Chess News, Chess Programs, Databases

Kasparov knows more about Deep Junior than we do
15.02.2003 – Two days after the X3D/FIDE Man-Machine World Championship match between Garry Kasparov and Deep Junior had finished, Mig talked for over two hours with Junior co-programmer Shay Bushinsky. From his home near Tel Aviv, Israel, Bushinsky spoke about the joys of a big match, Junior's preparation, the program's style of play, and the touchy subject of man-machine draw offers in a fanscinating interview.

Kournikova, van Almsick, Kosteniuk
15.02.2003 – When a chess player makes it to the "sportbabes" page, then we sit up and take notice. Next to collections of fairly naughty pictures of tennis stars (Graf, Sabatini, Kournikova), skaters (Witt, Szewczenko), gymnasts (Khorkina, Dobre) and swimmers (van Almsick), we find chess star Alexandra Kosteniuk gracing the pages. Click around this Dutch web site at your own risk.

Moscow picture gallery
14.02.2003 – After three rounds of the Aeroflot Open in the famed Hotel Rossija everything is still, well open. After three rounds there are six players with a perfect 3/3 score: Aleksandrov, Bologan, Efimenko, Alexander Moiseenko, Najer and Zvjaginsev. Only a small number of games have become available, so we bring you a picture report by Eugeny Atarov.

Shredder tops the computer rankings
14.02.2003 – When was the last time Fritz did not occupy the first place in the computer chess ranking lists? In the latest SSDF (Chess Computer Association) ranking list, based on over 90,000 games played by 251 computers, it is Shredder 7.0 that is in the lead, eight points ahead of Deep Fritz 7.0 (Fritz 8.0 has not been tested yet). Here is the list of the top 50 programs.

Ponomariov signs deal with FIDE
14.02.2003 – They got together at six in the evening, the reigning knockout world champion Ruslan Ponomariov and representatives of FIDE. At 6 a.m. the next morning the 19-year-old champion, hardly able to speak any more, "signed some paper". Apparently Ponomariov has conceded to all demands and agreed to play the announced match against Kasparov. More

One Match Drawn, and the Next Match...?
14.02.2003 – Garry Kasparov on the men and the machines that are causing him grief these days. The Man-Machine championship is behind us, what about the Man-Man title? Does world championship unification take an Einstein or is it a no-brainer? Tal or HAL revisited, do computers have style? Time to deep six the Deep in Mig on Chess #186.

Deep Junior Makes the Fight Worth It
13.02.2003 – "In game five of my match with Deep Junior it played an imaginative sacrifice of the type generally considered impossible for a computer player," Garry Kasparov writes in the Wall Street Journal. "It was a landmark moment for computer chess and the science and programmers behind it." In an outspoken article he praises the programmers and organisers and criticises IBM for abandoning its experiment with computer chess in 1997. More

Where Harry met Sally
13.02.2003 – Back at last in "old" Europe we look back nostalgically at two exciting weeks in New York, where Kasparov met Deep Junior and where we occasionally got a chance to look around a city that is bigger and more vibrant than any other in the world. In our final pictorial report we visit the Petrossian Restaurant, stroll through East Village and, yes, have exactly what she was having. More

Who is Peter Weinberger?
13.02.2003 – Do you remember the Ken Thompson's Endgame CDs that ChessBase published some years ago? They were the first databases of five-pieces endings that reached the general public, precursors to the Nalimov Tablebases we have today (Fritz Endgame Turbo). If you still have a copy of the original CDs you may want to take a closer look at the artwork. It contains one of the most famous running gags of the US computer community. Here is the full story.

Small wonders – miracles of nature
12.02.2003 – At three Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son watched his parents playing chess in the family's ramshackle home on a board crudely drawn on a piece of plywood with a felt-tipped pen. Within a month, he was defeating his parents, at four he was competing in national tournaments. Now 12, he is Vietnam's youngest champion and a grandmaster in the making. Read all about Son and other child prodigies in this fascinating Time Magazine article.

Fasten your seat belts, the Aeroflot open has begun
12.02.2003 – A total of 481 players from 38 nations has descended on Moscow to play in the yearly Aeroflot Open. Everything is being conducted in the style of a commercial airline flight, with "pilots", "navigators" and "flight personnel" running the show. The organisers have also though up a unique method of publishing the games: they provide scans of the original gamescores. More

Is the chess-playing computer also an artist?
11.02.2003 – Ask most chess grandmasters if chess is art and they will unequivocally say, yes. Today chess computers have reached a point where they can compete against the world’s best players. But if computers become better than humans at chess, does that mean that computers are being artistic or that chess is essentially a complicated puzzle? Here's an astonishingly perceptive ABS-CBN article on the subject.