March 26, 2025

Chess: Consistency of beliefs in transpositions

Strategy against the game.

For too long I was playing games against the game itself. That is, I believed that, objectively and regardless of the opponent, there is an optimal strategy by which victory is achieved. The point, whether in a study or in a match, was to find that strategy. This view created great pressure to find an optimal move and, at the same time, undue frustration when any positional advantage could not be realized.

April 12, 2024

Tonality structure in music

The systematic recording of thoughts on musical harmony led to the placement of the twelve musical tones on a constructible three-dimensional surface of an umbilic torus. To this visualized link of mathematics and music I gave the personal name Cholidean harmony structure.

The course of creation of the above link is recorded in pdf file. The broader background to its creation is set out at the beginning of this discussion.

Here are excerpts of the introduction and epilogue, the audio content, and the main images of the file.

August 28, 2023

Greek characters in librecad design program

At one time, when I was working, I used librcad. When I first used it, I had difficulties printing Greek text on drawings. I don’t need librecad anymore, but I ran it recently, out of curiosity to see if Greek fonts is now integrated without problems. Despite the six installed Greek fonts, I couldn’t write Greek comfortably (at least with the MText command).

In a post of mine, I mentioned that, to solve the problem, I reorganized greeks.lff to put the characters on the appropriate, for today, keyboard keys and designed a final ’s’. I named the modified file greeks-mine.lff. Also, to have the Greek in unicode I merged greeks-mine.lff into unicode.lff and added the vowels with accents. I named this modified file unicode-mine.lff. I don’t know if there is a licensing problem, as mentioned in another post, but my fonts still work flawlessly today.

August 17, 2023

Autobiographical sonata

About three and a half decades ago, before the advent of computers, I played classical guitar. At some point I wanted to express myself and, after buying and studying a book of harmony, I composed a piece. Because of its unusual chords, however, I had difficulty keeping the tempo. Then came computers with DOS and probably with the first windows, I was introduced to midi. The piece, after several attempts and separating the voices into instruments, somehow managed to be heard. From then on, for more than thirty years, I was firmly convinced that I had composed something and that all that was needed was a real musician who, with minimal editing, would make it sound as it should. (What a wrong impression!)

July 1, 2023

Meet the musical intervals and the Neo-Riemannian moves, through an analogue clock.

After circle of fifths and diatonics, continuing to read about fundamentals of music theory, I find that the music clock can help in easily identifying the intervals of common musical terminology.

Our music clock

Terminology

A musical interval, as the difference between two pitches, can be defined in an absolute way as the number of semitones that separate them. But the total number of semitones of an octave is 12, while the notes of a scale are 7. The relation of tones in a melody is necessarily expressed as the relation between the 7 tones of the scale used. Thus, to define an interval, it is necessary to use two terms. The first noun term will indicate the relationship to the 7 tones of the scale and the second, as an adjective of the first, will specify the exact interval in number of semitones.

June 26, 2023

Meet diatonic scales in music, through an analogue clock

The A minor scale is related to C major, in that they share the same, empty, key signature. These scales are two different sevenths of white keys on the piano. Because the notes are repeated in octaves, there could be five other different sets of white keys, that is with the same, blank, signature, defining different tonalities. I understood that, in the most, the two mentioned above were imposed, but I always wondered about the other, blank-signed, scales.

June 18, 2023

Circle of fifths in music, through an analog clock

In my youth I studied classical guitar. I read a lot of sheet music and knew how to use key signatures. But I’ve never been able to identify, at a glance, the major or minor scale pair that defines a, non-trivial, signature. I thought this ability belonged only to very experienced musicians. A few days ago, I realized that I was completely wrong. Identifying the pair of scales that defines a key signature is as easy as using a wristwatch.

May 9, 2023

My introduction to game theory

I just finished reading the book “An introduction to Game Theory” by Martin J. Osborne. A truly wonderful book, which seems to have influenced even my everyday thinking. Its only problem, for me, is that it tries too hard not to make it necessary, for its reader, to use even elementary algebra.

Its beauty, however, lies mainly in the carefully chosen exercises. At the beginning of the book, they seem so elementary that they make you wonder, and even bore you to solve them. But they unfold, from the middle of the book onwards, in a surprisingly beautiful and inventive way.

April 27, 2023

As a Book for bridge card game

“Once in a blue moon an idea sweeps through the bridge world and revolutionises thinking. The so-called Law of Total Tricks is so accurate in assessing potential in the contested auction and so easy to use (meaning in the book) that it is being introduced early and used to justify many subsequent bidding decisions.”

From the book “Understanding the contested auction” of Ron Klinger and Andrew Kambites.

Once upon a time, I was playing bridge.

April 26, 2023

A Dark Ananke theme

All necessary files are copied from ananke/layout folder to corresponding project’s/layout folder and modified there. So, in order to have a dark theme, copy the below files. (Delete extention .txt, if you directly copy them.) You do not have to modify them.

project’s/layout/index.html.
project’s/layout/_default/list.html.
project’s/layout/_default/summary-with-image.html.
project’s/layout/_default/summary.html.
project’s/layout/_default/taxonomy.html.
project’s/layout/post/list.html.
project’s/layout/post/summary.html.

Last, make sure your config.toml has the following color parameters you like

[params]

  text_color = "white"
  background_color_class = "bg-black"
  body_classes = "avenir bg-black"
  aux_text_color = "silver"
  bg_button_color = "bg-black"
  bg_button_hover_color = "hover-bg-dark-gray"

I picked color names from here. I also found some explanation to abbreviations used on templates here.

April 24, 2023

Stockfish Chess Engine Server

For linux users it seems pretty easy and natural to let scid chess databases, on low CPU and RAM devices, to use stockfish chess engine that runs on a more powerful server.
We start by installing stockfish onto our most powerful machine.
In my case a desktop with 32G RAM and 8 CPU cores with 2 threads per core, that means 16 threads.

Stockfish server

The chess engine will run only when the user is logged in. So, in ~/.local/share/systemd/user/ directory, we create two stockfish files

September 6, 2021

Video game Pioneer analysis

Years ago, got nostalgic for the time of youth and searched an old video game Elite I played on ZX Spectrum. Got upon pioneer. I loved it and tried to help in order for players to have stronger feeling of progress. I did a lengthy analysis in a relevant repository. The main idea was finally accepted, but the consequence to control the progress of player was still to come. I do not play the game any more but one great feature it has, is that supports mod. I created one such mod on this fork. Unfortunately, I think it does not work as it is. Probably, a git revert of few commits, at a stage where the mod was working, might needed if anyone want to try my mod.