Language acquisition and chess

Warning: Rampant groundless speculation follows. My brother and/or anyone else should feel free to contribute their own ideas or simply ridicule mine. 

The first thesis I will never write was about the similarity between Bobby Knight and Bobby Fischer (that’s my third Reassembler post ever).

My second unwritten thesis is about the similarity between language and chess. The un-done research piece of this thesis is a search for a correlation between chess ability and facility with multiple languages.

Chess seems like an artificial, ultra-simplified version of a language, in some respects. It’s got components (the pieces = morphemes/phonemes/semantics) which must obey certain possibly arbitrary rules (grammar) to construct output (play, or a game, like speech) which can be correct or incorrect (illegal moves = ungrammatical speech) but furthermore may be adjudged a legal-but-poor. Good, better, best. Beautiful. So there’s correctness according to the rules, and according to the internal logic of chess which makes some moves bad, but also according an aesthetic, subjective dimension.

It resembles language, yes, but also math in certain aspects. Math’s rules seem non-arbitrary to me; that’s a critical difference from chess but perhaps not from language. Linguistics features, or used to feature, observations about universal rules of grammar shared by all languages and debate about whether those rules arise from some hardwired aspect of the human brain. I.e. a biological basis for certain restrictions on how any language must be structured.

Music – now is that closer to math or to language? The basis of chords and keys is mathematical, or maybe it would be more correct to say they can be described mathematically. (Howard? George? Harvey? Matt? Anyone else wanna dive in here?) This stuff has percolated in my mind for years. It resurfaced yesterday in part because of a conversation with my co-worker Kate Walsh.

For an American I am pretty good at chess, percentile-wise, though my play is more volatile and ‘appealing’ in the barbaric sense than it is in the sense of correctness. 

Like most of my colleagues, I am “good at language” (that’s why we’re writers and editors) but not so “good at math”.

I learned German pretty well (although my Langue was ahead of my Parole) but I never understood musical keys particularly though I played tenor saxophone for about six years; I could learn to play by rote, but never quite grasped the whys behind  music or calculus or trig or the treble clef.

Ah, the mysteries of the mind. I suppose this has all been hashed out by Pinker and others – I’ll get around to reading someday…

The third little piggy

This one I haven’t made yet. In fact I’ve never tasted it. But you can tell by reading and looking that this Carne Adovada is a knockout. It’s a New Mexican dish of pork loin marinated in a chilis, oregano and garlic paste. Bake long time at low temp. Shred. Feast.

So you throw a big party and you serve the Three Little Piggies as hot horse dovers [sic].

• First one is a bit of this Asian-inspired ground pork served in an individual leaf of Belgian endive (or other lettuce cup).
• Second one is this Cuban Sloppy Joe served on a toast point or (better) a piece of pressed bread.
• Third one is the Carne Adovada served as suggested on a miniature warm tortilla with avodaco and melted cheddar.

Yes, it’s a lot of pork. That’s the point. We’re talking tiny portions and three VERY different flavors. Make a vegetable platter, a fruit plate, a cheese tray for balance if you must.

The five most underrated classics of pop music

To qualify, has to be something you almost never hear on the radio. And it has to compel you to crank the volume to an unsafe level.

5. Lonely is the Night, Billy Squier. Aggressive guitaring. True story: When I was a wee tot I listened to (I think it was) WKRQ “Top Banana!” in Memphis. This was the station where Rick Dees was a DJ prior to hitting the big time with Disco Duck and moving to bigger media markets. Anyway another WKRQ DJ once ‘locked himself in the broadcast booth’ (a stunt, yes) and played Everybody Wants You over and over, something like 50+ times in a row. Even he got tired of it. But the point is, Billy rocked.

4. The Reflex, Duran Duran. Girls on Film is a better tune but less underrated.

3. Outside, The Fixx. Passive-aggressive guitaring. Also this one actually belongs on the ‘top five album-ending songs’ list. Who says I don’t like slower pieces? They just have to be kooky.

2. Groovy Train, The Farm. You don’t remember that one, do you?

1. Message of Love, The Pretenders. Also on the ‘top two pop songs quoting Oscar Wilde’ list (there aren’t five). Chrissie Hynde rocks Billy Squier (and everyone else) out of the room.

At last, the payoff

Okay. As noted, this weekend was the Greater Boston Open chess tournament. In a pleasantly surprising turn of events, I won my first three games, beating players rated 2100, 2250 and 2330. Unfortunately, playing for first place in the fourth and final round, I got drubbed by Esther Epstein (2165) so I wind up either second or tied for second.

Well, final round aside, that’s still a fantastic tournament for me. Here are my chess improvement takeaways.

1. Being lucky doesn’t hurt. Chris Chase was slowly strangling me and then made an oversight leading to instant CML. (Catastrophic Material Loss.)

2. As a general rule, you’re going to score well in familiar positions and poorly in unfamilar positions. Nothing magic there. So learn new positions. If you’re old and you have a day job, this learning process will be slow, but that’s okay. I am way more familiar with my Black openings these days, and whaddya know, I’m winning with Black.

3. Hard work pays off, eventually. You just don’t know when it’ll be. Might take years. Gotta keep plugging. My rating could plummet next time I play – doesn’t matter, I’ve proven to myself that I’ve still got some upside left.

Brain overload, part 2

Way back in February, which seems roughly two lifetimes ago, I had a week of offsite training, complete with a team case study – quite intensive. And since I was leaving from there for the annual USATE chess tournament, I was simultaneously trying to process all that information AND spend my evenings sharpening the competitive blade, cramming on my chess opening books. [Original Brain overload post here.]

A point I’ve belabored with this blog is that lighting up your brain is great. That’s part of why I blog in the first place, and why the subjects are all over the map, and why I enjoy reading comments here from you eclectic weird- er, diverse commentators. [Smile.] However, brain overload also really wears you out.

It’s been another one of those weeks – on top of a sad family event (the funeral) and the perpetually busy work schedule in my perpetually metamorphing industry, plus those darn Red Sox, I’ve been trying to sneak in preparation for the Greater Boston Open. (Which will also explain why I probably won’t be posting anything this weekend, but look forward to having something new to say on Monday.) 

Chessloser just blogged about the odd but universal phenomenon of studying intently and learning new ideas only to see your performance degrade. (Chess has a rating system that makes your performance quite empirically measurable.) The comments, aside from my garbled metaphoric hash, are really interesting as people try to describe the mind’s efforts to sort out new information and put it all properly in place.

Acting!

Love the old Jon Lovitz SNL bit Master Thespian. I was merely … Acting!

Also love watching great, blow-you-away acting. Now if I’m cognizant that it’s great acting, you might argue, it’s not great acting. Great acting should be invisible. (Yeah, whatever.)

What brings this to mind is Anthony Hopkins in Fracture. I suspect the script has one good idea and otherwise is mediocre at best. And the female lead, Rosamund Pike [corrected], despite her considerable goodwill earned in the surprisingly and infinitely re-watchable chick flick Pride and Prejudice, gets completely blown off the screen by Hopkins and Ryan Gosling. Hopkins, wow.

Similarly I like watching Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush in the first Pirates of the Caribbean, where they recognize the ridiculousness of the script and decide to go WAY over the top, to great effect.

I like male actors with gravitas, and there aren’t many. Denzel in Glory; Russell Crowe in Master and Commander. Worst casting decision ever, in this regard: Bill Pullman as a milquetoast President in Independence Day. He was so much better as The World’s Stupidest Person in Ruthless People…

But for sheer astonishing power, any day I’ll sit down and watch Daniel Day Lewis and Emily Watson in The Boxer. Truly an underappreciated flick.

Dead and buried

People say that gravestones and burials are “for the living”, i.e. a place or a time to remember deceased loved ones. Fair enough. I respect that choice. I lost a friend, a 17 year old kid. He deserves a grave; he didn’t get his fair shot at life. His parents deserve a place to remember him.

And a trip to any graveyard gives you an unusual perspective, looking around at the markers, seeing how long (or how short) people’s lives were, and those who died early in war, and so on.

But I can’t shake the nagging suspicion that the modern burial process is a vestigal act. In the early early days, when somebody died, it presented the community with a problem: either they got eaten by animals, or they started to stink. Solution: Cover them with rocks. That handles the animal problem but not the smell. So how about a sarcophagus? How about embalming? Hey, if we embalm them , AND put them in a box, AND take that box and bury it six feet underground, THAT seems to do the trick. (This is what the security world refers to as “defense in depth”.)

Me, I’m getting cremated.

A good tagline

My wife asked me about corporate logos I like. Which lead me to realize that I don’t pay much attention to logos. I pay more attention to taglines, inveterate word guy that I am.

As mentioned, I am bored by ”More bars in more places” and liked “Raising the bar”. [Moment of silence for Cingular.]

But I LOVE “7 whole grains on a mission“. And no, I don’t eat Kashi. I just think that is a compact phrase that not only gives you a sense of what they do but also of a personality and purpose. It’s brash but not obnoxious. Not bad for six words.