This blog entry is the result of playing chess against the computer on three long bus rides from the Faculty apartments in Shunde (China) to the location of the SYSU-CMU Joint Institute of Engineering (JIE) in Guangzhou (China).  The hour long, bumpy bus rides were mind-numbingly boring with often very little breathing space, but they did offer me the opportunity to explore a game (viz. Chess) which I had long since forgotten about... 

I never thought I'd miss driving a car so much - can't wait to get back home to Pittsburgh after this this semester of teaching at China !

Anyway... Back to Chess!  The following are three interesting game-plays generated while playing against the computer (playing on the Chess.com iPhone app), each using similar opening strategies.  The central theme behind the opening strategies employed in the following three games is 'The Ruy Lopez opening' for 'white'.  This opening was invented sometime in the 1400's and has been proven to carry a small advantage to 'white'. This opening also allows for an early ability to 'castle' and build an attack.  

In games 1 and 3 below, I experiment with the Ruy Lopez opening as 'white' (each resulting in wins for 'white'), whereas in Game 2 I attempt the same opening and force a draw except this time playing as 'black'. In conclusion, it surely does seem like the Ruy Lopez opening is a promising one and can potentially provide either side (viz. 'white' or 'black') a marginal advantage; although, if you do end up playing against someone whom chooses this opening strategy it may certainly be possible to gain back the competitive edge with some tact!

References:
1) www.Chess.com 
2) http://www.chess.com/blog/monsterking/top-10-most-powerful-openings

Acknowledgements:
Special thanks to my wife, Jessika, for patiently reading the PGN Chess Codes to me which were essential to preparing this blog article. I also thank her and am grateful for her support in enduring this not-so-fun stint in China.

Today I visited the Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem, Israel. It was truly a frightening experience although the museum itself was a spectacular display of the carnage carried out by the Germans during Word War II (WWII). Revealing the truth about atrocities of WWII by sharing with us her grim experiences was Martha Weiss, holocaust death camp survivor, whom we were fortunate enough to meet as she reminisced the agony of what is meant to be a Holocaust Survivor...   Martha was identified as being a Jew by a traitor in Holland where she had been safe for some years under the protection of a guardian and sent off with her elder sister to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp at age 8. Her parents had sent her to Holland, away her home in the Czechoslovakia, in order for her to remain in hiding under a false 'Aryan' identity and therefore avoid being snagged by anti-Semitic (and as it turns out, highly 'sadistic') German captors - the Nazi SS Officers - carrying out the bidding of Adolf Hitler whom we all know for his falsely justified virulent hatred of the Jews. As per some historians (and evidence in the museum) this false 'justification' for hating the Jews seems to have originated from Darwin’s original ‘survival of the fittest’ theory which was contorted into an incorrect understanding by Hitler’s administration - whom incidentally regarded themselves as 'intellectuals' - that developed and implemented policies designed to protect the ‘superior race’ (i.e. themselves, or as they termed themselves, 'Aryans') and simultaneously preventing the ‘inferior races’ (psychopathically inferred by Hitler and company as being those of Jewish faith) from mixing with those adjudged superior, in order to avoid 'contamination' of the latter’s gene pool [1]. What was originally planned as a mass exodus of those of Jewish faith from Germany, except for 'Essential Jews' whom were given a badge and made to work to support the genocide of their brethren, turn culminated in the ‘final solution’ for the extermination of approximately six million Jews when neighboring countries (as well as ones not so near by) to Germany refused to become 'involved'.  In addition to the Jews, four million other people who belonged to what the German intelligentsia judged as ‘inferior races’ were also made to suffer, starve and then be murdered in cold blood. 

The brutal details of Martha's experiences are beyond the scope of this blog entry but several questions came to mind as I listened to her recounting the pathological and highly psychotic doings of the Nazi's in the pretext of 'Darwinism', and while I mental pieced together evidence presented along the museum's walls.  Is being an anti-Semite a 'feature' encoded in the so called 'Aryan' DNA..?  Is that why Hitler won his election to power with a landslide of 40% support from the German people..?  Is this the reason the SS Officers in the concentration camps had the same virulent fervor as their monstrous and conceited leader - based on a vague theory of 'Darwinism'..?  Is the anti-Semite pathology still latent in our DNA and is this why the world is still at war with the very victims of the holocaust ..?  As I understand from recent visitors to Poland including the holocaust survivors, this virulent hatred for Jews is still rampant in the local population as is evidenced by conniving jives that roll off the tongues of ordinary people such as the conductors of trains as they pass by locations where concentration camps once murdered millions ( ... details available upon request).  Could there be cure for this pathology in the interest of the human civilization being at peace with itself ..?

The Yad Vashem museum provides us a glimpse of the what Jewish life had been before the War and unveils a brave image of the miserable life of slaves which the 'entire world' willed upon the Jews between the world wars and of-course the holocaust.  Over 6 million were murdered but the museum has the goal of attributing a 'name' to every single victim of the holocaust whom were never given a righteous burial. Today they are at 4.2 million named victims and counting as historians continue to rummage through the remnants of the memoirs left behind by holocaust victims and their kin through whom they are survived today...

References:
[1] Darwinism and the Nazi Race Holocaust by Dr. Jerry Bergman on November 1, 1999.  


P.S - The following may be of interest:  http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/newsletters/pdf/giving_030-032.pdf