Chess Page

For centures people have been playing games. Chess is one of the oldest games known today. Originaly it was invented in India. As time moved on, chess started to spread all over the world.

People changed chess, and the ways they play this game. Nowadays this game is played: face to face -- when two players gather in the same place and share the same board and pieces; by mail -- when two opponents don't see each other, but send their moves by mail; E-Mail -- the same as mail, but without long time delay required to deliver a letter; chess over internet -- the most modern way, people can gather in internet chess clubs, virtually, and play each other right from their homes, without having to wait for mail or E-Mail messages.

Chess as a game has almost the same rules for these different ways to play, but each way is different sociologically.

When two opponents are sitting across a table, they can see: if the opponent. is nervous, if he is aggressive, maybe read something in his eyes. Sometimes this is possible to messure an opponent before a game by looking at him and decide what style to play agains him depending on if he looks dangerous or not.

When two opponents are playing over internet there is no interaction by eyes, and people are only able to learn something about other side by the rating of the opponent. On internet though people often send messages.

It is very interesting to observe social relationships between people, who play chess on the internet. First of all it is easy to realize that there are players, who represent all countries of our big world. They all have different cultures and different characters. Off course, chess is a game, which involves a lot of thinking and everyone wants to win and none likes to lose. When we lose we get upset, but all of us have different characters, and we get upset all in different manner. For example, some people are not revealing their bad mood, after their loss, but some can not hold their anger inside and start ethier complaining that his/her partner did not play fair or even insult them. But most of the people thank their partners for the game in any case (a win,a draw , a loss). It is very interesting to note that even though there are only a few women who play chess on the internet, comparing with a number of men-players, there are some women- players, who have a very high chess rating.

There is a high number of peolple, who likes to talk not just about chess, but also about other things, like politics, dating, movies, education and so on. Some of them make friends there, and they might become very close friends, so that they would even visit each other.There is a real social life going on the chess server.People communicate there just like in a real world.

Some people play chess using computer's help, and this loads up the CPU. If a user logs out of a workstation without closing the chess process, it doesn't terminate automatically. Instead, it hangs out there taking up CPU.This may be very irritating to the users who are currently using the machine. Especially, those who frequently use compiling and linking tools. (you can use the command top to check the current CPU load)

We offer these problems for you to solve. If you succeed please send us your solutions. Have fun.

White to play

White to play

Useful Chess Links:

 Chess on Internet
 FIDE Laws of Chess
 Internet Chess Library
 Grandmaster Java Chess Viewer
 CHESS SERVER

Peter Pashkov
Mikhail Derazhne
Yuriy Levinson
Anatoliy Rivkin
College of Computer Science
Northeastern University
Boston, MA
e-mail: peter@ulaska.com