17 August 2019 | New Scientist | 53The back pages Feedback
A knight’s tale
If you were a piece in a game of
chess played to the death, what
piece should you choose to be? It
is the privilege of science to resolve
such unanswered – dare one say
unasked? – questions. Step forward
(two squares on your first move,
one subsequently) postgrad student
Tom Murphy of Carnegie Mellon
University in Pittsburgh, with his
paper “Survival in chessland”.
Drawing from a database of
more than 300,000 chess games,
he models the attrition rates for
each piece. The first lesson: uneasy
lies the head that wears the crown.
All non-draw games end with a
king’s capture – and execution,
one presumes – so being one gives
you only a 50 per cent chance of
survival. A similar fate befalls the
queens, with the board’s most
powerful pieces only seeing the
endgame 45 per cent of the time.
Faring substantially worse,
however, are the bishops (32 per
cent survival rate) and the knights
(right at the bottom at 27 per cent).
Things are a little bit better for
the rooks (54 per cent), but
there is a surprise winner in the
survival stakes: the diminutive
edgemost pawns, which make it
all the way through an astonishing
70 per cent of games.
Which just goes to show that, as
in any war, the best way to survive
is to avoid the fighting altogether.
Plus, Feedback muses, being a pawn
in someone else’s game and making
it to the end of the board provides
you with the enticing opportunity
of being reincarnated as a queen.
Check that, mate.
The Uncert Inn
“The size of macro objects shown
to exhibit quantum superposition
has increased dramatically
recently,” writes Graham Legg.
“Walking past my local public
house yesterday, it had two signs
outside: one announcing ‘Food
served every day’, and another
stating ‘Kitchen closed today’.”
Feedback feels Graham missed
a trick in not passing through
all-important ingredient: a starter
culture of yeast.
By sampling ancient Egyptian
clay crockery at Boston’s Museum
of Fine Arts and Harvard University’s
Peabody Museum – and a very stale
loaf of Old Kingdom bread found
on the Giza plateau – Blackley could
recover viable yeast spores and feed
them up into a bubbling culture.
Latest reports include pictures of a
round, brown, baked object looking
very much like a loaf of bread, with
a crumb Blackley describes as “light
and airy, especially for a 100%
ancient grain loaf”. Well worth the
5000-year wait.Fruit salad
Going the other way, meanwhile,
we come to that staple of millennial
cuisine, the avocado. NPR reports
that a heatwave in California, plus
a seasonal lull in production, has
sent prices soaring. Taquerias in
California are now bulking outtheir guacamole with small green
squash known as calabacitas.
Javier Cabral, editor of L. A. Taco,
told reporters that it is “scary how
much this fake guacamole tastes
like the real guacamole”. Surely a
cause for celebration?
Avocados wouldn’t be the first
staple to be thus threatened. In
recent years, it has variously been
cocoa, coffee, bananas and olive
oil, while Feedback remembers
all too clearly the dark days of
the Great Fig Roll Crisis of^ ’08.
Now a colleague leafing through
the archive stumbles across a
report from the 1990 Australian
and New Zealand Association
for the Advancement of Science
meeting. It warned that “kiwi fruit
could vanish from supermarket
shelves almost as suddenly as
they appeared if New Zealand fruit
growers do not start planning for
climate change”. Which makes
us wonder: what was the earliest
middle-class commodity panic? ❚the inn’s portals to sample the
multiverse within. Then again,
the sudden onset of superposition
effects after a few stiff drinks is a
phenomenon with which we are
all familiar.Doggy dynamite
Attending an event in Hyde Park,
London, Peter Duffell is warned by
signage of an “explosive detection
dog in operation”.
“I couldn’t help but think of the
mess that the dog makes when it
detects something and then blows
up,” says Peter. This indeed takes
doggy heroism to new levels – and
gives a new, poignant meaning to
cleaning up after your dog.Taking the bisque
If you think that is scraping the
barrel, you haven’t been to the
Bangkok establishment of chef
Nattapong Kaweenuntawong.
Great Big Story reports that his
restaurant Wattana Panich has
been selling the same beef stew
for 45 years. Every night, the
remaining broth is saved. Every
day, the gigantic pan is filled and
fired up again, resting comfortably
in its home, a 15-centimetre-deep,
half-century-old caldera of
congealed stew spillage.
Something seems to be working
as the dish has garnered awards
and, as far as we know, no food
poisoning lawsuits. Perhaps
biologists might like to hotfoot
it to Thailand to find out what
undiscovered extremophiles may
have evolved in this primordial
soup. Meanwhile, we shall content
ourselves, as every afternoon,
with two victuals well known
to improve with age: port wine
and fruit cake.Bread of the dead
Speaking of slow food, physicist and
baking enthusiast Seamus Blackley
has posted details on Twitter of his
mission to recreate 5000-year-old
Egyptian bread. Working with an
Egyptologist and a microbiologist,
Blackley has been hunting for theGot a story for Feedback?
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[email protected]Liana Finck for New Scientist