Week 2 HW Wed. Q22

It's always nice to have classes out of the way. Wednesday was a nice evening of reading Thinking Strategically.

I read chapters 5 and 6. I'm not quite done with chapter 6, but I'll finish it today. Chapter 5 covered threats and promises as well as warnings and assurances. Chapter 6 talked about 8 ways to being credible. Without credibility, threats and promises aren't much good.

Today I'll be reading the case for PTAP and then reviewing notes.

Quixote Update
Chapter 22

Quixote and Sancho come across a gang chain ... prisoners in chains on their way to the galley. Quixote asks the guards why they are all locked up. The guards basically tell him to ask the prisoners themselves. So Quixote asks them and between the slang that they prisonsers use and the madness of Quixote, all the prisoners' stories make them sound innocent when in fact they are not. So Quixote lances the head guard in an effort to free these "slaves." The "slaves" seize the moment and take out the other guards. When they are freed, Quixote tells them to go to Dulcinea and tell her of Quixote's nobility in freeing them. Instead of thanking Quixote, they throw rocks and him and Sancho ... and they get beat up ... again.

Chess Update

Didn't play chess last night. After doing homework, I went to the gym to workout.

The 3/23/06 chessgames.com puzzle is 45. ? I think the best thing to do would be to check the king. But he would escape to easily. We'd need to clear the b1-h7 diagonal ... so f6 would be a good move. If the queen takes it, then Re8+, the king moves to h7, the white queen moves to b1, black's response is either Qg6 (Rh8+ Kg7, Rg8+ and white wins a Q) or Kg7 then white moves Qg1+. If the black queen defends, then the white rooks checks, else the black king moves f7 followed by white Qg8 mate.

I nailed it!

On a somewhat related note to chess ... I did my first Sudoku puzzle yesterday. It took me about an hour. Once I started, I couldn't stop! It was really fun. It took me about 10 minutes of bumbling around to figure out a decent strategy. What I ended up doing was writing all the numbers down in each box and then I'd cross out the ones that wouldn't work. Eventually I'd just write down the valid numbers. After finishing it, I read up on Sudoku at Wikipedia and found that I used a good strategy to figure it out. Today I'm going to do a hard one.