Tag Archives: chess

Summer 2011 Pentathanerd: Bug House

Because chess isn’t nerdy enough the organizers of the Pentathanerd brought the game to a whole new level of nerdiness.

Here’s what Mark Seemann from The Werd had to say about the action:

“The Bughouse finals wrapped up with with fast action and heated matches.

In the Loser’s Bracket, the InterNerds – Scott G and Shaomeng Z – struggled against She! (as Justin H has renamed the team), with Michael H filling in for Scott S. With a checkmate on the board, She! went on to face the loser of the Winner’s Bracket.

Teh Awsumbs cracked out a near-instant victory over the Revenge of the InterNerds – John Thompson and Jonathan Huff – with Sai X dropping a pawn backed up by a knight for checkmate within a dozen moves.

She! were doing pretty well against the Revenge, but Michael H let his king open to check at a vulnerable time – when the opponent could notice – and dropped the game. This led to a rematch of Revenge against Teh Awsumbs.

The final match was well fought, and arguably the best match of the competition. With several trades and subtle threats, Teh Awsumbs’ Sai spotted the king move into a knight-check, taking the king, the game, and the victory.
The overall point totals after the Bughouse Event:

1500 – Teh Awsumbs
1250 – InterNerds
1050 – Revenge of the InterNerds
1000 – The Whom?
900 – She!
700 – Nausea
500 – Effortless”

Pentathanerd, Day 1: Chess

This week it’s sports, sports, sports at the first-ever Pantathanerd! The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat is in the air along with all the pageantry and tradition of this, the pinnacle of nerdy competition. This week the nerds do battle like ancient nerds of yore in Chess, Foosball, Rubik’s Cube, Boggle, and Mario Kart. Many teams will compete, but only one can be named Pentathanerd Champion.

The games opened yesterday with the Chess event. Sai Xiong got the gold medal in the chess round robin tourney, while Pentathanerd founder Mark Seemann took the silver, and Justin pocketed a bronze medal. Pentathanerd standings after Day One:

1^st Velociraptors – Sai                          1115 points

2^nd Elder Statesmen – Mark S            1000 points

3^rd Perfectonists – Justin                    770 points

4^th Maranerded Chix- Kai                    665 points

5^th Blackberry Fools – Jon Rex          310 points

Pentathanerd: Chess day from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

Day Two:  Foosball. If you’re watching the most comprehensive Pentathanerd coverage available anywhere, you’re Inside The Nerdery.

Profiles in Nerdery: Thomas Bishop, DJ and data miner

• Astrological Sign: Aries, adventurous, energetic, quick-witted, accurate enough.
• Time at the Nerdery: 7 months.
• Area of expertise: Leading projects as a programmer and creating complex algorithms. I absolutely LOVE data mining (ex. clustering).
• When people ask you what you do, how do you respond: My passion lies in planning and creating solutions to complex questions, whether it deals with programming, shooting an independent film, or DJing at a party.
• Favorite kinds of projects to work on: Those that deal with analyzing and restructuring large amounts of data. I love working with seemingly useless data and transforming it into extremely wealthy results. Sounds boring but it’s awesome. Specifically, working with thousands of records of individual’s music collections to create amazing marketing worthy results.
• What one thing about The Nerdery surprises people the most when you tell them about it: How relaxed it is: the dogs, flex time, casual dress, and freedom of project interest.
• Seven dream Jeopardy Categories: 1. Chess Tactics; 2. Warcraft III; 3. Lovecraftian Mythos; 4. Things That Do Not Work in IE6; 5. Sub-genres of Electronic Music; 6. Japanese Horror Films; and 7. The Subconscious of Thomas Bishop
• Favorite Fictional Nerd: Mouse from The Matrix.
• According to the Wikipedia entry on Nerd, some nerds show a pronounced interest in subjects which others tend to find dull or complex and difficult to comprehend, or overly mature for their age, especially topics related to science, disambiguation, mathematics and technology. Do you know what disambiguation is: Of course I do.

Profiles in Nerdery: Mark Seemann, he knows his Lucky Charms

• Astrological Sign: Western: Gemini. Eastern: Rabbit. … I’m a split hare.
• Time at the Nerdery:
  
  
• Area of expertise: Breaking code, chess, breaking things, modesty, PHP hackery, arbitrary lists, puns, teh internets, cube mods, pick, poke, peek, games, fencing, counting, bughouse, jQuery, finding areas under curves, sounding smart, guessing, precision, luck, commas, ellipses…
• When people ask you what you do, how do you respond: I start to explain the development process then hesitate, bring up recent projects and awesome coding tools, realize this is going way over their heads, simplify it to short and general statements pertaining to anthropomorphized scripts and happy little servers, reconsider my audience, then sigh audibly and say, “I make websites.”
• Favorite kinds of projects to work on: Nothing brings more glee than finding the subtle hidden unanticipated trick to make a patch of code explode. Except maybe discovering a tight solution to a stubborn problem that’s been holding back a project. Or seeing and executing a forced checkmate in seven moves. Or a well-timed joke to make someone laugh then cry because she has a sore stomach from laughing too much already. Or maybe…
• What one thing about The Nerdery surprises people the most when you tell them about it: There are dogs here at work. True, they may not have the cleanest code, their methods are a little unorthodox, but they get results.
• Seven dream Jeopardy Categories: 1. Jeopardy Categories 2. Etymology 3. Fencing Tricks 4. The Erdos–Faber–Lovász conjecture 5. Lucky Charms Marshmallows 6. Random & Pointless Trivia 7. Transcendental Numerology
• Favorite Fictional Nerd: I couldn’t think of one. I thought of many. In no particular order: Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, Angus MacG, Dr. Larry Kyle, Gyro Gearloose, Dr. Emmett Brown, Gune, Dr. Horrible, Jeff Albertson, Dr. Roy Hinkley, Richard Langley, Dr. Zefram Cochrane, Alan Turing, Richard Feynman, er whup, those aren’t fictional.
• According to the Wikipedia entry on Nerd, some nerds show a pronounced interest in subjects which others tend to find dull or complex and difficult to comprehend, or overly mature for their age, especially topics related to science, disambiguation, mathematics and technology. Do you know what disambiguation is: If one traces the word back to its roots, the origins of the term are derived from the Greek: “etymon” meaning true sense, and “logy” meaning logic. Transcribed from Middle English as ethimologie, the phrase entered common… oh wait, that’s the etymology of “etymology”.