Now it's GO's turn.

Google has announced it has made a breakthrough in programming a computer to play GO. Up until now, programmers hadn't been able to write a decent GO program, at least not compared to human masters. But Google (and perhaps soon, Facebook) has created a program that has beaten the best human player in Europe by a 5-0 margin.

The research has implications beyond an old Chinese board game. The systems used by Facebook and Google were not preprogrammed with specific if-this-then-do-that code or explicitly told the rules. Instead, they learned to play at a very high level by themselves. These techniques can be adapted to any problem "where you have a large amount of data that you have to find insights in," Hassabis said.

One of the programmers also created a similar program for chess:

DeepMind [Google's AI research group] recently hired Matthew Lai, a London researcher who developed a system capable of playing chess at the grandmaster level. His software was able to reason in a way similar to how humans do, a more efficient method than IBM's attempt to crunch every possible outcome before making a move in the 1990s.

Here's more on Lai's prior chess program, Giraffe. Giraffe is impressive, but still not up to snuff with the best "regular" chess programs.

How NOT to play the London System as White

From the Tata Steel Masters Tournament , today in Utrecht instead of the Wijk!

The Gifts Keep on Coming....

The greatest thing about this era of chess is that so much information is given away freely. For example, a week ago IM Johan Salomon tweeted a link to some analysis he had done of a game from 1981 involving Jonathan Tisdall.

My analysis of @GMjtis-G. Lee A beautiful and instructive game! Click to open on phone or in browser! https://t.co/i7GIC5T8kq

— Johan Salomon (@JohanSalomon) January 12, 2016

Older players will remember him for his coverage of various Karpov-Kasparov matches for Chess Life, but he also has the distinction of having not one but two moves included in Tim Krabbé's list of The 110 Greatest Moves Ever Played. The move in question came in at Number 15 on the list. (It should be noted that Krabbé stopped updating his list in, I believe, 1998, so you won't find Kasparov's Rxd4 against Topalov, for example.)

Here's the position in question:

Tisdall - Lee, London 1981

White to move after 14...Qg6

Tisdall remembered this game being played at a weekend tournament. Here's a link to IM Salomon's analysis, displayed using the ViewChess website. And just in case you'd prefer the KnightVision layout I've been using here, I've included that below as well. All analysis is by Salomon, though I have added a text note at the start of the game and made one minor correction in the notes.

Game of the Day: Navara - Giri, Tata Steel Chess Tournament, Wijk aan Zee 2016

Navara played a brilliant attacking game against Giri today, and the Czech GM should have won the game. But on move 40 he seems to have made a wrong turn, and Giri escaped with the draw. Afterwards Giri said, "Generally it's good to be a queen down when you're lost. It's harder usually to convert. With two rooks there are always some chances." The quote, and the game notes below, are from the ChessVibes.com report. Annotations by Peter Doggers. One quick note from me: If Black goes pawn & rook hunting with 20...Bxg2 he gets slaughtered after 21 fxg6 when White is threatening all kinds of nastiness on the f7 square, among other things.

Carlsen - Cauana, Tata Steel Chess Tournament, Wijk aan Zee 2016

Fabiano Caruana explains his interesting game with Magnus Carlsen from today's round at the TATA Steel Chess Tournament in Wijk aan Zee.

Solution Time for the Christmas Position of the Day

Back on Christmas I posted a position from one of John Nunn's puzzle books. Here it is again:

Kudriashov vs. I Ivanov, USSR 1979

Black to move

5rk1/PP4b1/3p2p1/3P4/1R2P2p/5pp1/4r3/R4NK1 b - - 0 1

Nunn gives the solution as 1...Re1! 2 a8(Q) h3! 3 Ra2 g2! 4 Rf2 Rxf1+ 5 Rxf1 h2+ 6 Kxh2 gxf1(Q), the first two moves of which were played before White resigned. (I'll have this and more in a replayable board below.)

I didn't figure it out. I kept trying to make another move work. It seemed to me that 1...Rg2+ was the way to go, but I couldn't figure it out. When I saw Nunn's solution I figured it was the "correct" sequence, and that I had been off my rocker looking at the other move.

But lo and behold! When I put the position into ChessBase prior to publishing, the computer spit out that 1...Rg2+ was indeed a winning move. The trouble isn't with that move, but the follow-up, which runs 2 Kh1 (forced) Rc2!!, and here White is losing in all lines.

Kudriashov vs. I Ivanov, USSR 1979

White to move

I'm not going to pretend to understand how White is losing by force here, but he is. I've included the main lines from the computer analysis below. Improvements can be found along the way, but it appears only for Black.

Best Games of 2015

Chessbase has picked what they believe are the ten best games of 2015. You can replay them at the Chessbase site. They have chosen the games, but not put them in order - they're going to let people with Chessbase accounts vote for the honors. My personal favorite is Khismatulin – Eljanov, Jerusalem 2015, but it's languishing down in fifth place. The games by Navara and Wei are also quite impressive.

Anyway, have a look at the games, and cast your votes, if you've got one.

A minor dispute.

A few days back Paul Leggett wrote the following, concerning the participation of several top GMs in the Qatar Masters Tournament:

I am firmly in the camp that believes the top player's ratings are inflated because they tend to avoid playing in Opens (Kramnik played in his first open in something like 20 years just within the last year [I believe it was at last year's edition of the Qatar Masters. - ed.]), and this is an example of what can happen when the top dogs move to the shallow end of the pool.

These results are rare, but when the opportunity is present, the top guys will get nicked enough (a draw is a rating loss) to keep rating at a more accurate level.

I meant to disagree (mildly) at the time, but forgot with all of the holiday hullabaloo. I do think the top players would probably get nicked sometimes, but I also think the top players are the top players because they really do perform that well. It hasn't been unknown for a player to soar to elite ratings status only to get knocked back down immediately upon getting into elite events.

Mostly, I think the top players would have to adjust to the style of an open Swiss tournament by learning to take more chances. This would increase their variance, but it would do so both ways, and ultimately I would expect them to end up in about the same positions on the ELO scale. As evidence, I give you the top five players, by rating, from Qatar, along with their results:

It turns out that the top three players in the world all gained ELO points, as did the twelfth ranked player. And the tenth ranked player, who had a disappointing tournament, only lost 1.8 ELO. Not bad! The eighth and tenth seeds did get hammered, ratings-wise, but they're both outside the top twenty in the world.

This is one tournament, and thus a painfully small sample size, but I think these results would hold up over time.

Thus endeth a minor disputation over a particular inconsequentiality.

Database reliability: A cautionary tale

Databases have revolutionized the game of chess. Thanks to these databases, people have access to millions of games, easily accessible and searchable. Contrast this to 1980, when I was but a lad of 12, living in the chess hinterlands of Orlando, Florida. I had exactly three books about the game: the then current edition of the USCF Rules of Chess, Harry Golombeck's Chess: A History, and Robert E. Burger's The Chess of Bobby Fischer.

The rule book was a rule book. Golombeck's book had all of 55 unannotated games. Burger's book, which was and is a gem, was something of a textbook, and had only a few complete games, though many positions from Fischer's games. (Now that my health has improved I plan on reviewing that book at some point, and I will explain then why I'm not linking to the book now.) But that was it. Probably fewer than 60 complete games, and I counted myself lucky! Books weren't as easy to come by, especially if you were a child and didn't have a USCF membership. These days anyone with an internet connection can access all manner of online databases for those millions of games mentioned earlier. And relatively cheap databases can be had for offline use. Astounding!

But these databases can have problems. Sometimes these collections haven't been checked well. In some sense, how could they be? Who could review millions of games for quality assurance? A few years back, I found the following game score in ChessBase's collection:

Starting with Black's 25th move, the game score becomes utter nonsense. For all I know this game score is still being used by ChessBase, though I sent them an email at the time. (Side note: An awful lot of the games between Petrosian and Tal were boring as dirt.)

The correct score can be found at ChessGames.com: LINK. That's where I found it then. You'll see that the last few moves of the game actually make sense! The prior score would only be believable if both players were so drunk they were wetting themselves at the board in their oblivion, and even that isn't believable. In that case neither would have resigned, and the most likely outcome would have been someone flagging after passing out.

So, the cautionary note is that you need to review the actual game scores in your database before taking them at face value. Trust no one! If you're a 1700 and find a bunch of stuff that you can determine is nonsense without even turning on a program, then you need to check the game score with another source!

Position of the Day: Christmas edition!

Another one for the "books beat databases" files! The book this time is John Nunn's Chess Puzzle Book, which includes the following position which I cannot find in my database or in ChessGames.com online database: Kudriashov vs. I Ivanov, USSR 1979.

Kudriashov vs. I Ivanov, USSR 1979

Black to move

5rk1/PP4b1/3p2p1/3P4/1R2P2p/5pp1/4r3/R4NK1 b - - 0 1

Nunn calls the position "totally weird" and I'd be hard-pressed to disagree. I'll post the solution in a few days, but I've given the fen so you can plug it into a program if you like.

Game of the Day: 12/24/2015 edition

And now to look at some actual quality chess. Magnus Carlsen (FIDE 2834) faced Li Chao (2750) for the first time today. It was the first board of the fifth round of the Qatar Masters Open. Not many opens have an average FIDE rating of 2792 on the first board! (And we'll go higher in coming rounds, no doubt.) It was a "let's hand each other lit sticks of dynamite and see who goes BOOM first" kind of game. Carlsen played the currently popular 3 f3 line against Li's Grunfeld, and it went from there. I've only added a note about an amusing possibility on white's 28th move. If you want real annotations, look elsewhere! To that end, I recommend FM Mike Klein's article at ChessVibes both for annotations and post-game comments from Carlsen, as well as recaps of other action from the day. Here's the Carlsen-Li game.

Dumpster Diving: 12/24/2015 edition

Playing a three minute game online on Christmas Eve, waiting for my turn to wrap presents, I came up with the following. I missed a few things here and there, but it has a pleasant finish.

Position of the Day: 12/23/2015 edition

And I'll conclude with something a bit more upbeat. Down the boards today Norwegian IM Johan-Seabstian Christiansen (FIDE 2385) played against German GM Stefan Bromberger (2521). I'll confess that I don't believe I've heard of either of these players before. A rather crazy game ensued (which I'll embed below), but the most amazing thing is this position from near the end of the game:

Christiansen - Bromberger, Qatar Masters Open

Position after 29...Q8d3+

White resigned in light of 30 Bf3 Q3xf3+ 31 gxf3 Qxf3# and 30 Bxd3 Qxd3+ 31Kf4 Qe3#.

Gruesome, isn't it?

Goat of the Day

More games from the Qatar Masters Open, with an eye towards finding the goat of the day.

In the runner-up position, we have the young Chinese star Wei Yi (FIDE 2730). After a fairly blunder filled game (at least according to Stockfish), Wei reached the following position as White against the Indian IM Vignesh (2422):

White to move

White is a pawn to the good, and Black has weaknesses, but White's king isn't too secure either, the presence of queens means that White MUST keep up the home guard, and the rook ending would probably be difficult to win if the queens come off (at least according to Svidler and Ramirez).

Grandmaster Instruction

Mark Crowther, of The Week In Chess fame, has been stating on Twitter that the last couple of years he felt like his understanding of the game has improved simply by watching top grandmasters go over their games in press conferences after rounds. I sympathize with this point of view, although it is hard to know exactly how much understanding translates into improved play, much less improved results. (If everyone you play is getting better at the same rate you are, you might not see any improvement at all!)

For example, I found it helpful to watch Vladimir Kramnik (yes, my favorite player) go over his game today. Kramnik is very fast and spews lots of lines (you can see Svidler struggling to keep up at times), but it is interesting to see what he's looking at, both positionally and tactically. Today he took on Naroditsky. The commentary is below, for those interested.

[I'm having trouble getting the video to embed. The link is below. The clip with Kramnik should be the second clip on the page.]

LINK

Coverage courtesy of Chess24.com & Livestream.com.

Note that Livestream classifies this as Sports/Extreme Sports! I had no idea an ironing board was involved....