Sometimes I’m amazed by webpages which answer profound or trivial questions that I’ve asked myself before. This time, I’m more amazed that someone would work to answer a question that has never and probably would never occur to me: can you teach a spam filter to play chess?

Laird Breyer wrote a program called dbacl to filter email using a Bayesian classifier. For the amusement of all, he demonstrates how this program can be used to learn elementary chess tactics, and hooks it to Xboard so that you can play chess against it. Nifty.