Undulations of Chess Consciousness

I begin with a summary of my efforts today, in order to provide a context for our topic:

7p-1f-25p-1f-27p-1f-12p-1f-25p
96% @ 1353 ± 81; 1403 final

Unfortunately, I dipped from my target of 98%--I'm blaming it on a general shortage of sleep this week and some pretty intense Saturday blitz earlier today. I went 3-3-0 with my latest OTB nemesis (let's call him Chernobyl Grunvasser). Chernobyl is a blitz fanatic, and that's all we play when we get together. I am basically just learning how to play blitz so today was a first indication that I am getting better at it. Usually my sessions with him are skewed significantly in his favor.

Digression on the Performance Graph
Before I get started on the actual topic of the day, I would like to say that Loomis's suggestion to get rid of the annoying outlines around the bars in the Performance Graph make all of the difference in the world. At this point, I'm thinking of using color (or shading) to represent the rating of the problem relative to the tactician's rating--perhaps using a blue-cyan-yellow, blue-cyan-magenta, even a cyan-white-orange gradient. I'm not sure which yet, and I'll probably do a little experimentation with it. This will put into use wormwood's excellent suggestion to use shading to increase the information dimensionality. I am probably not going to attempt to capture the cumulative rating change in the representation, as I am not sure of the utility of representing this change for my purposes--which will become clearer in the future. I decided to keep time on the X-axis because it seems very natural. In fact, if one looks at my performance graph tonight, he will likely notice, above all, variations in my time management.

In particular, I solved some clusters of problems much quicker than the others. The most prominent such cluster preceded one of my four fails for the evening (p50383). Recently, waaek has described bouts of fogginess when working problems or when playing over the board. For high accuracy players such as waaek, me (lately), or dogwaste (aka dktransform), I think that these mental lapses are reflected in a shorter decision process. In fact, inspecting dktransform's latest actions, I notice a similar pattern. He has 2 fails of 20 problems shown and the first fail came after a run of 4 problems with an average time solved of 5.25 seconds, though the average of this 20 was almost twice that at 10.3 seconds. And I'm guessing that his typical average time is probably significantly greater than 10.3 and that he had gone to his mental capacity for this particular session. (I would have made a performance graph of dktransform's latest actions, but I have yet to write a parser for the "Latest Actions" page.)

These observations lead me to conjecture that the key to accurate chess is to habitually reign in the natural mental tendency to short-circuit the analytical process (i.e. guess). Such guessing is likely a useful biological adaptation, but is not best practice in the mathematically precise realm of the chess board. Cultivating a complete analytical habit becomes even more difficult with fatigue, and, barring a dogmatic yet virtuous pursuit of one's personal throughput goals, it is best to simply know when to stop solving for the evening.

And now, I happily present the

Chess Tactics Server Problem of the Day
p19052

White to Move

Here's the solution and why I like it (start selecting text following the colon): 2.Nc6 is forcing because it attacks the black Queen, so its easy to guess. But its beauty is White's threat of mate in 6 if Black simply recaptures: 2...bxc6 3.Qa6+ Kb8 4.Bxa7+ Ka8 5.Bb6+ Kb8 6.Qa7+ Kc8 7.Qa8++.