by scribe | Mar 15, 2018 | current news, people, PRO Chess League, ruminations
This week the PRO Chess League playoffs started with a rash of upsets. In five out of eight matches the team with the lower seeding beat the top-seeded team, and in one more match the favored team only managed to squeak through to the next round by virtue of their...
by scribe | Feb 21, 2018 | current news, games, positions, PRO Chess League, tournaments
The PRO (Professional Rapid Online) Chess League is well into its second season now, with six rounds complete. The league is easier to follow online than it was last year, because it now has a website independent of chess.com (http://www.prochessleague.com), and there...
by scribe | Feb 13, 2018 | current news, literature, off-topic
Going off topic today! I hope that my readers will forgive me. As many of you know, for the last two years I have been working on a big, non-chess book. It’s called The Book of Why, and we are now entering the home stretch. Publication date is now just three...
by scribe | Dec 30, 2017 | current news, games, people, positions, tournaments
This morning I got a reminder in Facebook of a blog post I wrote exactly two years ago, called How to Beat a Grandmaster. My friend Robin Cunningham, a FIDE Master, was at that moment playing in the Hastings Masters tournament in England, which traditionally bridges...
by scribe | Dec 15, 2017 | current news, games, literature, openings, positions
So far I have looked at three games from the AlphaZero-Stockfish match: #5, #9, and #10 from the ten games provided in the arXiv preprint. All three are amazingly similar, and at the same time they are amazingly unlike almost any other game I’ve ever seen. In...
by scribe | Dec 6, 2017 | current news, literature, openings, ruminations
Today, like many people, I was shocked by the news in my Facebook new feed. AlphaZero beats Stockfish! For those who (like me) had never heard of AlphaZero, let me explain that it is a new deep-learning algorithm created by the same folks who gave you AlphaGo, the...
