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...
by scribe | Jul 26, 2017 | current news, people, positions, PRO Chess League, tournaments
This title sounds like the beginning of a joke: The best way to beat a grandmaster… is ANY WAY YOU CAN. (This is spoken by somebody who has never done it.) Nevertheless, if I ever beat a GM, I would want to do it the way that IM Eric Rosen did today. At the...
by scribe | Sep 10, 2016 | current news, people, tournaments
September 10, 2016. That’s the day when both American teams, the men (or “open”) and women, were tied for first place at the Chess Olympiad. Does anybody with a better knowledge of chess history know whether this has ever happened before, with so few...
by scribe | Mar 17, 2016 | current news, off-topic, people, ruminations
My ISP had server problems the last couple days, so I wasn’t able to post in a timely fashion and the “news” is no longer news. The match between Lee Sedol, the top human go player, and AlphaGo, a new computer program developed by Google, ended in a...