קלאודיו

A dog being posed by a German soldier, early 1940′s

At the beginning the war was still fun and the soldiers were not full engaged in action. So they had some fund with this German Shepherd dog, who has no idea what he’s doing. Still looks classy though. Dressing dogs as humans has always been funny.

The Germans viewed canines as being almost as intelligent as humans and attempted to build an army of fearsome ‘speaking’ dogs, extraordinary new research shows. Hitler hoped the clever creatures would learn to communicate with their SS masters – and he even had a special dog school set up to teach them to talk. The incredible findings show Nazi officials recruited so-called educated dogs from all over Germany and trained them to speak and tap out signals using their paws.

The Germans hoped to use the animals for the war effort, such as getting them to work alongside the SS and guard concentration camps to free up officers. The bizarre ‘Wooffan SS’ experiment has come to light after years of painstaking research by academic Dr Jan Bondeson into unique and amazing dogs in history. Dr Bonderson, from Cardiff University, visited Berlin to scour obscure periodicals to build up a bizarre – but true – account of Nazi ideas.

Bobby Fischer playing 50 opponents simultaneously ,1964

He won 47, lost 1 and drew 2. Fischer was an American chess prodigy, grandmaster, and the eleventh World Chess Champion. He is considered by many to be the greatest chess player who ever lived. He lost to Donn Rogosin, not a well-known player. Fischer was 21 in this picture.

He is playing white, that’s a big advantage in high-level chess. You can choose an opening that you know well and your opponent doesn’t know well. Basically, you get decide which direction the game’s going to go for the first few turns. Openings are by the book so to speak, but there are variations and choices you can make. This is especially obvious in gambit style openings where you offer to sacrifice a piece for position, here the opponent can choose to take it or not. So there is a lot to know even if the best moves in a given position are known. But grand masters will know most of these of course and a lot of preparation goes into finding answers to the opening you expect from your opponent.

After only 4 moves, there are already millions of possible openings. Not all of these openings would be viable or “good moves”. There are a lot of openings that have been discovered and masters of the game would know a lot of those. There are some variations that are more common than others, and those have been logged as ‘book lines’ far past a typical opening sequences. The great thing about chess is there are so many ways to create an entirely unique game for yourself each time. Strategies and patterns often repeat, but positions are rarely equal.