A Chess UI is a program that interfaces with a chess engine in order using a computer chess interface to allow human players to interact conveniently with the engine.
The user friendly Chess UI! Exactly what you would expect from a GNOME Project package. But also packs some punch via the Universal Chess Interface, e.g. Stockfish just works.
Both chess engine and a CLI chess UI. As an engine it is likely irrelevant compared to Stockfish as of 2020. TODO: does the UI support Universal Chess Interface?
Cool project history though. Started before the GNU Project itself, and became one of the first packages.
Advanced. Not beginner friendly, very clunky.
CLI program implementing Universal Chess Interface: www.reddit.com/r/ComputerChess/comments/b6rdez/commandline_options_for_stockfish/
How to actually play against it: chess.stackexchange.com/questions/4353/how-to-install-stockfish-on-ubuntu So hard!
As of 2023, apparently does not use GPUs, but rather a deep learning algorithm called efficiently updatable neural network which is designed to run well on CPUs:
Since Snakes and Ladders is nothing but a Absorbing Markov chain, the results are exactly the same as for that general problem.
www.jstor.org/stable/3619261: How Long Is a Game of Snakes and Ladders? by Althoen, King and Schilling (1993), paywalled.
First major one: Magic: The Gathering.
Ciro thinks this is idiotic, and that Wizards should sell all cards individually with unlimited supply and all with the same prices, especially online where there are no printing costs. But because Wizards made the silly promise never to reprint certain cards with the reserved list in 1994, they can't even correct this mistake legally! (TODO maybe, see further discussion at: www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/contract-from-below-promissory-estoppel-and-the-reserved-list). There is however one simple solution: create and promote a new no reserve list format, and let reserve list formats rot away:One interesting outcome of this would be to have card cost limited formats. Penny Dreadful puts a super low limit, on individual cards, but it would be cool to have a max cost per deck version of it.
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIq0NWSLAJA Magic TV - A Look at Non Reserve List Legacy by ChannelFireball (2015). Notably, they suggest the workaround of printing very slightly differently functional reprints, e.g. "Snow covered duals". Genius.
- www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/8gtoj4/no_reserve_list_legacy/
A cool thing is when they printed Garth One-Eye, which allows you to make imaginary copies of some of those restricted list cards during play. This is the type of "flirting with the rules", that Ciro Santilli admires. The introduction of online-only cards such as XXX has pushed that even further as of 2021.
This was especially insane when Ciro was young and the Internet was not very widely available in Brazil yet, and Ciro did not know how to check the values of cards on online markets, and would trade cards with older much more knowledgable teenagers, based solely on his appraisal of a card's strength! Can you imagine how many young Timmys got ripped off in this manner, trading useless one million mana spells for ultra expensive black lotuses?
Another option we could pursue would be to make governments consider TCG pack opening a form of gambling, which it obviously is:
There is however one good solution to Magic's insane cost: watch people who have nothing better to do in their lives play on YouTube.
And as Internet formats dominate more and more, if they have any brains at will they will migrate to a subscription model where you pay to play for a given period of time, and have immediate access to all cards. It could even be a tiered access, with older formats being more expensive (more bugs to fix on different cards), but you must get access to all cards of a format at once.
Very good channel that gives some idea of the behind the scenes of working with card stores and secondary market trading.
Such lessons can have applicability in business and investment outside of the Magic The Gathering context as well. Yet another example that usefulness can come out of uselessness.
Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.
Figure 4. Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation.
Figure 5. Web editor. You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.Video 4. OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo. Source. 
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact