chess
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Your support makes all the difference.Another problem for connoisseurs of chessboard oddities. This one was composed by TR Dawson in 1947 and first appeared in a little publication called Caissa's Fairy Tales. It is White to play and mate in seven moves.
Black is practically devoid of moves, but White must find a way of keeping him bottled up. 1.f6 Kd1 2.f7 fails to reach the objective, because of 2...Nxb3+ 3.axb3 Bc3+.
What White needs is a way to keep the knight pinned, while also closing in on the black king. The trick is to oscillate the white queen between the c1-h6 diagonal and the d-file: 1.Bb1! Kd1 2.Qd6 Kc1 3.Qf4 Kd1 4.Qd4 Kc1 5.Qe3 Kd1 6.Qd3 Kc1 7.Qc2 mate.
The basic geometric idea could, Dawson noticed, be extended to a board of any size. He accordingly asked a subsidiary question: if we extended the board to a huge number of squares, with the same pieces in its bottom left-hand corner, and the white queen at the furthest end of her present diagonal, just how far away would she be if the position were a mate in 69 moves?
The answer, assuming that each square on the board has a side of one inch, works out at 250,000 miles. Or, as Dawson put it, on the moon.
The problem therefore qualifies as an unarguable piece of chessboard lunacy.
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