Albert Einstein vs. Robert Oppenheimer (1933) | Hacker News Reader

Albert Einstein vs. Robert Oppenheimer (1933)

chessgames.com

58 pointsdrdee23 comments

I find their rap battle performances more compelling:

Einstein (v Stephen Hawking): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn7-fVtT16k

Oppenheimer (v Thanos): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1vXC-vKgKg

The origin of this game and its attribution to Einstein and Oppenheimer is greatly disputed. And yet it has been floating online for more than two decades now without a proper source.

> The game was first published in Freude am Schach (The Pleasure of Chess) by Gerhard Henschel in 1959.

> Some (Dennis Holding and Andy Soltis) have attributed the above game to Albert Einstein's son, Hans Albert (1904-1969), and played at Berkeley in 1945 where Hans taught. But Hans Albert did not play chess. There is no indication that J. Robert Oppenheimer was in Berkeley in 1945. He was either at Los Alamos, New Mexico or Princeton, New Jersey in 1945. He was at Berkeley from 1929 to 1933.

> Andy Soltis, writing in the July, 1979 issue of Chess Life on page 372 in an article called "Science at Play" says this game was apparently played in the late 1940s when Hans Albert Einstein, son of Albert Einstein, and Robert Oppenheimer were both on the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley.

> Another source says that Black was not Robert Oppenheimer the physicist, but Max Oppenheimer (1885-1954), the European artist.

https://www.chess.com/blog/ThummimS/albert-einstein-vs-j-rob...

It sounds like the lack of first names in the record might have caused some confusion

> The game was first published in Freude am Schach (The Pleasure of Chess) by Gerhard Henschel in 1959.

That book used the conditional tense, to convey uncertainty about the game’s authenticity (‘la partie suivante qui aurait été gagnée par Einstein contre le grand physicien Robert Oppenheimer’)

source: https://www.chesshistory.com/winter/winter04.html item: 3533

For those who don't read French: that construction could roughly be translated as "the following game was supposedly won [or: 'is said to have been won', etc.] by Einsten against the great physicist Robert Oppenheimer".

The conditional tense here in French is used to report that something has been asserted by someone, without taking a position one way or the other on whether the assertion is true. I don't think there is an exact grammatical equivalent in English.

Something like "which would have been won [if the reports are to believd]" perhaps.

I think in English “would have been won” implies that it was not in fact won.

I'm just an amateur and don't care to study strategies, etc (I do want to do) but mostly with brut-force and heuristics. Even with my limited experience, I believe Black made the first mistake by the 14th move on D5. It is downhill from there. The only chances of recovery is to wait for your opponent to make a mistake.

It does weaken the e5 pawn, and that is where things begin to collapse for Black.

Not sure it's unsalvageable at that point. I am curious about supporting from the other side with f6.

> don't care to study strategies

did you mean "haven't had much chance to" or something?

in english, "don't care to" generally means the same as "don't want to", aka "dislike to", but i'm curious what idiom you're confusing it with

Now, you are making me think. :-)

I have to go back and think from the first principle if I want to get better at Chess or play it as fun (as is happening now). Here is my dilemma. I want to get better, and thus strategies, openings, closings, mid, et al. However, I also want it to be intuitive that it is just my way.

So, I "don't care," but eventually, I might want to in the future. If life is Tetris and business is Chess, I need to be comfortable playing it simultaneously with both hands using both sides of the brain. ;-)

Eventually, I want my Chess games to come to me naturally with muscle memory and gut instincts, just as I wish I could solve the Rubik's without the formulae already muscled into my hands.

> Eventually, I want my Chess games to come to me naturally with muscle memory and gut instincts, just as I wish I could solve the Rubik's without the formulae already muscled into my hands.

There's a lot in chess that is very oblique and loads of Columbus Egg moments/plays. When you learn those they become quite obvious in hindsight but it'd take you a long time to actually instinctively get to those strategies.

Also, a lot of intermediate-higher level playing comes from predicting moves in advance, those come from pattern matching and studying strategies is a very good place to hone your skills into finding these patterns. It can take thousands of games instead of some hours of playing around with different puzzles and understanding the fundamentals of why some positions are weak or strong even if they aren't clearly obvious for the next 5-10 moves.

I think you can brute force a lot of this learning by playing a lot but there are some key aspects that you could unlock by studying strategy that would take you much longer to learn by simply playing.

https://youtu.be/cAe1xAWJvxQ

analysis by agadmator

I’m just an 1800 rated patzer in blitz/bullet on LiChess, but I would say white’s knight sac demonstrates a certain comfort/familiarity/maturity with the game.

Who's who and who won? Couldn't tell from clicking through (never played chess)

Einstein is allegedly white. But it's completely unproven whether this game was played by either of them.

Einstein played with the white pieces and won according to the notation (no clue whether it’s true).

Games are listed as white's name vs black's name. So in this case Einstein is white. The score at the end is in the same order, so Einstein won.

Thanks, from looking at it it doesn't look like Einstein got checkmate (did he?), did oppenheimer surrender?

Black is down an entire queen (plus two pawns) of material and resigned.

No checkmate: Black resigned (it's normally called "resigning", not "surrendering"). When you're up as much material as White is, it's very straightforward to win.

No matter what Black does, White can force (at least) equal trades, simplifying down to an endgame where White has a queen and Black has nothing, at which point checkmating is easy.

Any 1000-rated player could win this position against Stockfish, IMO.

On mobile (iphone 6s) the adverts load directly in front of the next move button, so I clicked ok n the ad multiple times while trying to study the game. One of the worst mobile dark patterns I've seen, intentional or not.

Just use a phone/browser with adblock

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