collision detection: Left uppercut to black knight

October 12, 2005

Left uppercut to black knight

Boxing and chess have always seemed like polar opposites -- games that sit on each side of the Cartesian mind/body divide. Thus I was intrigued to learn about the new sport that limns both regions: Chessboxing. The rules, according to the World Chess Boxing Organization, are thus:

In a contest there shall be 11 rounds, 6 rounds of chess, 5 rounds of boxing. A round of chess takes 4 minutes. Each competitor has 12 minutes on the chess timer. As soon as the time runs out the game is over. A round of boxing takes 2 minutes. Between rounds there is a 1 minute pause, during which competitors change their gear.
The contest is decided by: checkmate (chess round), exceeding the time limit (chess round), retirement of an opponent (chess or boxing round), KO (boxing round), or referee decision (boxing round). If the chess game ends in a stalement, the opponent with the higher score in boxing wins. If there is an equal score, the opponent with the black pieces wins.

The first annual competition was hosted in Berlin last week, and the victor was Bulgarian boxer Tihomir Titschko, who not only has a killer right hook but is one of the world's top-rated players of high-speed "bullet chess". A renaissance man indeed! Though as CNN found when it reported on the event, spectators were amazed that anyone could play this thing at all: "It's hard to imagine coming back from a round of boxing and remembering what you were trying to do on the chess board," said one. "You're probably sitting there preoccupied with the pain."

(Thanks to Yishay Mor for this one!)

Posted by Clive Thompson at October 12, 2005 11:43 AM

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Comments

I heard that the code breakers at Bletchley Park (Turing et al.) got up to something similar during WWII by combining running and chess: after making your move, you ran a loop around the garden, and your opponent would have to make their move by the time you got back, whereupon they'd take off and you'd make your move. Like the chess/boxing combination, if offers intriguing activity balancing strategies. (I'll see if I can dig up a source.)

Posted by: Michael S. at October 12, 2005 4:02 PM

Way to pick up on that Michael. My reference for this is the very great Gödel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter.

It's interesting that in the modern era, intellectualism or intelligence is so rarely equated with athleticism and brawn. That wasn't always the case. But why strive for excellence in only one domain? Why not just strive for excellence?

Posted by: Steve E. at October 12, 2005 11:15 PM

I first saw this in Enki Bilal's Froid Equateur, the third volume of the Nikopol Trilogy. Apparently others did too.

Posted by: theophylact at October 13, 2005 2:42 PM

Michael, that's incredibly cool news about Bletchley. I visited it three years ago and actually got to physically play with an Enigma machine!

Steve, heh, yes.

theophylact, thanks for the link!

Posted by: Clive at October 13, 2005 3:59 PM

One of the things that struck me while reading the article was that the word “multi-tasking” is actually completely wrong for describing the work pattern “Lifehackers” are supposedly fighting. The problem is not that you're doing a bunch of things at once, but that you’re flitting from one thing to another really fast preventing you from becoming immersed in any particular task. It’s more like “sequential tasking” than real simultaneous "multi-tasking".

It got me to thinking: what would tools for actually doing more than one thing at once, for real multi-tasking, look like? I’ve got some ideas (automated email reading, haptic alerts, smart web page readers, etc.), but I don’t want to hijack this discussion too badly.

I wrote up my thoughts in a post on my own blog. Come check it out (and help me brainstorm) if you’re interested.

Posted by: AtDuskGreg at October 18, 2005 4:36 AM