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A Game Plan for the AI Boom

The Atlantic - Technology

Ten years ago, AlphaGo trounced human competitors--and its legacy is still present in today's most advanced bots. Thore Graepel may have been the first human to be vanquished by a superintelligence. In 2015, on his first day as a researcher at Google DeepMind, he was challenged to play against the earliest iteration of AlphaGo--a computer program developed by DeepMind that would prove so effective at the ancient-Chinese game of (or Go, as it is commonly known in the West) that it changed how humans play it, and then upended the field of AI itself. When Graepel faced it, AlphaGo was just a "baby" project, as he put it to me, and he was an accomplished amateur player. But it still took him down.


Medieval chess was more inclusive than the world around it

Popular Science

Black, white, Muslim, or Christian: Players found common ground across the board. A black chess player about to win against a light-skinned cleric. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Chess is widely seen as a great equalizer. Players from every social, racial, and economic class have squared off across the board for nearly 1,500 years, with victories determined solely by skill and strategy.


ChessGPT: Bridging Policy Learning and Language Modeling Xidong Feng

Neural Information Processing Systems

Chess, one of the oldest and most universally played board games, presents an ideal testbed due to the wealth of both policy data and language data. In terms of policy data, it is reported that over ten million games are played daily on Chess.com, the most frequented online chess platform.







Cheating just three times massively ups the chance of winning at chess

New Scientist

It isn't always easy to detect cheating in chess Just three judiciously deployed cheats can turn an otherwise equal chess game into a near-certain victory, a new analysis shows - and systems designed to crack down on cheating might not notice the foul play. Daniel Keren at the University of Haifa in Israel simulated 100,000 matches using the powerful Stockfish chess engine - a computer system that, at its maximum power, is better at playing chess than any human world champion. The matches were played between two computer engines competing at the level of an average chess player - 1500 on the Elo rating scale typically used to calculate skill level in chess. Half the games were logged without any further intervention, while the other half allowed occasional intervention by a stronger computer chess "player" with an Elo score of 3190 - a higher rating than any human player has ever achieved. Competitors usually have a slim advantage when playing white, with a 51 per cent chance of winning, on average, tied to the fact that they make the game's first move.


Chess or video games--which actually makes you smarter? The answer may surprise you.

Popular Science

Chess or video games--which actually makes you smarter? The answer may surprise you. People play chess all over the world, but can the game actually make you smarter? We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. Every Christmas, my family follows the same script: a stack of board games hits the table, and a spirited debate breaks out over what we should play.