacements. A lot of moving things here and there. Splitting classes. Encapsulating stuff. Creating new libraries. Etc.

There's a fair amount of new code... I'd say 10000 - 15000 lines, some of which I generated.

Re:Magnus Carlsen Repeats at World Chess Championship by cdelsolar on Monday November 24, 2014 @03:21PM (#8654521)
Yeah - I actually need to add a lot of new functionality and change the language, so it might take me a while longer. Still pretty cool. Refactoring can be fun.