Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. He is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture. He has had an immense impact on 20th- and 21st-century art, and a seminal influence on the development of conceptual art. By the time of World War I, he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists as "retinal", intended only to please the eye. Instead, he wanted to use art to serve the mind.
The Mind Sports Organisation (MSO) is an association for promoting mind sports including Contract Bridge, Chess, Go, Mastermind, and Scrabble. Since 1997 it has annually organised in England a multi-sport competition, the Mind Sports Olympiad.
The Computer Olympiad is a multi-games event in which computer programs compete against each other. For many games, the Computer Olympiads are an opportunity to claim the "world's best computer player" title. First contested in 1989, the majority of the games are board games but other games such as bridge take place as well. In 2010, several puzzles were included in the competition.
An abstract strategy game is a type of strategy game that has minimal or no narrative theme, an outcome determined only by player choice, and in which each player has perfect information about the game. For example, Go is a pure abstract strategy game since it fulfills all three criteria; chess and related games are nearly so but feature a recognizable theme of ancient warfare; and Stratego is borderline since it is deterministic, loosely based on 19th-century Napoleonic warfare, and features concealed information.
The Decamentathlon is a multi disciplined games event that was created as part of the first Mind Sports Olympiad. It was founded to try to find the best games all-rounder in the world and hence possibly the best games player. It was given a prize fund of £10,000 for the inaugural competition, that equalled that of the highest funded event at the first MSO sponsored by Skandia. However, the other events were spread over multiple playing sessions whereas the Decamentathlon was held over just a single session. This event was initially hailed as the MSO flagship event. Although, the Mind Sports Olympiad's other new event the Pentamind has since become regarded as the more significant event despite not having a fixed format.
Neo-futurism is a late-20th to early-21st-century movement in the arts, design, and architecture.
Osprey Publishing is a British publishing company specializing in military history based in Oxford. Predominantly an illustrated publisher, many of their books contain full-colour artwork plates, maps and photographs, and the company produces over a dozen ongoing series, each focusing on a specific aspect of the history of warfare. Their publications include the Men-at-Arms series, running to over 500 titles, with each book dedicated to a specific historical army or military unit. Osprey is an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing.
The World Mind Sports Games (WMSG) was a multi-sport event created by the International Mind Sports Association (IMSA) as a "stepping stone on the path of introducing a third kind of Olympic Games" after the Summer and the Winter Olympics".
Watkins Books is London's oldest esoteric bookshop. It specialises in esotericism, mysticism, occultism, oriental religion and contemporary spirituality. The book store was established by John M. Watkins, a friend of Madame Blavatsky, in 1897 at 26 Charing Cross. John Watkins had already been selling books via a catalogue which he began publishing in March 1893. The first biography of Aleister Crowley recounts a story of Crowley making all of the books in Watkins magically disappear and reappear.
The Mind Sports Olympiad (MSO) is an annual international multi-disciplined competition and festival for games of mental skill and mind sports. The inaugural event was held in 1997 in London with £100,000 prize fund and was described as possibly the biggest games festival ever held.
Angry Robot is a British-based publishing house dedicated to producing modern adult science fiction and fantasy, or as they call it “SF, F and WTF?!?”. The Nottingham-based company first released books in the UK in 2009, and since September 2010 has simultaneously been publishing its titles in the US as well, as a distributed client of Random House. All titles are released as paperbacks and eBooks.
Batsford Books is an independent British book publisher.
Alexander de Cadenet, also known as Bruiser, is a British artist working in various media: predominantly painting, photography and sculpture. He is most known for his photographic "skull portraits" and also his meteorite and Life Burger sculptures. Set within the tradition of Vanitas, these works are designed as aids to spiritual and philosophical contemplation. He has referred to his art work as "a way to give experience meaning in a tangible form; it is an exploration into the mysteries and sacredness of life and its presentation through art".
Dario De Toffoli is an Italian board game designer, gamebook author, and games player who founded the games company Studiogiochi and established many games events. Born in 1953 Venice, after an early career as a chemist he entered the world of games. Winner of over 60 medals at the Mind Sports Olympiad. He won the 2002 and 2012 Pentamind Competition for the best games all-rounder in the world. In 2006, he won a special award for his contribution to games which includes contribution to all aspects of games.
Steve Taylor is an English author and lecturer/researcher in psychology, who has written many books on psychology and spirituality, as well as books of poetry. He is a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University and has been the chair of the Transpersonal Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society.
Repeater Books is a publishing imprint based in London, founded in 2014 by Tariq Goddard and Mark Fisher, formerly the founders of radical publishers Zero Books, along with Etan Ilfeld, Tamar Shlaim, Alex Niven and Matteo Mandarini.
Collective Ink Limited is a publishing company founded in the United Kingdom in 2001 under the name John Hunt Publishing and launched as O Books. The publisher has 15 active imprints, the largest of which are Moon Books, O-Books and Zero Books. The Zero Books imprint was founded to combat what they viewed as a trend of anti-intellectualism in contemporary culture. After changing ownership in 2021, in June 2023, John Hunt Publishing was renamed to Collective Ink.
Diving chess is a sport in which chess is played underwater. It was invented by Etan Ilfeld; and, since 2013, it has been included as one of the disciplines in the annual Mind Sports Olympiad.
Natasha Katherine Regan is a chess player and an award-winning chess author, best known for her book Game Changer. She has represented England at two Chess Olympiads.
