News:

Several updates have recently been made to the section on Chess, among them:

The page on the immortal Andersen-Kieseritzky game has undergone major updates (and has now been moved as well) - and a page on the 50th game between MacDonnell and de la Bourdonnais has been added!

A page has been added with descriptions of a few of the well-known Chess openings.

Another page describes a number of the systems for recording the moves of a Chess game, including several quite obscure ones.

The description of Korean Chess has been corrected and extended.

The points schedule for Dynamic Scoring has been revised in consequence of what I have learned about Korean Chess. (And the page has been split up into four pages, to allow for a clear step-by-step explanation of the rationale behind this suggestion.)

And yet another Chess variant, Prequel Chess, has also been added to the section; a page with several ordinary Chess variants has been split up into several smaller pages.

Pencil and Paper Systems • Electrical and Mechanical Cipher Machines • Telecipher Machines • The Computer Era • Public-Key Cryptography • Miscellaneous Topics

Cylindrical Projections • Azimuthal Projections • Conic Projections • Pseudocylindrical and Pseudoconic Projections • Polyconic Projections • Conventional Projections • Other Conformal Projections • Other Equal-Area Projections • Miscellaneous Projections

How Does A Computer Work? • What Computers Are Made From • Computer Arithmetic • The General Layout of a Computer • The Old Days: Computing Without RAM • The Old Days: Decimal Computers • The Perfect Computer? • Not Quite RISC • A Historical View of FORTRAN • Remembering APL • Computer Architectural Preferences • Computer Front Panels • The Punched Card • Print Train Trivia • Printing Terminals and Proportional Spacing • Digital Magnetic Tape Recording • Reforming ASCII and Unicode

Large Keyboards • Keyboards for Genuinely Large Character Sets • Comments on the Keyboard of the IBM PC • Keyboard Arrangements • The Keyboard Overlay Problem • Making Keyboards More Compact • An Attempt at a Popular Keyboard • Scan Codes Demystified

The Slide Rule • Infinity • Archimedean Solids • The Fourth Dimension • Rotations of a Dodecahedron • Examples of Groups • Two Famous Equations • Euler's Constant • Sphere Packings • Gödel's Theorem and the Halting Problem • Magic Squares • The Mandelbrot Function • Diophantus at the Printer's Shop

The 17 Wallpaper Groups • Pentagonal Tilings • Octagonal Tilings • Dodecagonal Tilings • Heptagonal Tilings

A Few Openings • Comments on the Rules • The Immortal Game (Anderssen-Kieseritzky) • The Immortal 50th Game (La Bourdonnais-MacDonnell)

The Crisis in Chess (and a possible solution: Dynamic Scoring)

A Proposed Rating System • Tournament Tiebreaking • Chess Notation

Leaping Bat Chess • Random Variant Chess • Chess 2016 • Three-Dimensional Chess • Engagement Chess • Five-Player Chess • Four-Player Chess • An Unusual Board for Three-Player Chess • Spectral Realm Chess • Half-Shogi Chess • Temporary Marsellais Chess • Antimatter Universe Chess • An Ordinary Variant • Antimatter Universe Flag Chess • Yet Another Ordinary Variant • Rotating Spaceship Chess • A Problem Corrected • Prequel Chess

Well-Known Forms of Chess • Traditional Enlarged Forms of Chess • Warring States Chess • The Game of the Three Kingdoms • Jetan, Barsoom's Game of Chess • The Game of Battle • Chess-Draughts • Hexagonal Chess • Hexagonal Chess, Part 2 • S. Waider's Chess for Three Players • Enlarged and Improved Chess

Two-Move and Three-Move Restrictions • The Perfect Game [of checkers]? • Other Forms of Checkers • Hasami Shogi, Seega, and Other Related Games • Ludus Latrunculorum • English Gothic Double Checkers

Board Games Other Than Chess • A Few Board Games of Interest • Comments on Wei Ch'i (or Go, or Baduk) • Other Uses for a Go Board • The Greatest Modern Board Game of Skill • Backgammon • The Jungle Game • Rithmomachy • The Perfect [board] Game? • Making Wargames More Complicated • Making Full Use of Three Ordinary Dice • The World is Round • Making Board Games More Complicated • Space Battles in Three Dimensions • The Real Game of Bridge • Siberian Semi-Contract Whist (or Bridge) • Bridge for Six: Trivial Whist • Counting Tricks Before They're Hatched • The Semi-Tarock Deck

A Few Words About Stars • A Space Habitat Design • Travel to Mars • Lining up the Planets • The Equation of Time • The Inconstant Moon • The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiments • The Fine-Structure Constant • Punctuated Equilibria

How a Telescope Works • Kinds of Telescopes • Telescope Mountings • Eyepieces • Introduction to Geometrical Optics

Perpetual Calendars • A Luni-Solar Calendar • A Simplified Calendar Proposal • Julian Day Numbers • A Martian Calendar • A Modest Proposal for the Abolition of the Leap Second • Happy Easter! • Happy Hanukkah! • The Mayan Calendar

Printer's Units • Temperature Scales • From Gold Coins to Cadmium Light • Gauge is Not Scale • The Size of the Piano Keyboard • Some Unusual Units of Length • Old Feet and Old Pounds

The Musical Scale • More Complicated Temperaments • A Bit About Musical Notation • Some Interesting Keyboards • A Bit About Chords

Memory-Reference Instructions • Additional Instructions • Basic Architecture • Tagged Operation Modes • Restricted Functionality • Off-Chip Processing •

Basic Information • Writing an EXALT Program • Arithmetic Statements • Control Structures • Type Declaration • Storage Classes • Subprograms • Parallel Processing • User-Defined Types • Program Source Modification • Expression Evaluation • Input/Output • Database Management • Exception Handling • Advanced Features • Appendix II: Implementation Notes