How do you get on with facing 10 chess masters at the same time without knowing how to play?
A few days ago a meme of an 8 year old boy circulating on the internet that faced several chess masters at the same time… and the meme said that he lost everyone. The irony of the meme revolves around the fact that it is easy to face several masters at the same time in chess, the difficult thing is to beat them…
However, if you are a reader of my blog, you know that mathematics is a tremendous tool for many gambiarras in life, among them facing 2.n chess masters at the same time and having between n defeats and victories, or even 2.n ties. N being a natural number any greater than or equal to 1.
The most interesting thing about this is that you don’t even need to know how to play chess for this. Just have a slight sense of composite functions. Yes, what can a composite function do to help me in this challenge? That’s what we’ll see.
Let us recall the idea of compound functions a little: Let x be an element of the domain of function F, the function F applied to x generates F (x), which can be understood as an element y of the domain of function G, which applied to y generates G (y). However, G (y) = G (F (x)). That is, G (F ()) is a composite function that uses the domain of F.
The idea here is to face n players using the black pieces and n players using the white pieces.
For P1, P2, P3,…, Jn players who start with the white pieces, we will repeat their actions against players P(n + 1), P(n + 2), P(n + 3),…, P(2n).
In contrast, when players P(n + 1), P(n + 2), P(n + 3),…, P(2n), react to the move, we will repeat this reaction against players P1, P2, P3, …, Pn.
With that, we will actually be acting as a composite function that receives an x value from a domain (an opponent’s move) and turns it into a y value (response to the other opponent). Finally, for each pair we “mediate” we can have a victory and a defeat, or two draws.
In extreme cases, we will have n wins and n losses, or 2.n draws.
Now that you have learned this composite function trick, go around and challenge any number of chess masters, and make sure you have between 2.n draws to n wins! Best of all, you can do this without even knowing how to play chess 😀