From the Yngwie Malmsteen School of Chess (and everything else)

Tractor Chess.

(And no, I don't really expect anyone to get the title reference without me explaining it. Probably not even then.)

I don't ever want to hear about how slow chess is again.

Yesterday.

Image from Attractions Magazine

300 minutes! That's five hours standing in line, most of it directly in the summer sun of Florida, on hard, hot surfaces!

I haven't played a five hour long game of chess since perhaps the 1980s, and at least then I got to play a game of chess, not just stand around baking for a three minute ride!

Yeah, don't want to hear about chess being slow OR boring again....

Last night.

Last night, playing poker with friends, I uttered words perhaps never before uttered by a man, almost certainly not on a Saturday night.

"I should have gone to Palatka."

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.