A knight’s tale
If you were a piece in a game of chess played to the death, what piece should you choose to be? It is the privilege of science to resolve such unanswered – dare one say unasked? – questions. Step forward (two squares on your first move, one subsequently) postgrad student Tom Murphy of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, with his paper “Survival in chessland”.
Drawing from a database of more than 300,000 chess games, he models the attrition rates for each piece. The first lesson: uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. All non-draw games end with…
