http://www.math.tu-dresden.de/num/chess2008/ is a rare announcement for a math / chess meeting. The date for this workshop is 21.11 - 23.11 in Dresden, where the chess olympiad is taking place from 11.11-25.11.

There is a tradition to use chess as a toy model for many problems in combinatorics, game theory and information theory. But there has been very little progress some classical chess-math problems like the n-queen problem. Perhaps this meeting gives the opportunity to present some new results and also to promote such kind of problems.

In a Darpa announcement a “Broad Agency Announcement” for 23 mathematical challenges can be found. The author is Benjamin Mann, a program manager of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). (more…)

In the last years I only played a handful of overboard chess games, and my latest game in a german league I had the following position

O. Sick - E. Bauer

White to move wins

I lost this position! But in fact there are at least three wining moves. Can you detect one of them? Two of them are really spectacular. And I hint: I played b4!?. It’s not bad, but not one of the wining moves I mentioned above… Any ideas?