Friday 8 December 2017

Blast from the past

Well this seems to have have attracted a fair bit of attention


but this is the bit that caught my eye.


Good Lord, it's Dharshan Kumaran, who was nearly British Chess Champion: he lost a play-off to Michael Hennigan in Dundee in 1993, the first year I ever went to the championships. I'm not 100% sure I'd come across his name since that kind of time, until he turned up as one of Demis's team just this week, though had I been paying attention I'd have noticed this a few years back.

No Wikipedia page though, even though his achievement included not just the grandmaster title


but world championships at under sixteen level


and under twelve.


Actually that's not quite right: he does have a page in Russian and another in Polish. But not in English.

I don't know who in the chess community tends to put together these things (it isn't me) but if two world championships and the grandmaster title isn't enough, he might, on top of that, be changing our world.

7 comments:

Jonathan Rogers said...

Just to be nerdy, the play off was not in Dundee itself; rather it was held six months later in the upstairs bit of the old Chess & Bridge store on Euston Road.

Dharshan was an odd kind of child prodigy. Notwithstanding winning the odd junior world championship, he once fell for the smothered mate trap in the Budapest Gambit (he thought that black had played an interesting but unsound sacrofice of his bishop on b4) and there were other such episodes too. He seemed to offer draws all the time too, until about age 15, even in positions where he was doing well. And yet he must have been one of our younger GMs, all the same.

Anyway, on to (even) better things now, no doubt.

Anonymous said...

Justin, what do you precisely think about Kumaran's work "Patients with hippocampal amnesia cannot imagine new experiences"? (in the ECForum's thread I've seen the name of Leontxo Garcia…)

Riccardo Musso

ejh said...

I can't imagine any comment I made on such a work would be of any value whatsoever.

(Where's the GarcĂ­a reference? I can't find it.)

Anonymous said...

It's the post immediately following the one you have linked.
Riccardo Musso

ejh said...

Ah good point. I don't think that's anything to do with Kumaran's work though. I wouldn't take seriously anything Garcia said where science is concerned, either.

Andrew Gelman said...

Justin:

You can go into Wikipedia and create your own English-language page for this guy, no?

ejh said...

I can and could, but it's something I have every intention of leaving to somebody else!