A lovely tribute to the great IM Emory Tate - Steve Colding

[malaise]

http://ernestcolding.com/2015/11/06/in-memoriam-emory-tate/

[lapfog_1]

1. Interesting.

I was thinking that I should have known or heard of him, given we were born near to each other... but I read his wikipedia page and realized that we were at least 10 years apart in our chess playing careers... mine were all over by age 18, he didn't start until years after me.

I only defeated a couple of grand masters... he defeated many many more.

I gave up chess when I had my ass handed to me by a Russian GM back in 1975. I knew I would never reach the very pinnacle of the chess world.

I returned to Chess briefly in 1982 or 1983 (memory fades now) when I helped write a "boolean logic chess move generator" which uses some interesting assembly language instructions (and vector to vector instructions) for a Cray 1 supercomputer. The programming team consisted of just 3 people. We very nearly won the ACM Computer Chess Championship... and we were the only contestant that got the grand master commentator to actually stand up and applaud when our computer program sacrificed a queen for a checkmate in (at most) 10 moves later. We would have won the tournament except that our Cray-1 was in commercial use so we had to forfeit games when the demand for time on our Cray could not be moved or rescheduled.

Anyway, I am sorry I never ran across Emory. Reviewing the game in the memorial video... he was, indeed, a great chess player.

[malaise]

2. I have two friends and both of their daughters are serious chess

players - one knew ET very well - he sent this for me to see. I'm beyond ordinary