Dogs and Chess

Me thinks this pooch is expressing his opinion on the calibre of the game being played in the background...

Article. 

Dogs Love Chess

Some breeds of dog are smarter than others.  My long-departed Spencer (he died in 1999, and there is hardly a day that goes by without me thinking of him), who was a peekapoo, was very smart, and temperamental to match.  He loved sitting on my lap while I played chess, and he would intently watch the board.  I wonder what he was thinking???  Oh no, mommy just made a really stupid move...

I stumbled across this photo at Facebook, which I visited today after several weeks' absence.  It is absolutely adorable!  It is from the home page of Chess Videos, which I thought was a service but is actually the profile name of a person.  Thank you so much for this great photo Mr. Chess Videos, whoever you are! I hope you do not mind my borrowing the photo to post here.

Gobekli Tepi: Eden?

Hola darlings! At first I thought this was one of those "Don't eat that, Elmer" stories - but when I got down to the veerrrrryyyyyy end, I realized it was a book review - only it didn't say it was a book review! Regardless, the images are great, and the recap of the events surrounding the discovery of Gobekli Tepi by a Kurdish shepherd in 1994 is engrossing. Do I think that the 13,000 year old ruins at Gobekli Tepi are the "Garden of Eden"? I have no idea and, frankly, it's not a question I'm particularly interested in. What I do find intriguing is this image of a lone fox. In a flight of imagination - could this stone form be a prototype for a pawn, just squared off, not rounded as much later versions of game pieces? And could this lone ancient fox running across the stone with his or her tail flowing out behind be the prototype for the "dog" game pieces that were used in the Middle East and in Greece thousands of years later? The use of canines in many ancient games and references to ancient games suggests the standard hypothesis of chess derived from "hunt" games, as dogs were most probably used for hunting from the time they were first domesticated. Suggestive...

The Chessplaying Hughes Family (and Dog)

This article caught my eye because of the mention about "training up the dog" to play chess – he’s black and white too, just like my Spencer was. But the story is about a chessplaying family and one in particular, Rhian Hughes, who played on the Scotland Women’s Olympiad Team in Turin in 2006. The dog, as far as I know, does not play. Living Scotsman.com Saturday, june 16, 2007 'We were going to train up the dog' FAMILY MASTERS Parents Jeremy and Brenda Hughes, with Lloyd, 17, Owen, 14, and Rhian 13. LAST summer in Turin, Rhian Hughes, then 12, became the youngest player ever to represent Scotland at Olympiad level. She already has a host of chess trophies to her name, but her best supporters are her first opponents: her family. The chess board on the coffee table of the Hughes' Edinburgh home is clearly not just for show. Jeremy Hughes, an academic renal physician, is also Chess Scotland's director of youth events. His wife Brenda has coached children's chess, and Lloyd, Owen and Rhian make up three-quarters of the chess team at James Gillespie's High School. "I knew there was a reason why we should have had four children," Jeremy laughs. "To have a chess team!" "We were going to train up the dog," Brenda adds. "He is black and white, after all!" Although it looks as though chess is in the blood for the Hughes, Lloyd was actually the first member of the family to play seriously. "I'm dyslexic and we were advised that chess might help my concentration," he says. "We moved to Seattle and I carried on playing there, it was a real hotbed of chess." Rhian was just five when she won her first tournament. Brenda says: "We had taken her brothers to a tournament and she asked if she could play along with the little ones. And then she won the big trophy." By the time she was 11, she was representing her country in international events. Brenda was astonished, when she went with Rhian to a competition in Montenegro, to see the upper echelons of female chess: players who could double as models, sporting the latest fashions. At Olympiad level, however, pressure on players is intense. Jeremy says: "It's not cold and calculating, it's an emotional game, incredibly tense and nerve-racking. There are moments when it's high pressure, like a poker game, suddenly the stakes are very high. People deal with it in different ways." "I get nervous for Rhian, but she's as cool as a cucumber," says Brenda. Rhian shrugs. "I get nervous before the game, but once I'm in it, it doesn't really bother me. But if I've been playing for ages and I make a stupid mistake where I throw it all away in one move, I get annoyed." She practises regularly, doing chess puzzles, learning theory and improving her tactics. Lloyd says: "Dad and I test new things with her. She normally beats us, but she can learn something new, and it's easier playing a person than a computer." Lloyd still enjoys playing, but stopped competing seriously in the last three years in order to concentrate on his school work. He helps organise tournaments and coaches younger players. "It's great helping them to surpass my own standard," he says. Owen tends to prefer practising with his band. Jeremy and Brenda emphasise that they are anything but pushy "chess parents". "We've always said to Rhian it's up to her. We've said that to all three of them. Owen does play but it's not a passion." Here are Rhian’s results from Turin: Hughes Rhian 0 SCO Rp:1703 Rd. SNo Name Rtg FED Rp Pts. Res. Bo. 1 138 WGM Igla Bella 2288 ISR 2238 6,5 w 0 3 2 411 Stolarczyk Anna 2036 POL 1670 2,5 w 0 3 3 419 Arosemena Bethania 0 PAN 1548 3,5 s 1 3 4 376 WFM Franco Beatriz 2048 COL 2053 2,5 w ½ 3 6 364 Mokgacha Keitumetse 0 BOT 1778 5,0 w 0 3 8 71 WFM Zepeda Cortez Sonia Guadalupe 2036 ESA 1985 3,5 s 0 3 11 143 Chierici Marianna 1922 ITA 2022 7,0 s 0 3

Dogs Are Smarter Than We Think

I'm a dog lover, raised from a long line of dog lovers. I already had two canine companions when we moved into this place, and I adopted a third in 1991. The four of us happily rattled around the house and garden, until one by one, they succumbed to old age and went off to the Happy Hunting Ground. It broke my heart each time I lost one of my doggies, so these days I'm dogless. As any dog owner knows, some dogs are very smart. Spencer, who died in May, 1999, was a small peekapoo with a temperamental disposition who let me know he suffered my role as master of the house only to keep a roof over his head and food in his dish. He was smart as a whip and he loved sitting on my lap while I played OTB chess. He would sit very still, his head just peeking up above the edge of the table, and stare intently at the board. He never went so far as to shove a piece forward with his paw or pick one up in his mouth, but I swear he knew the game better than I! It seems scientists are finally learning just how smart dogs are. This news story hit the wires earlier in the week - I saw it today in my local newspaper: What Were They Thinking? More Than We Knew. By Rob SteinWashington Post Staff WriterMonday, June 4, 2007; Page A05 Dog owners have long maintained that their pooches have a lot more going on between their furry ears than scientists acknowledge. Now, new research is adding to the growing evidence that man's best friend thinks a lot more than many humans have believed. The provocative new experiment indicated that dogs can do something that previously only humans, including infants, have been shown capable of doing: decide how to imitate a behavior based on the specific circumstances in which the action takes place. "The fact that the dogs imitate selectively, depending on the situation -- that has not been shown before," said Friederike Range of the University of Vienna, who led the study. "That's something completely new." The findings come amid a flurry of research that is revealing surprisingly complex abilities among dogs, chimps, birds and many other animals long dismissed as having little intellectual or emotional life. "Every day, we're discovering surprises about animals and finding out animals are far more intelligent and far more emotional than we previously thought," said Marc Bekoff, an animal behaviorist who recently retired from the University of Colorado. "We're really breaking down the lines between the species." The study was inspired by research with human infants. Fourteen-month-olds will imitate an adult turning on a light with her forehead only if they see her doing it with her hands free. If the adult is clutching a blanket, infants will use their hands, presumably because they can reason that the adult resorted to using her forehead because she had no choice. To determine whether an animal could respond similarly, Range and her colleagues trained Guinness, a female border collie, to push a wooden rod with her paw to get a treat. A dog generally does not use its paws to do tasks, preferring to use its mouth whenever possible. So the key question was whether dogs that watched Guinness would decide how to get the treat depending on the circumstances. After making sure the owners could not influence their pets' behavior, researchers tested three groups of dogs. The first 14, representing a variety of breeds, did not watch Guinness. When taught how to use the rod, about 85 percent pushed it with their mouth, confirming that is how dogs naturally like to do things. The second group of 21 dogs watched Guinness repeatedly push the rod with her paw while holding a ball in her mouth. In that group, most of the dogs -- about 80 percent -- used their mouth, imitating the action but not the exact method Guinness had used. That suggested the dogs -- like the children -- decided Guinness was only using her paw because she had no choice. The third group of 19 dogs watched Guinness repeatedly use a paw on the rod with her mouth free. Most of those dogs -- 83 percent -- imitated her behavior exactly, using their paws and not their mouth. That suggested they concluded there must be some good reason to act against their instincts and do it like Guinness. "The behavior was very similar to the children who were tested in the original experiment," said Zsofia Viranyi of Eotvos University in Budapest, who helped conduct the experiment, published in the May 15 issue of the journal Current Biology. "Whether they imitate or not depends on the context. It's not automatic, insightless copying. It's more sophisticated. There's a kind of inferential process going on. " Viranyi and her colleagues said more research is needed to confirm the results and to explore what the findings say about the canine brain."Do they use the same cognitive process as the infant? Or is it something different?" Range said. "We have no way of knowing that right now." The findings stunned many researchers. "What's surprising and shocking about this is that we thought this sort of imitation was very sophisticated, something seen only in humans," said Brian Hare, who studies dogs at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. "Once again, it ends up dogs are smarter than scientists thought." The experiment suggests that dogs can put themselves inside the head of another dog -- and perhaps people -- to make relatively complex decisions. "This suggests they can actually think about your intention -- they can look for explanations of your behavior and make inferences about what you are thinking," Hare said. Others go even further, suggesting the findings indicate that dogs have a sense of awareness. "It really shows a higher level of consciousness," said Stanley Coren at the University of British Columbia, who studies how dogs think. "This takes a real degree of consciousness." Others were more skeptical, saying it's too far a leap to conclude from the study that dogs possess conscious awareness. "It's so easy for the human mind to look at a dog doing something like this and force our human way of thinking about it on the dog," said Daniel J. Povinelli, a cognitive scientist at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. "This ability might happen automatically without any conscious reflection on the dog's part." The findings could simply be yet another example of the well-documented ability of dogs to interpret subtle physical cues that stem from their long, close relationship with humans, several researchers said. "Dogs are really keen observers of the world around them," said Bruce Blumberg, who teaches classes on dog behavior at Harvard University. "They use simple but reliable rules that capture just enough of a problem to be able to just do better than guessing. This may just be another example of that." Regardless of the interpretation, the research reflects a renewed interest in dogs. "There's been an extraordinary explosion in research on dogs," said Stephen Zawistowski, an animal behaviorist at the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. "What we're seeing really for the first time is incredibly serious and important work on dog behavior and dog genetics. The really important work will be when the canine cognitive work meets the canine genome work. It's going to give us information about where these capabilities come from."