Immortal

[gfoot]

That was interesting, I've never had to search for chess games before. I was a bit disappointed by the sites available - few had a "search by position" option, most required you to input all the moves from the start of the game, and even then some of the sites just didn't have this game. That seems pretty poor for such compact, and free, data as chess games - surely pretty much every database should have pretty much every game.

[theStack]

It's indeed not easy to find a proper chess database which has a powerful search engine by moves and one that includes all games. However, when creating this challenge I thought at least of two ways which can lead to success anyway:

1. First, search for the chess opening that was played in the game - chess players with (basic) opening theory knowledge of course have some advantages here but for others it's easy to find out. In this case the "scandinavian opening" (e2-e4 d7-d5) was played, a simple search for that in google leads us to the following first hit:
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessopening?eco=B01
From there, you can just go watch over the "notable games" where "white wins" (the last byte 0x10 -> 1-0 shows quickly that this is the case without further analyzing) and the second line finally leads to success:
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/nph-ches ... id=1264050

2. Another approach is to just google for the first few moves in short-notation (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebraic_chess_notation for more information about common chess notation), combined with the title of the challenge:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22e4+d5 ... 2+immortal
here the second hit leads to a nice wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peruvian_Immortal

Well, including a not so well-known wikipedia-article deserving chess game in the file would have been more challenging of course, but users with commercial chess software including a huge game library (e.g. Fritz) would have been great advantages here. The only difficulty or diffusing factor in this challenge was that there was NOT meant the famous "immortal game" which everyone (including google) expects at first

Maybe I will create some more challenges concerning chess, in my opinion it's a pity that there were no other challenges about it (all I know is a challenged named "It's NOT chess" )

[gfoot]

If you want something obscure you could pick a random online game, making sure it's pretty unique... assuming the online games are searchable.

I wasn't sure how well searching for moves on Google would work - I used this site in the end: http://www.chessopeningsdatabase.com/27 ... tabase.htm

[megabreit]

Thanks to a question in the challenges forum I was pointed back to chess.
I was thinking about that but threw away the idea because of wrong field names like 61 or 42.
Is this coding of G and H a standard or is it just for confusion?

I started over by "playing" the game in Shredder. I know a bit chess, but it's just beginner level, so I actually don't know names of openings and such, but Shredder told me what to look for: B01 Scandinavian opening with 14 moves, white wins.

Then it was "just" google work to find the right game on www.chessgames.com.

Funny challenge!

[Yharaskrik]

I tried http://www.365chess.com/search_position.php until I realized that I have to register.
But it generates the correct notation for the moves.
I copied the whole game to google and there are 4 hits. Voila

[theStack]

Thanks to a question in the challenges forum I was pointed back to chess.
I was thinking about that but threw away the idea because of wrong field names like 61 or 42.
Is this coding of G and H a standard or is it just for confusion?

Of course you do write the normal letters G and H in every chess notation, but due to the fact that the hexadecimal system doesn't include G and H I had to take digits as alternatives
6 resembles "G" in some way and 4 resembles with some fantasy "H" (4 written on a 7-segement display is "4" with one missing segment)

[rmplpmpl]

The chess connection was one of the high priority ideas I had. After decoding the Base64 I did not pay much attention to the result though.

After writing down some of the values I noticed that this was about chess indeed. To find the opening was pretty easy, to find the match took some time, the databases I tried did not know it or forced me to become a premium member to access more than five moves.

Finally, the German wikipedia did the job for me

[b0bA]

I've found it using the historical Game search on
http://www.chesslab.com/PositionSearch.html

[jonik555]

very very nice one

[inQr]

I liked it too.

Searched for "e2-e4 d7-d5" "e4xd5 Dd8xd5" "a6 matt" and found the wikipedia article. Great!

[swgr]

After base64 and turn 6 to g,4 to h, I googled several starting steps and found nothing. Then I tried searching some ending steps and got the answer in

http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cac ... pEJBV9kAdQ

Page 15.

What a good challenge!

[BadCop]

look at this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peruvian_Immortal

[AMindForeverVoyaging]

Nice challenge, but is there not a mistake in the data? It should be "0 0 0" instead of "0 0" in move 10. In that position, kingside castling is impossible for black - a knight is in the way. So it has to be queenside castling instead. To be fair, that doesn't keep you from finding the solution, still I don't see a reason for leaving out a byte zero when you can keep it just fine.

[moose]

It was quite hard for me to find it. I thought only one immortal game existed. Obviously, another one exists, too. After I found this wiki article it was easy.

[Malfi]

The keyword immortal was a bit misleading for me and I was a bit disappointed that this game was just a simul. exhibition and not a "real" fight between masters.
Anyway, it is a nice challenge and especially I like the idea with base64 which somehow matches so well to chess