ChessBase Chess News: Mega Database 2024: More than 700,000 new games. “The new Mega Database now contains over 10 million games and over 700,000 new games. With 112,000 annotated games, the Mega Database is also the largest annotated game collection in the world.”
Chess .com: How A Bolivian Junior Chess Champion Became A Social Media Star. “WCM Alexandra Prado, also known as AlexandraChess, is the mind behind some of the internet’s most-viewed chess content, with hundreds of thousands of followers across different platforms. How did a young chess champion from Bolivia become one of the world’s most-followed chess influencers? Read her story to find out!”
Wall Street Journal: The Chess World’s New Villain: A Cat Named Mittens. “Mittens—or technically the chess bot known as Mittens—might look cute. Her listed chess rating of a single point seems innocuous. But her play over the past few weeks, which has bedeviled regular pawn-pushers, grandmasters, and champions who could play for the world title, is downright terrifying. And as it turns out, people are gluttons for punishment.”
Ars Technica: Adafruit’s Cheekmate gets to the bottom (ahem) of chess cheating controversy. “Figuring out how to communicate with a player mid-match was tricky since any kind of visible LED or audible speakers would be far too obvious. The Adafruit team opted to use a tiny vibration motor similar to those used in cell phones, along with a small driver board to supply a bit more current. And because the receiving device must be concealed on (or in) a sweaty human body, it needed to be encased in something sufficiently moisture-proof to protect the electronics.”
TechRadar Pro: Why this chess grandmaster left Google behind. “When [Tal] Shaked arrived at Google in 2004, the company had just 3,000 employees and looked nothing like the sprawling megacorporation it is today. He was brought on as a junior engineer to work on Google Search. At the time, Google’s search rankings were not powered by any form of intelligence. Instead, a dedicated team of engineers was tasked with managing a complex rule-based system designed to serve up the best and most relevant results to users.”
Mediazona, headline machine-translated from Russian: Roskomnadzor blocked two pages of the website of the chess portal Chess.com; chess player Karjakin asked to restrict access to it. “Roskomnadzor, at the request of the Prosecutor General’s Office, blocked two links to the pages of the Chess.com chess portal Roskomsvoboda drew attention to this . The reason for blocking was the article ‘On the war in Ukraine’. It states that ‘Chess.com strongly condemns the Russian government’s military aggression against Ukraine and its people.’ In addition, according to the authors of the site, they blocked the accounts of chess players who fell under international sanctions.”
Harvard Gazette: Chess is more than a game for researcher focused on brain health. “As the U.S. population ages, concerns about dementia grow larger. David Canning, the Richard Saltonstall Professor of Population Sciences and of Economics and International Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, is studying aging among chess players, reasoning that the centuries-old game serves as a type of cognitive test. The research involves analysis of a massive database of games from the U.S. Chess Federation and a second pilot study that will follow 200 players over time.”
EurekAlert: AI may mistake chess discussions as racist talk. “‘The Queen’s Gambit,’ the recent TV mini-series about a chess master, may have stirred increased interest in chess, but a word to the wise: social media talk about game-piece colors could lead to misunderstandings, at least for hate-speech detection software.”
New York Times: Chess (Yes, Chess) Is Now a Streaming Obsession. “The coronavirus pandemic and stay-at-home orders have crowned a host of unlikely winners catering to bored audiences. But watching livestreams of chess games? Could one of the world’s oldest and most cerebral games really rebrand itself as a lively enough pastime to capture the interest of the masses on Twitch? Turns out, it already has.”
US Chess Federation: US Chess Digital Archive is Live. “The digital archive includes all Chess Life / Chess Review / Chess Life & Review issues in fully searchable PDF format, save a rolling ‘paywall’ of the most current 12 months of Chess Life, which are only available to US Chess members. Each month, a new PDF will be added to the public archive. This archive is available to the general public at no charge as part of our non-profit educational mission to empower people, enrich lives, and enhance communities through chess.”
MIT Technology Review: Instead of practicing, this AI mastered chess by reading about it. “Chess fans love nothing more than discussing a masterful sacrifice by Bobby Fischer or an ingenious line of attack from current world champion Magnus Carlsen. It turns out that this chatter could help AI programs learn to play the game in a new way. One day, the same technique could allow machines to use the emotional content of our language to master various practical tasks.”
The Verge: DeepMind’s AI became a superhuman chess player in a few hours, just for fun. “The end-game for Google’s AI subsidiary DeepMind was never beating people at board games. It’s always been about creating something akin to a combustion engine for intelligence — a generic thinking machine that can be applied to a broad range of challenges. The company is still a long way off achieving this goal, but new research published by its scientists this week suggests they’re at least headed down the right path.”
The Next Web: Twitter games are the best use of the new 280 character limit. “Some genius Twitter users are already using the expanded 280 character limit on Twitter in the best way: by playing games using emoji. Bryan Menegus of Gizmodo and Jack Crosbie played what might be one of the first full games of chess entirely on Twitter (Menegus won with a checkmate). The grid and pieces were represented by Unicode characters roughly analogous to a grid board.”
Huh. Did you know you can play chess via Facebook Messenger?. (Obviously it won’t be encrypted chess….) “Unfortunately, the board is not drag-and-drop; instead, you need to send text commands to move your pieces across the board, with the board refreshing as a new static image after each move. “
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