In May, reigning world chess champion Viswanathan Anand of India will defend his championship against challenger Boris Gelfand of Israel. The match will take place over twelve games, with a prize fund valued at around two and a half million US dollars. Gelfand won the right to challenge Anand by narrowly winning each of three short Candidates ( Read more... )

One of my new favourite Wikipedia pages is List of world championships in mind sports, which lives up to its name. At one point I had a long-term slow-burning plan to start a low-volume blog which detailed the existence of the various mind sports world championships that existed, updating each of perhaps forty or fifty once every year, or two years ( Read more... )

As hinted at a few months ago, in a Friends-locked post, MathsJam is a monthly collection of nearly ad hoc meetups of random people who like, well, maths. "MathsJam is a monthly opportunity for like-minded self-confessed maths enthusiasts to get together in a pub and share stuff they like. Puzzles, games, problems, or just anything they think is ( Read more... )

Meg and I have enjoyed a recent trip to the South to stay with malachan for three nights, headlined by a very enjoyable and successful party (where I got to see people who I hadn't seen for far too long!) to warm his new house. The trip also featured a diversion even further still to stay overnight with frayer and radinden in Brighton. The standard of hospitality ( Read more... )

For a long time, there's a a post I've been meaning to make. Sometimes tunes just hang around and you sort of know what they are, or know where they have come from, without knowing where they originally came from. I've been meaning to post to try to find out what they were, possibly even with a LiveJournal phone post in which I attempt to recreate ( Read more... )

A sad note arrived on my Facebook feed earlier today; a friend had recently attended the funeral of Doug Massie. I have happy memories of playing games with Doug at plenty of games cons over the years; Doug was a thoroughly enjoyable, entertaining and well-mannered opponent, but also a heckuva player. Doug won the Diplomacy tournament at OxCon in ( Read more... )

How are you doing? I am doing *international rotating-hand gesture for "so-so"*; Meg has gone to London this weekend to see some lovely people and it is a filthy, grey day here. Another friend is on a London-to-Edinburgh train and is probably within thirty miles of here but has been delayed due to lightning strikes. There's a storm brewin ( Read more... )

Kay, who blogged at mhw, sadly passed away recently. It's testament to how many people's lives he touched for the better that several people in barely-connected circles are sharing their happy memories of him. I most immediately remember rubbing noses with him at MacT00bage, a house party held by John far too long ago, which was most assuredly all ( Read more... )

This weekend sees the UK Puzzle Championship. Take part online at no charge from wherever you are in the world; pick a starting time of your choice between, er, yesterday and 23:30 UK time on Sunday 26th, and solve as many points' worth of puzzles as you can in 2½ hours. Top UK solver jumps the queue and advances directly to the UK team for the ( Read more... )

(Huh! My old steam-powered LiveJournal turned nine years old today. You get shorter sentences for arson... than some of the ones I've written in that time ( Read more... )