Neil Mix

If you ever take the time to read through grandmaster chess games, you’ll find that once a player obtains a substantial material advantage (takes a rook, bishop, or knight, for example) the other player resigns immediately. While most inexperienced players in this position choose to fight it out, grandmasters know that once there’s a disparity in power, the game is over. Why is this?

To find out, look forward to the endgame. At the start of a game, the loss of a bishop doesn’t represent an overwhelming power differential between players. In the endgame, a bishop advantage is overwhelming.

Let’s give each piece a value representing the destructive power it wields on the board: pawn: 1, knight: 3, bishop: 4, rook: 6, queen: 10, king: 2. Starting a game by removing one player’s bishop yields difference of 4 in power, with a power ratio of 42/46, a difference of about 9.5%. Now let’s say we continue the game exchanging pieces equally between players, down to a king and a pawn for each side, plus the bishop advantage one player started with. The difference in power is still 4, but the ratio is now 3/7, or 230%.

So as the number of pieces on the board decreases, the disparity in power between players grows. Thus if you obtain a power advantage early in a game, your best strategy for the rest of the game is not to play to win, but to tie. In other words, make sure that every piece you lose is matched by an equal loss by your opponent. Taking this to its logical conclusion, you can seek out equal exchanges. Put your pieces on suicide missions, trading pawn for pawn, rook for rook, etc. Such exchanges are pointless tactically, but strategically valuable. Each exchange brings you closer to the endgame where your power differential is overwhelming.

When you employ this “equal exchange” strategy, your opponent’s job is immensely more difficult. Not only must your opponent find a way to win a piece from you (just to break even) while defending against attacks enhanced by your power advantage, but your opponent must also dodge any attempts at self-sacrificing equal exchanges. It’s too much to defend against.

The equal exchange strategy isn’t sexy or exciting. It’s a grind-it-out, lengthy process (especially when your opponent is unaware of what you’re doing). But it works every time, and it’s easy to do.

So why is this post titled Chess and Politics? Because you can draw a direct analogy to the current Democratic presidential primary between Clinton and Obama. The pundits were looking to see if Obama would strike a knockout blow last Tuesday with the Texas and Ohio primaries. He did, but the pundits don’t realize it yet. It’ll take a few weeks to sink in. Here’s why:

1. Texas and Ohio were the only states remaining big enough to provide a significant shift in the difference between delegate counts.
2. The total shift resulting from those primaries was less than 10 delegates.
3. The Democratic party’s super delegates won’t go against the will of the voters. Not this year, not this election.

All this sets up the equal exchange strategy for Obama. All he needs to do is make sure pieces are removed from the board nearly equally for each player the remaining primaries. Each time this happens, Obama’s power relative to Clinton grows.

Obama’s no longer playing to win, he’s playing to tie. And that is much easier to do. Of course anything can happen in politics (which is what the Clinton camp is depending on at this point). But I think it’s fair to say that if Obama isn’t able to get the nomination with his current advantage, then he probably wouldn’t make a good presidential candidate.

I haven’t posted in a while. Rather than list off a litany of lame excuses (why should you care?), I’ll just share one activity that’s taking up some time for me these days:

We’ve already set a new record for snowfall this year. And being of contrarian nature, I choose not to own a snow blower since shoveling is amongst the only exercise I get. (Sure beats sitting at a desk all day every day.)

But this is getting out of hand. By my estimates, I’ve shoveled around 200 cubic yards of snow this winter. That would fill 13 dump trucks, or 5,000 shovel scoops. The neighbor kids have taken to using our snow mounds for sledding.

Only another month or so to go. Next year I’m getting a snow blower.

Buried in this Reuters article is a paragraph stunning in its implications for journalism, even if only by accident:

Kerviel could not be reached for comment. A headshot of him cut from a trading Website showed an earnest-looking young man. At the start of the afternoon, when his identity was revealed, he had 11 friends listed on the facebook.com social website. That number later dropped to four.

I’m speechless. Welcome to the social web?

Dan discussed “flow” recently and made some observations that stunningly mirror my own life. Quoth Dan:

I’d deliberately side-stepped IM and Twitter, but without consciously noticing it, I let my email and blogs reading habits — distractions on their own — to become interrupts…Previously, I’d get to the end of the day and feel unsatisfied. One of the ways I feel satisfied when I’m creating and learning, so I’d go looking for something new to read about in blogland and, before I knew it, it’d be 1:00am.

Dan plans to re-arrange his life so that all of his activities — work or leisure — are broken into uninterrupted chunks. That means scheduling time to check email and read blogs, rather than letting such activities creep in throughout the daily routine.

I’m so sympathetic to this it hurts. But I have a problem: my workday tasks contain empty space. Much of my worktime consists of the following cycle:

1. think
2. write
3. compile
4. test

Steps 3 and 4 are mostly automated, so they don’t require a lot of active engagement. Furthermore, they take time enough that it’s difficult to sit and stare at the screen and wait for them to finish without doing something else. But they’re not long enough to really dig in and engage in other work-related tasks.

So I often fill my time in steps 3 and 4 with activities like emails or a blog reading. (For example, I’m writing this amidst build-and-test cycles.) But I find the context switch to be tiring by day’s end, thus leaving me in what I call “disphoria” — an over-stimulated, partially-connected brain-state that’s productive but unfulfilled and disorienting. Exactly what Dan describes.

So what does one do during these empty mid-task moments? Meditate?

Apparently, a comet that was discovered in 1892 has taken us by surprise and suddenly become a million times brighter, visible to the naked eye. Neat! I hope to check it out tonight.

In the process of reading about this, I discovered Stellarium, which has to be one of the coolest software applications I’ve ever used. Star gazing, anywhere in the world, anytime in history, from your computer. I’ve been using it for 10 minutes and I’m hooked. Even neater!

I have a close friend (a telecommuter like me) who’s recently decided to hit the job market. As an experiment, I figured I would put out a line to my THRONGS of readers who might be able to hook him up with a quality opportunity. (I say experiment because there’s some risk I’ll get a deluge of emails for poorly matched jobs. Or that I’ll get none at all. We’ll see.) Here’s what my friend has to say about what he’s seeking:

I’m trolling for a startup — small enough that I can make a big impact as an individual contributor, but established at least to the point where they can pay me and have benefits. Ideally, a place that needs scalability/performance work measured in orders of magnitude, that’s what really gets my pulse racing and what I’ve excelled at in the past. I’m pretty much language agnostic, but my strongest languages are C and Perl.

I can personally vouch for him as one of the best engineers I know. You’ll never find someon like him by sifting through resumes, and he’s amazing at optimization. You should hire him. If you have something that fits well with what he’s looking for, and you’re willing to hire a telecommuter (which you should be), then drop me an email (see left sidebar).

(p.s. no 3rd-party recruiters — my rule, not his.)

As you may have noticed, my blog has been offline for a while. I’d like to say that I was too involved in a stealth-mode startup pursuing teleportation technology to notice that my blog was down, but the reality is far more boring. My blog provider sufferred a hard drive crash, I didn’t have a backup, and you know the rest.

We’ve all shared the misery of data loss at one time or another. It sucks. However, the past couple of weeks have given me a chance to reflect on the direction I was headed with my blog. I’d never gotten to the point where I felt my “true voice” was active, so I feel like this is an opportunity to give it another shot.

I’m a startup guy, so I’m all about starting from scratch. I far prefer the blank slate to the well-defined shell. I hated losing my blog, but I love the potential of a new start. So here we go.

(Of course, there are a few posts on my old blog that were traffic drivers or personal favorites. I managed to recover those from my blog reader; they’ll be appearing again as soon as I get a chance. In particular, the “Threading in JavaScript 1.7″ post, with its accompanying Thread.js library, is not lost. Expect it again soon or drop me an email if you’re impatient.)