The Instructor

The Instructor was an official periodical of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) between 1930 and 1970, during which time it was the official organ of the LDS Church's Sunday School auxiliary.

History

The Instructor began publication in 1930, when the Sunday School ceased publication of The Juvenile Instructor, its official publication since 1901. Like its predecessor, The Instructor was targeted primarily at the LDS Church's youth and young adult membership. The first editor of the periodical was George D. Pyper, a member of the general superintendency of the Deseret Sunday School Union.

With the implementation of the Priesthood Correlation Program, The Instructor ceased publication in 1970. Although the Sunday School did not replace it with an official publication, in 1971 the LDS Church began publishing the New Era for youth and the Ensign for adults.

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Chess

Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a checkered gameboard with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. Chess is played by millions of people worldwide, both amateurs and professionals.

Each player begins the game with 16 pieces: one king, one queen, two rooks, two knights, two bishops, and eight pawns. Each of the six piece types moves differently. The most powerful piece is the queen and the least powerful piece is the pawn. The objective is to 'checkmate' the opponent's king by placing it under an inescapable threat of capture. To this end, a player's pieces are used to attack and capture the opponent's pieces, while supporting their own. In addition to checkmate, the game can be won by voluntary resignation by the opponent, which typically occurs when too much material is lost, or if checkmate appears unavoidable. A game may also result in a draw in several ways.

Chess is believed to have originated in India, some time before the 7th century; the Indian game of chaturanga is also the likely ancestor of xiangqi and shogi. The pieces took on their current powers in Spain in the late 15th century; the rules were finally standardized in the 19th century.

Chess annotation symbols

When annotating chess games, commentators frequently use widely recognized annotation symbols. Question marks and exclamation points that denote a move as bad or good are ubiquitous in chess literature. Some publications intended for an international audience, such as the Chess Informant have a wide range of additional symbols that transcend language barriers.

The common symbols for evaluating the merits of a move are "??", "?", "?!", "!?", "!", and "!!". In these cases, the corresponding symbol is juxtaposed in the text immediately after the move (e.g. Re7? or Kh1!?, see algebraic chess notation).

Use of these annotation symbols is subjective, as different annotators use the same symbols differently. Moreover, an annotator's use of symbols is often influenced by the player's strength: a positional misjudgment that an annotator might give a "??" if played by a strong grandmaster might pass unremarked if played by a beginner.

Annotators' use of punctuation also may possibly be influenced by the result of the game (regardless of the actual quality of the move); one possible example came in the 11th game of the 1972 World Championship, when Spassky played an unexpected move, 14.Nb1, retreating the knight to its initial square. Spassky won the game, and several annotators gave the move two exclamation points. Edmar Mednis asserted that if Spassky had lost the game, the move would likely have been given two question marks instead.

Chess (OS X)

Chess is a 3D chess game for OS X, developed by Apple Inc. It supports chess variants such as crazyhouse and suicide chess. It originates in OpenStep and Mac OS X 10.2 and is based on open source software. Apple redistributes the source code under its own Apple Sample Code License.

Development

The game's front end is a Cocoa application whose drawing code is based on GNOME Chess. It communicates with the Sjeng chess engine which runs in a separate process. In OPENSTEP and OS X up to version 10.2 (Jaguar), Chess used bitmap graphics with a fixed, pseudo-3D perspective and used an early version of GNU Chess as the back-end engine.

Features

Chess can be also played using voice commands which uses OS X's built-in speech recognition capabilities. Games can be logged using the log feature, which can include information such as names, dates, places, types of game and moves made. In OS X Mountain Lion, Chess supports Game Center and in OS X Mavericks there is a voice-over which says "check" after playing the respective move.