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=**The Talstar Chess Wiki- an Educational Site!**=

//.....v1 May 2012 (what a wiki that one was!) // //..........v2 June 2013 (in progress- you're all set!) // //...............v3 July 2014 (make your reservations now!) // //.......................v4 July 2014...ok? OK! // ... //Train travel in Sverige- fast, reliable, inexpensive, with beautiful scenery...ok, turns out not so inexpensive, nothing is inexpensive in Swetopia! but the 25% tax (less on travel and books) is put to good use... namely, encouraging thrift! The old chessboard and Fritz X will have to suffice.//


 * This website was setup during a time of researching chess software. Subsequent experiments and product use took place and it this site is now being revisited as a forum for developing new software. What rekindled the interest was some discussion on encrypting computer payloads, using various programming languages, notably C, and recalling the powerful vector and array manipulation power of APL. Several products have evolved from APL, in a chain of AI development, somewhat separate from the mainstream of C, C++ and Java. Some of the strengths APL type languages may offer over C in encryption may apply as well with chess algorithms.**


 * What in turn sparked the discussion of APL was remarking how Julian Jayne's theory of the origin of consciousness permitted me to, without looking except to recognize a block of code in an encryption program as a block of hexidecimal notation, and asking someone else to without looking, name the first 4 characters in the 4th line of the hex code. They declined, but I guessed "x10a" without thinking about it at all. It had been 30 years since I last did any programming involving hex code. In fact, those characters were off by only one letter, with "c" replacing "a." I thought this a good example of using the brain to arrive at a conclusion without any conscious thought. Having only recent discovered Jaynes 1976 text, I thought of the potential applications in artificial intelligence of some of his concepts. Surely others had thought of that, and the first web search done was " Julian Jaynes AI APL " and turned up some listserv text from 1984, roughly the heyday of AI. I had some catching up to do, having left the more cognitive aspects of AI behind, when my programming work became more integrated and mainstreamed with CASE tools, resulting from the pragmatism of turning programming as a kind of art and science, into (supposedly) more predictable and controllable software engineering. Today, such environments have been made even more mundane, typically being called IDE.**


 * Taking another look at APL, to ensure I had explained its origin and usefulness to a much younger programmer, I started thinking about decision trees and of course, when chess has been in your mind long enough, one sees the trees decorated with leaves of algebraic notation. So here we are... or here I am, perhaps for a very brief time with the next version of this page, v3, coming about in July 2014. Some further explorations will take place however, with the chess programs, notably examining the engines developed with varying languages, and looking to see what applications of a novel engine developed with an APL type language might have occurred.**


 * Perhaps there is someone visiting here, that might have some knowledge of this; if so, I hope you feel free to contribute and comment. I must confess that wikispaces is not the part of the web where I usually hang out- I can be found more often on wordpress, developing my site there. Perhaps there is a way to dovetail these threads, and if so, will provide the link.**


 * Let's take a look at existing chess programs, starting right on our own wiki block here, with Chess Programming Wiki (CPW)'s CPW-Engine. Very nice project, laying out the code and what it's doing, decent commenting, straightforward C code. There is enough overview on the CPW that you can refer to. We take this as representative of chess programs written in procedural-object oriented languages such as C, C+, C++, C#, etc.**


 * What we'd like to do is compare the structures of this code with a more vector-array oriented language, as described above with APL. But before we get too far, we need to do another web search to see what results might be documented from prior efforts.**


 * Also, another possibility lies in exploiting the decision tree so useful in chess (e.g. Kotov's Think Like a Grandmaster) to learning a language. I am learning Svenska now, which is how Swedish is spelled in that language. I was tempted to say "trying to learn," but Yoda's "do not think" is so powerfully installed in my noodle that this "try" is not a word to be often used. Let us simply say, I need some help. Then we come round to some extend to Jayne's theory of the origin of consciousness and consider language and linguistics, and interpersonal communication generally.**


 * What is with the name? The Chess Programming Wiki did not have a Talstar, unlike many chess websites where there are many aficionados** ** of the Russian grandmaster Tal who have before me chosen this name. As much as I like this Tal, the naming of sites as Talstar predates my knowledge of that Tal, and instead stems from my name, the city of Tallahassee Florida, and the famous jazz guitarist, Tal Farlow. And as if another reason is needed, I used to do satellite communications programming, so it is also a takeoff on the Telstar satellite. And no other reasons are certainly needed, but like rabbits in a hat, there's another that can be pulled out. **