On Nov 16, 9:19 am, The Historian wrote:

I see that Mr. Innes has chosen to compound his bad behavior with
misrepresentations of my posts in another thread. I have dealt with
that in the proper place.

Good. Then /finally/, Mr. Innes will be receiving the
professional help he so desperately needs.



I must say, Mr. Innes, that if this incident is typical of your
behavior in the past, I begin to understand how you acquired the
unsavory reputation that I frequently see referenced in this news group.

Not just in this newsgroup. He's considered a chucklehead in the
Shakespeare group as well.

I have posted several times that I agreed with IM
Innes regarding his point about the impossibility
of determining what is happening on the board
where the actual position cannot be made out, as
in a famous painting discussed on that newsgroup

But since then I have stumbled across something
which gives me pause; it appears that a few
obsessive-compulsives (possibly chess players) have
made a study of that painting, carefully comparing
the style of chess pieces and other details such
that they believe they can make out which piece
is which, and apart from the single man held in the
air, what the exact position in question was.

Now this is not an exact science, since it will be
noted that the position as claimed is not legal, or
rather it cannot be obtained in normal play by any
legal sequence of moves, but that detail aside, it
would appear that the nearly-an-IM 2450 Innes
was wrong: these nutters /can/ distinguish the
King from the Queen, the Rooks from the Knights,
and so forth. What they cannot do is forensically
determine the exact square the man-in-the-air
came from or is going to, so that much is left to
speculation.

But the claim that it is impossible to have any
mate-in-X appears to have been wrongheaded.
So both IM Innes and I were apparently mistaken,
in view of this new (to me) evidence. That would
make Neil Brennen correct, after all.


-- help bot


P.S.: Even so, given the position on the board,
I would have beaten either of those patzers in a
set match.