From: "World Chess Championship", INTERNET:newsletter@mark-weeks.com Date: 00/10/01, 12:38 Re: Chess History on the Web (2000 no.19) Site review - Britannica.com My last review, which explored pre-1800 chess literature, had several links to the Britannica.com site. I decided to take a closer look at this site, where the main page is at address... http://www.britannica.com/ ...The [About Our Site] page informs us that 'Britannica.com includes the complete, updated Encyclopedia Britannica, the oldest and largest general reference in the English language.' The Web hypertext architecture is an excellent technology for an online encyclopedia. Explorations on a topic invariably lead to new topics, all accessible by a mouse click. Of course, the navigation has to be carefully considered. It is too easy to get lost in a tangle of links where it is not clear which links point to new information and which point to pages already visited. A search of Britannica on 'chess' can be bookmarked with the address... http://search.britannica.com/search?query=chess ...This returns a page which at first sight looks complicated. It breaks down into five main sections:- - First there is a question 'Did you mean...' [chess (game)], [Chinese chess (board game)], [Japanese chess (game)], or [Four-Handed Chess (game)]? - 'Did you mean' is followed by four columns. The first is 'The Web's Best Sites', where the featured site is 'Britannica Feature: Clockworks'. What does Clockworks have to do with chess -- something about chess clocks? I clicked a few pages, found nothing related to my search subject, and went back to the list of best sites. The first in the list is 'Kasparov Chess', which gets four stars; the next sites have two stars. Counting the sites linked under [More Web Sites], there are more than 90 linked sites. - The second column has four internal Encyclopedia Britannica links to [chess], [Chinese chess], [shogi], and [Four-Handed Chess]. These are the same choices as in the 'Did you mean' section, and are followed by a link to [More Encyclopedia Entries]. Clicking this last link delivered variable results. The first time I tried it, I received a list of internal links -- [Computer extension of chess theory], [The world championship and FIDE], [Development of Theory], etc. A few days later I received a near-empty page saying only 'Your search: chess.' - The third column is 'Magazines'. The first listed here is 'Dennis Stearns: From Games of Chess to Financial Plans' from the Journal of Financial Planning, while the second is 'Mona Karff' from The Economist. The link [More Magazines] produced 10 more magazine articles, with a total of 75 available on the site. - The fourth column is 'Related Products - Books'. Here the first two entries are 'Xiangqi Syllabus on Cannon: Chinese Chess 2' by David H. Li and 'The Genealogy of Chess' with no author listed. I didn't look to see what else was available. --- At this point I was somewhat disappointed. This is all very nice, but where do we find the real entries related to chess and perhaps to chess history? There are two good candidates for further exploration -- 'Did you mean chess (game)' & the encyclopedia entry for 'chess'. I tried both. When I clicked on 'Did you mean chess (game)', my browser opened a page which was very similar to the main search page for 'chess'. There was a new section at the top of the page with a picture of a chess board, drop down menus for 'Images' & 'Table of Contents', and a link to [See Article]. There was also a new column on the right titled 'Related Topics', while the column headed 'Encyclopedia Britannica' with the four internal links was missing. 'Table of Contents' listed [Characteristics of the game], [History], [Development of Theory], [The time element and competition], [Chess and artificial intelligence], [Chess composition], and [Bibliography]. I was mildly annoyed to see that the column 'Related Products' still listed books on Chinese chess. I went back to the first page and clicked on the encyclopedia entry for 'chess'. My browser opened a page which looked unlike the two pages I had already visited. This page had a four paragraph overview of the game & its history and a column on the right titled 'More About This Topic'. At the bottom of the page was an outline headed 'Contents of this article':- - Introduction - Characteristics of the game - Algebraic notation - Moves - [...] When I clicked on the page's [Next >>] link, I received a new page called 'Characteristics of the game' with additional sections on 'Algebraic notation', 'Moves', 'King', and 'Rook'. Some of these headers linked to intermediate pages with 'Information about this topic in other articles' and a new list of links. The 'Characteristics' page was similar in structure to the previous page, with an identical 'More About This Topic' column on the right and a 'Contents of this article' outline on the bottom. The outline was marked with little blue arrows showing where in the article the current page was located. I returned to the previous page, which was almost certainly the introduction to the main article on chess. A key sentence informed me that 'This article provides an in-depth review of the history and the theory of the game by noted author and international grandmaster Andrew Soltis.' There were also two links to 25 historic games annotated by Soltis and to a table of the world chess champions. The 'More About This Topic' in the right margin lists six links:- - [Article] links back to the introduction in the main. - [Images] displays small screen shots of chess positions, which look like compositions. - [Index Entry] is another outline. I noticed that it is linked from each page in the main article a second time under the heading [Click here for a list of other articles that contain information on this subject]. It was not clear to me what criteria were used to build this new outline. - [Internet Links] appears to be the same as 'The Web's Best Sites', which we've already seen. I noticed that the second entry was to 'Kasparov vs. the World', which had three stars and which was not on the previous list of links. - [Tables] is an intermediate page with a single link to [chess champions]; that page lists 'Generally recognized world chess champions'. The list starts with '1866-94 Steinitz, Wilhelm' and ends with '1985- Kasparov, Gary'. Note the time spans for the two champions, which are somewhat controversial. Each name has a link to a full biography about the champion. There are also links to eight 'other notable chess personalities', starting with Adolf Anderssen and Sam Loyd. - [Yearbooks] is another intermediate page covering the years from 1999 back to 1993. The entry for 1999, titled 'Year in Review 1999: sports-and-games', is a nine article by Bernard Cafferty. What more can I say about the main article on chess? You'll be relieved to know that I have no intention of covering every page! The '25 historic games' linked from the introduction is a Java chess program. It automatically downloads a few large files, including a 187K PGN file with annotations by Soltis on every move of every game. The first game in the file is a casual game played in 1789 between Philidor and Count Bruhl; the last is from the 1996 match between Kasparov and Deep Blue. Another page worth special mention is the [Bibliography]. It lists twelve book titles and four periodicals. The books could easily form a cornerstone for a serious library on the game. The bibliography links to [A.E.So.], a short page telling us that 'A.E.So.' is 'Andrew E. Soltis, Columnist, Chess Life. Chess columnist and reporter, New York Post. Author of Pawn Structure Chess and many others'. USCF members will recognize Soltis as the author of the long running monthly 'Chess to Enjoy' column in Chess Life magazine. I searched the Web for other references to Soltis. A search on AltaVista for '(and* NEAR soltis) AND chess' returned 'about 520 pages found', where the first 30 references were mainly links to books. When I fed the phrase 'andrew soltis chess' to Google, it found 'about 382' results, which were again mainly references to books. How many books has Soltis written? The Max Euwe Centrum lists 14 titles, some of which are translations. Amazon.com returns 19 titles. Bookfinder.com gave me a much longer list. When I merged the three lists and eliminated duplicates, I ended up with 48 different English language titles, including biographies of Marshall, Pillsbury, and Tal. In case you didn't realize it, Soltis is a serious chess historian. So what does Soltis' Britannica.com article have to say about chess history? The outline shows that there is history scattered throughout the entire article -- sections on 'The Soviet school' & 'Origin of time controls' are just two of many examples. The topic [History], one of seven high level sections in the 'Table of Contents', has six subtopics:- - Ancient precursors and related games - Introduction to Europe - Standardization of rules - Set design - The world championship and FIDE - Women in chess These subtopics link to other pages like 'chaturanga', 'Chinese chess', 'Vikings', and the 'Polgar sisters'. I was disappointed to see that the link for Judit Polgar had no more information than her name ('Polgar, Judit') and a link back to the referring page on 'Women in chess'. The same was true of links for Zsuzsa & Sofia. Are these pages under construction? The topic 'The world championship and FIDE' mentions the 1996 Karpov - Kamsky match and ends with 'Both organizations [FIDE & PCA] have indicated an interest in unifying the championship title by having Kasparov play a definitive match with Karpov.' The 'Computer chess' topic mentions 1997 Kasparov - Deep Blue & ends 'With the match tied at one win, one loss, and three draws, Deep Blue won the decisive final game in 19 moves.' These references allow us to date the Soltis article to the middle of 1997. Any problems? The page 'The world championship and FIDE' exposes embedded commands '(See Game 4 .)' I was annoyed that Britannica pages override my default colors for links already visited. Considering that there are so many ways to navigate the site, it is essential to see which pages have not yet been viewed. --- Finally, I decided to see what other encyclopedias are on the Web. A Yahoo search on 'encyclopedia' returned as its first entry an entire section on the subject... http://dir.yahoo.com/Reference/Encyclopedia/ ...The first entry here is to the Britannica.com site, so it looks like I started in the right place. Other sites I looked at were:- Information Please http://www.infoplease.com Encyclopedia.com http://www.encyclopedia.com/ Encarta Online http://encarta.msn.com/ Encarta was by far the best of the three, but even it contained nowhere near the quantity or quality of the information found in Britannica. I'll stick with that site in the future. One additional test of Britannica would be to see if someone can learn to play from its description of the rules. I'd be interested to know. In any case, the article is a valuable Web resource for chess. One of these days I'd like to explore the link between chess and the Vikings! Bye for now, Mark Weeks