Sunday 8 April 2018

All your chess questions answered

There is an old joke in computer academia that goes like this. "Professor, what programming language do you use?" "Hmmm, Graduate student I guess". These days the answer might be "Stack Overflow", and not just for university professors. For those not familiar, Stack Overflow is a website where you can ask questions about programming problems and hopefully receive a useful solution (although I do get annoyed when the only response to a question is a request for more information, followed by silence).
What I've just discovered is that Stack Overflow has a number of sister sites (through the Stack Exchange network), including chess. (chess.stackechange.com) You ask a question, answers are given, and if the answer is particularly helpful, users can upvote it (or downvote bad ones). Questions can be tagged (to allow easy grouping and searching), and you can filter questons by votes or open/closed status.
A cursory look at the questions shows a lot of questions concerning the laws of chess (or how they are interpreted). There are also questions on more general topics (best reply to d4 etc), as well as queries about online chess.
I've signed up an account, although I'm not sure how long my own interest will last (Quora takes up a lot of my time in this area). But it is worth checking out, if only because Stack Overflow has proved to be a useful resource in the past, and I'm assuming that this site will be too.

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