On Oct 7, 7:47 am, SBD wrote:
On Oct 7, 7:26 am, help bot wrote:

Generally, they like to show the ones which have been
"cooked", meaning that somebody demonstrated that it
was flawed in some way. Why the obsession with
"cooks" is beyond me, for much of the analysis in CL,
for instance, can easily be "cooked".

That is because a chess problem should be exact : there should be one
key, unless more than one is intended and the analysis should be
flawless. A mate in six should not be a mate in five or seven. Duals,
such as multiple ending mates, tend to be intolerable. And that is one
of the points of a chess problem: it isn't a vague "and wins" but a
sure win or a mate or stalemate in x moves.


Yes, but by the writer showcasing problems which
have been "cooked", he focuses on the flawed, on the
inferior problems while using up valuable space which
better problems might have desired for themselves.

Maybe it's really about showing how clever the writer
is, how smart he was to find the "cooks". I mean, this
is the impression I often get when reading about other
things, like chess games for instance. Or is the credit
for finding the "cooks" given to those who wrote in? In
that case, it could be a way of encouraging interest in
problem solving via recognition. This is similar to how
Larry Evans' old column used to work; readers could
send in "questions", along with corrections to faulty
published analysis and if he agreed, he might list the
person's name right along with the correction.



-- help bot