Chess

CHESS provides our users state-of-the-art synchrotron radiation facilities for research in Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Environmental and Materials Sciences. A special NIH Research Resource, called MacCHESS, supports special facilities for protein crystallographic studies.CHESS serves a wide spectrum of experimental groups from Universities, National Laboratories and Industry. Each year, 500-600 scientists, graduate and undergraduate students visit CHESS to collect data. In addition, a significant effort of the staff is aimed at developing synchrotron radiation experimental facilities and methods that utilize the high intensity photon flux provided by the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR).

The playing board is the battlefield of the game. It’s traditionally oriented so that each player has a white square on the corner to his or her right. The pieces are arranged on the board as shown. Note that the queen always is placed on a square of her own color.

The game is played on a chessboard, consisting of 64 squares: eight rows and eight columns. The squares are alternately light (white) and dark colored. The board must be laid down such that there is a black square in the lower-left corner. To facilitate notation of moves, all squares are given a name. From the view of the white player, the rows are numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; the lowest row has number 1, and the upper row has number 8. The columns are named, from left to right, a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h. A square gets a name, consisting of the combination of its column-letter and row-number, e.g., the square in the lower left corner (for white) is a1.