Haifa - Baltimore Postal Chess Match

 
Source: Davar, 10 April 1953, p. 26 (Davar Ha'shavuah supplement)

The same correspondent as in the previous post noted that in 1953, a postal chess match was arranged between the Haifa's Youth Department's Chess Club in Israel, and Baltimore College's chess club in the USA. The article notes that each team has ten players, and that the (average?) age of the Israeli players is only 16.

The "Youth Department" was a government department which, at the time, took care of the interests of young Israelis, especially those who had to go to work to help with the family's finances. It was quite important at the time, with many new immigrants facing great economic hardship. 

"The Game of Queens"

A frequent correspondent notes that in 1977, the Israeli film service produced a short (29 min.) film about the 1976 Israeli women's team to the Haifa Olympiad. The team (Alla Kushnir, Ljuba Kristol, Olga Podrazhanskaya, and Lea Nudelman) won first place. The above still from the movie shows the four of them (from left to right, Nudelman, Kushnir, Podrazhanskaya and Kristol) with their trainer, Eliyahu Levant. 

The title is a pun on "the game of kings" (mishak ha'mlachim), a poetic Hebrew name for chess. The movie has many candid shots of the players, including during the award ceremony, and is well worth watching even if one doesn't speak Hebrew, to see the people behind the game. 

Source: Robert Leonard, Von Neumann, Morgenstern and the Creation of Game Theory, p. 9

Often, chess is credited with rather interesting developments in other fields. This is sometimes done by people who are not particularly good at chess, but it is interesting to note that it is also done by serious researchers, as in this case, about the history of von Neumann, the well-known mathematician. The author dedicates an entire chapter to the effect of chess on the intellectual scene of von Neumann's youth - 1920s Hungary - and credits it with much intellectual stimulation of Jews in Hungary in general and von Neumann in particular. 

It is claimed that Emmanuel Lasker's Kampf (Struggle) - his philosophical thesis - was highly influential, indirectly, in developing game theory. Lasker attempted to generalize the struggles in the game of chess to decision-making in life, and used terms later used by game theorists - "domination" and "equilibrium" for example - to argue that, like chess, in life too the seemingly near-infinite number of possible strategies does not preclude finding out, by logical thinking, the best or at least the few reasonable strategies (Leonard, p. 13).

This, claims Leonard, raising the possibility - later examined by Zermelo, who knew Lasker - of a completely objective analysis of chess, for example, mathematically defining a "winning position" by looking at the existence of a set of future moves that allow the player to mate no matter what the opponent does (Leonard, p. 17). Zermelo's paper was the first time (1912) that winning in chess was defined purely formally. From there, claims Leonard, it is not surprising that the idea of a general game theory along similar formal, purely mathematical principles for life, not just for chess, would occur to von Neumann.

I am somewhat skeptical, not of Zermelo's pioneering work, which very likely influenced von Neumann, but whether Lasker's Kampf was of such great influence on Zermelo. After all, one need not read Lasker's philosophical works to know Lasker, be interested in chess, and attempt to describe it mathematically. I am not convinced that it was Lasker's Kampf that gave to Zermelo, or von Neumann, the idea of the possible analogy between chess and life that led to game theory.

H. Wolf and S. R. Wolf - Cable Match, Vienna - Berlin

 

Source: Neue Wiener Schach-Zeitung, June 1911, p. 167

Mr. Herbert Halsegger notifies us of a large photograph (above) of a cable chess match between Vienna and Berlin, 1911. Of special interest are two of the "wolves" just mentioned in the previous posts: H. Wolf (no. 2) and S. R. Wolf (no. 14), as the captions on the next page in the magazine make clear. One can click on the image for a larger one.