Items tagged with Chess
The greatest chess matches are no longer played by mere mortals comprised of flesh, bone, and blood, but sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) schemes. Sitting at the top, at least for now, is AlphaZero, a product of Google's DeepMind division where machine learning rules the day. It also rules the chess board—AlphaZero took down Stockfish, the sophisticated open-source chess engine that many players use to prepare for big matches. Stockfish's recent string of successes includes winning the 2016 TCEC Championship and and the 2017 Chess.com Computer Chess Championship. It is a formidable opponent by any standards, except when going up against AlphaZero. In a closed-door event, AlphaZero...
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You know your chess opponent is in trouble when he has to hit the restroom after every turn. That was Tigran Petrosian’s thinking when he accused a fellow chess player during the Dubai Open this weekend. As it turned out, he seems to have been right: officials found an iPod in the bathroom running an app that displayed the chess moves from the game. Image credit: Dubai OpenAccording to the Telegraph, the tournament director got involved after people observed that Chess Grandmaster Gaioz Nigalidze, of Georgia, was partial to a particular stall for all of his emergency bathroom breaks. A search of the stall turned up a device running a chess app. Nigalidze apparently denied that the device belonged...
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There's no disputing that Bill Gates is blessed with a brilliant mind. Sure, he dropped out of Harvard College, but he got accepted into the elite institution of higher learning in the first place. Leading into his college career, Gates scored 1,590 out of 1,600 on the SAT. The rest is history -- he went on to co-found Microsoft, built a net worth that's in the billions ($76.8 billion at last count), and now spends his time on his philanthropic efforts. In fact, one of the few things you won't find on his resume is that of being a chess champion, and having now been soundly beaten by one on television, that's not a path he's likely to pursue. It took 23-year-old Magnus Carlsen, a "grandmaster"...
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Computers have reached the point where they can beat chess champions. So is it hard to believe that a chess champion might cheat by using a chess program and an elaborate scheme using text messages? That's what happened last year in Siberia, during the 2010 chess Olympiad. At least, that is what authorities believe happened last year in a scandal that involved up-and-coming French chess grandmaster Sebastian Feller, 20; Cyril Marzolo, 32; and French captain Arnaud Hauchard, 39. All have been suspended by the French national chess federation. How did it work? Marzolo watched Feller's match from a livestream online. He then enter the moves into Firebird, open-source chess software developed by...
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