Daniel Murrell writes:
I see you have a blog post about turing chess . . . I’ve seen another reference to it but am unable to find a definitive source. Do you know of a source where I could find out about the history of the idea?
My reply:
You mean the run-around-the-house thing? I don’t know where it comes from. It’s a well known story, if you google Turing chess run around the house you can find lots of references but I don’t know the definitive source. I can blog and see if anything comes up!
I’ve never actually played the game. I’ll try it outdoors sometime, perhaps. When I last posted on the topic, we had a fun discussion, revealing that the rules are not as clear as one might think. It makes me wonder if anyone’s thought hard about it and come up with a good set of “official rules.”
Any thoughts?
I don’t have the book in front of me so can’t confirm this right now, but in Hodges’ exceptionally good biography of Turing “Alan Turing – The Enigma” I think there is a paragraph or two about this game and its origins. He may cite his sources.
Turing himself would have found the running part easy. He made a late start to competitive running taking it up after WWII but wasn’t so far from olympic selection His time from one of the qualifying events would have seen him 14th in the Olympic Marathon.
An interesting variant is to put the chess board and (stone!) pieces in a swimmingpool, two meter under water. !