Sunday, 6 January 2019

Ultima Thule

White to play and mate in 2 (Ultima Thule 1874)
A few days ago the New Horizons space probe did a "fly by" of the furthest object visited by a spacecraft  in our solar system. The object was nicknamed "Ultima Thule", which is a greco-latin term for "beyond the known world". I'm not sure how common this expression is (or was), but it seems to have been known to at least one 19th century chess problemist.
While flicking through an archived copy of "The Chess Players Chronicle" a came across the problem shown here. It is a fairly basic "White to play and checkmate in 2" problem, although the key move might be a little hard to find. But what jumped out at me was the name of the composer. It was of course, "Ultima Thule"!

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