News You Can Bruise for 2004 June 5

I decided to find the answer to the Tootsie Roll Pop-like question of how many moves it would take to move a chess piece to any given part of the chessboard. I don't know why I bothered because it didn't take long to find out that the problem is not that interesting. Every space on the chessboard is accessible from the standard starting position in at most three moves.

On the plus side, while seeing if anyone else had duplicated my puny results, I came across the awesome Trading Agent Competition, best described as Core Wars for those intelligent agents we hear so much about that look for the best prices online. In fact, that link deserves to be the star of this entry. Okay, I'll move this paragraph above the diagram so you'll see it. I couldn't find source for the agents, but here's an overview of the strategies employed.

And here's the chess diagram:

+--------+
|33333333|
|33333333|
|23333332|
|11111111|
|11111111|
|11111111|
|00000000|
|00000000|
+--------+

The only thing remotely interesting about that diagram is that it's not symmetrical, because of the positions of the king and queen.

Another chess-mentioning entry coming later today, if I write it.