Hikaru Nakamura commented on Chess960 (or 'Freestyle' chess as chess.com is desperately trying to re-brand it) and said that as a 'spectator' sport he felt that only the high-elo crowd would really get excited about 960.
To clarify, not that lower ELO or the casual player wouldn't enjoy it but that there is so much history with the standard layout that even the beginner ends up understanding the high-level tactics and strategies of the openings.
This makes standard chess much more enjoyable for more people to watch and follow (i.e. bums-on-seats at the chess tournaments). While the super grandmasters are celebrities for the chess crowd in their own right, those lower down don't generate that kind of excitement and throwing 960 in the mix would see much less eyes than normal chess does.
Literally 960 different layouts might generate some types of opening theory, but to layman or perhaps 2200 and lower ELO players it just isn't that much fun to watch.
They are both equivalent. Scratch-built is perfectly cromulant.
My father used to talk about 'Scratch-building' his WWII dioramas and model vehicles/tanks. While you could use a phrase like 'Scratch-cooked' rather than cooking from scratch, I've never heard but someone would not think the former meant something different to the latter.
Hmm I wonder if an Ox would be exempt from the new congestion cameras they've just set up. I can see some exemptions for commercial HGVs so maybe they might come under that.
Looks neat. Might be worth constraining the inputs. I got an error at 200x200:
Uncaught PythonError: Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<exec>", line 22, in resetKnot
File "<exec>", line 473, in generateKnot
File "/lib/python3.12/site-packages/PIL/Image.py", line 2941, in new
return im._new(core.fill(mode, size, color))
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
In baseball, the baserunners are allowed to advance to the next base at any time the ball is "in play" which includes when the pitcher (vaguely similar to bowler in cricket) is holding the ball.
When a baserunner tries to advance without the ball ever being hit, this is called a "steal."
When the baserunner and batter are coordinating so that the batter will try to hit the ball during a steal, this is called a "hit and run." The idea is that the infielders will be getting in position to get the runner out, so won't be in good position to play a ground-ball hit by the batter.
So consider a play where a batter strikes out, then the baserunner is thrown out trying to advance (a strike-out throw-out double play). If it's a swinging strike, that might be a failed hit and run, but if it's a strikeout looking, then it's almost certainly a failed attempt at a steal (with the minority of the time it being the batter missing the signal for a hit and run).
I should acknowledge that 2 strikes with fewer than 2 outs is not considered a good count to try a hit and run; unless a poor batsman is up next you are often better off having a fresh count with the next batter. On the other hand a hit and run is really only effective when it's a surprise.
It doesn't really matter. But it's a datapoint that, say a batter has a lot of strike outs looking, they may have a poor sense of the strike zone. Or if a batter has a high swinging strike out rate then it says that their pitches are deceptive and have a lot of movement.
In baseball you DO differentiate between whether you struck out swinging or looking.
It matters for the pitcher because if you can disguise your pitch well enough that it looks like a ball coming in but is actually a strike, so that the hitter doesn't even try to hit it, that is a great signal.
As a batter, you typically* want to swing at strikes, so you want to know if you are letting hittable pitches go by. From the time baseball players are like 10 years old, you'll hear coaches and parents yelling "be a hitter, don't strike out looking!".
* there are always situations you probably don't want to swing, like if you have 3 balls and no strikes, you usually want to not swing, and assume you'll get another ball and will get walked to get on base. There are a lot of other situations where you do or don't swing, and the strikeout looking vs swinging measures that.
> If a ninth planet exists in our solar system, scientists say this telescope would find it in its first year.
Why?
I read the article and it wasn't clear to me what makes this telescope more likely (and within a year) be able to find this infamous Planet 9 than any other attempts.
While most telescopes focus (pun intended) on seeing far, this one focuses on seeing wide and often. It will be able to survey and resurvey the same large swaths of the sky. Offline analysis will be able to detect changes between different surveys. And these differences may show objects that are too faint, or at unknown locations such as a new undiscovered solar planet.
This ability is reflected in the telescope's working title of "Large Synoptic Survey Telescope".
This telescope takes a complete picture of the sky every three days. This is half of the key part. The second half is that they have developed storage and software to compare each photo automatically to flag what has moved every three days. Primarily planets and asteroids would move, everything else would not.
Alerts are sent when a moving object is found for further study by humans.
To clarify, not that lower ELO or the casual player wouldn't enjoy it but that there is so much history with the standard layout that even the beginner ends up understanding the high-level tactics and strategies of the openings.
This makes standard chess much more enjoyable for more people to watch and follow (i.e. bums-on-seats at the chess tournaments). While the super grandmasters are celebrities for the chess crowd in their own right, those lower down don't generate that kind of excitement and throwing 960 in the mix would see much less eyes than normal chess does.
Literally 960 different layouts might generate some types of opening theory, but to layman or perhaps 2200 and lower ELO players it just isn't that much fun to watch.
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