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DeadeyeDave73,"meprabot@gmail"You sure do get to see a lot of American history Bubba73.I sure would've liked to see the guidestones w/ya b4 their demise.Sure would like to know what you think about things!?"><"

I don't have much of an opinion about them. After they were demolished, they said that they were going to rebuild them exactly as before, but I haven't heard any more about it. Bubba73 21:31, 2 June 2025 (UTC)[]

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The lists on Morphy number need improved sourcing. Probably many of the uncited list entries were not added by you, but since you created the article I am interested in your thoughts. I opened a discussion topic at WT:CHESS#Morphy numbers needs sourcing or trimming if you care to weigh in. Quale (talk) 04:26, 11 February 2026 (UTC)[]

@Quale: The last time I edited it was 13 years ago and I haven't been watching it. Bubba73 05:18, 11 February 2026 (UTC)[]

We've been here a long time. I watch all the chess articles, but I haven't been a very active editor except to keep the list of GMs up to date. Quale (talk) 17:50, 21 February 2026 (UTC)[]

If I had the chessbase database in PGN form (their data may be in that format), I could write a program that gets the Morphy numbers based on those games. That could be a reference. Bubba73 00:55, 22 February 2026 (UTC)[]

Oddly, even though I use monthly FIDE rating lists to watch for new GMs I never considered writing a shortest path program on a games database to find Morphy numbers. Generally database searches are not WP:RS, but in this case they would find the numbers which can then be verified by hand pretty easily. I don't think we should add more players to the Morphy numbers lists (if anything a little trimming is in order), but it's essential to reliably source everything in the article. Quale (talk) 00:49, 2 March 2026 (UTC)[]

Yes. If we have the game, the reference would be its entry in chessbase. Bubba73 02:12, 2 March 2026 (UTC)[]

I spent a couple hours looking into this. At first it was a little frustrating, but after a bit I made some progress. I didn't have a large games database at hand, but I found that quite recently a kind soul has collected quite a few games in PGN and made them available for download: https://lumbrasgigabase.com/en/download-in-pgn-format-en/.

For the programming I googled and tried the first reasonable-looking Python modules for PGN reading and graph algos. I ended up with the Python chess and networkx modules. The PGN load and shortest paths calc would likely be faster if I used Java or C++, but the extra dev time would cost 100x or more than any savings, especially since I haven't written much Java in the last several years and even far less C++ in which I have never been fluent. On my computer it takes less than 3 minutes to load the PGN headers for 8.1e6 games and create the graph. Networkx takes 7 seconds to compute shortest paths from "Morphy, Paul".

Because the PGN files cover 200 years of games there are some name collisions that cause trouble and any results have to be checked carefully. My first run showed a Morphy number of 3 for Fischer. This would be an interesting result because he's known to have Morphy number 4. The problem is that John Owen has a Morphy number of 1 but decades later a different John Owen played Joseph Platz who played Fischer. Once the Owen issue is resolved there's a similar problem with Walter John. John is recorded as playing Morphy in a simul in 1858, but a later and different Walter John was a master-strength player born in 1879 who played many prominent masters from 1902 through 1940 https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=10549. Correcting these issues at least Fischer gets the correct Morphy number, but as I said before every result must be checked very carefully.

In case you want to mess around with this, this is a bit of what I tried. I use a Jupyter notebook for this kind of simple exploration but you can remove the %%time magic to make it valid Python.

%%time

graph = nx.Graph()

for pgnfile in sorted(Path("data/pgn/").glob("*.pgn")):
 print(pgnfile)
 with open(pgnfile) as f:
 while headers := chess.pgn.read_headers(f):
 w = headers["White"]
 b = headers["Black"]
 # Use only games with both players identified
 if w != "?" and b != "?":
 if w not in graph.nodes or b not in graph.nodes[w]:
 graph.add_edge(w, b, date=headers["Date"], event=headers["Event"])

print(len(graph["Morphy, Paul"]), graph.number_of_nodes(), graph.number_of_edges())

data/pgn/LumbrasGigaBase_OTB_0001-1899.pgn
data/pgn/LumbrasGigaBase_OTB_1900-1949.pgn
data/pgn/LumbrasGigaBase_OTB_1950-1969.pgn
data/pgn/LumbrasGigaBase_OTB_1970-1989.pgn
data/pgn/LumbrasGigaBase_OTB_1990-1999.pgn
data/pgn/LumbrasGigaBase_OTB_2000-2004.pgn
data/pgn/LumbrasGigaBase_OTB_2005-2009.pgn
data/pgn/LumbrasGigaBase_OTB_2010-2014.pgn
data/pgn/LumbrasGigaBase_OTB_2015-2019.pgn
data/pgn/LumbrasGigaBase_OTB_2020-2024.pgn
data/pgn/LumbrasGigaBase_OTB_2025.pgn
147 573498 8130487
CPU times: user 2min 33s, sys: 11.5 s, total: 2min 44s
Wall time: 2min 44s

# There are two different John Owen in the games data. Since the earlier John Owen has a Morphy number of 1
# and the later Owen played Platz who played Robert Fischer this will mess up our computations.
defprint_edges(node):
"""Print edges in date order."""
 for n1, n2, data in sorted(graph.edges([node], data=True), key=lambda e: e[2]["date"]):
 print(n2, data)

print_edges("Owen, John")
graph.remove_edge("Morphy, Paul", "John, Walter")

print_edges("Freeman, John G")
graph.remove_edge("Morphy, Paul", "Freeman, John G")

...

%%time

# The wikipedia article Morphy number says James Mortimer played some casual games with Morphy.
# Our PGN files don't include scores for these games so add the edge by hand.
graph.add_edge("Morphy, Paul", "Mortimer, James", date="????.??.??", event="offhand game")

# shortest_paths = list(nx.single_source_all_shortest_paths(graph, "Morphy, Paul"))
shortest_path = nx.shortest_path(graph, "Morphy, Paul")

print(shortest_path["Pillsbury, Harry"])
print(shortest_path["Fischer, Bobby"])

['Morphy, Paul', 'Bird, Henry', 'Pillsbury, Harry']
['Morphy, Paul', 'Rhodes Castillo, Stewart Jose', 'Rossolimo, Nicolas', 'Fischer, Bobby']
CPU times: user 7 s, sys: 47.6 ms, total: 7.04 s
Wall time: 7.04 s

I didn't check to make sure the Fischer path is legit, but we know that the path length 4 is correct. The Fischer path is wonky. The Wikipedia article suggests that all interesting Morphy numbers go through 5 players, so we can try that by removing the Morphy node from the graph and adding edges for only those 5.

%% time

# The Wikipedia article says that all interesting Morphy number paths go through just 5 players with Morphy number 1.
# Remove the Morphy node and add back edges for these 5 and try again.

graph.remove_node("Morphy, Paul")
graph.add_edge("Morphy, Paul", "Anderssen, Adolf")
graph.add_edge("Morphy, Paul", "Bird, Henry")
graph.add_edge("Morphy, Paul", "Mortimer, James")
graph.add_edge("Morphy, Paul", "Owen, John")
graph.add_edge("Morphy, Paul", "Paulsen, Louis")

shortest_path = nx.shortest_path(graph, "Morphy, Paul")

print(shortest_path["Pillsbury, Harry"])
print(shortest_path["Fischer, Bobby"])

['Morphy, Paul', 'Bird, Henry', 'Pillsbury, Harry']
['Morphy, Paul', 'Anderssen, Adolf', 'Lange, Max', 'Euwe, Max', 'Fischer, Bobby']

This looks a lot better. Networkx also has a single_source_all_shortest_paths function that could be used to examine all shortest paths to select the prettiest one. (In our case we would want a shortest path that only uses players we list with a Morphy number.) Quale (talk) 08:30, 4 March 2026 (UTC)[]

That is quite good work! Bubba73 17:08, 4 March 2026 (UTC)[]

George Abell's birthday is March 1st, not the 27th.

-Jonathan Abell ~2026-11879-24 (talk) 18:10, 22 February 2026 (UTC)[]

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