Since I have started playing chess, I think my skill had improved a lot over the past year. Although I still cannot beat Andrew, the grand master who had left PMC, I can slaughter Gordon most of the time if I don’t overlook some obvious blunders. What makes me different from a novice player is I no longer eager to exchange pieces, unless the exchange gives me a positional advantage. I learn how to setup traps and avoid the traps setup by the opponent. One thing I would like to improve is the ability to trade equal material with pieces of different values. My end game is still quite weak, many times I gave away my advantage by pushing the pawns too far, without giving them enough support from the king. The use of chess clock makes both Gordon and me play like a pro. He no longer do touch moves, he can even get me sometimes if I don’t pay good attention on the implication of his moves. There is no magic bullet in playing chess, study hard on the tactics, carefully plan your strategy and master mind your opponent is the only way to victory.
All posts by hevangel
Voting
Today is the election of the BC provincial government. As a good citizen, I did caste my vote. Fortunately, the candidate I support had won the seat in my riding. I know nothing about the candidate himself before going to the voting station, nor he had any advertisement targeted me. The only judgment I had is to vote along party line, support the party closer to my ideas. There is an independent candidate in my riding with the nick name “evil genius” in the ballot, who is a SFU student. I almost wanted to give him my vote as an encouragement for his courage.
longevity
The topic of longevity was bought up today during the aisle chit-chat session. What will you do if you can live a thousand years. One of the colleagues said he would like to build a self sufficient floating city, which is kinda like the Freedom Ship in the Discovery Channel show. I say I would like to be a historian and antique trader, provided that I’m the one of the few people can live this long. There would definitely population problem if everyone can live long. However longevity doesn’t imply immortal. In a long run the death rate is still 100%, thanks to accident and murders. To make longevity viable, all we need find the equilibrium among birth rate, death rate and resources growth rate.
politician
Today when I was discussing how to vote on tomorrow’s provincial election with colleagues, I come across this wonderful idea. Base on the fact that we all agree that politicians are not trustworthy, I come up with this wonderful idea of replacing all human politicians with computer AI. We all know that AI won’t cheat, and they are selfishness less, not like many flip-flopping politicians only care about to be elected and their own political career. The only problem we may have is that the AI could be buggy. Fixing bugs in software is a solvable problem if technology advance fast enough, not like monitoring the moral of all those politicians, which is hard to tell. Albeit the long term goal is to replace politicians with AIs, it is not yet feasible in near future due to technical reasons. The short term solution would be wiring lie detector to every politician’s head during TV debate, so the voter would know which candidate is more reliable. Then the guy sit next to me make a slight improvement to this scheme, instead of using the lie detector, it would be better to use a truth detector, so the machine will only go off once a while and won’t annoy the audience.
eposide
I’m the kind of person won’t have patient to wait another for another episode, and I don’t really like having my daily schedule based on the TV. That’s why I like to watch download program at any time I like. However, I have a problem of not able to stop once start watching. The only thing stop that me from starting another episode of my favorite show is the availability. To force myself not wasting too much time watching shows, now I won’t download all the files in one go. I have set up another rule that for the show I planned to watch immediately, I will only download 5 episodes at a time. So I will have to stop after about 2 hours of TV consuming, wait for the downloading of the next 5 episodes in the next day.