For a number of reasons, the game of chess has become unprecedentedly popular, partly due to enthusiasts and serious players alike turning to online play on a plethora of websites that established themselves during the pandemic. In parallel, new players have also been drawn in, due to the instrumental and sensational success of Netflixs Queens Gambit series.

Another contributing element has been the creation of the AlphaZero chess-playing engine, with its amazing abilities, including an almost vertical learning curve, resulting in the strongest chess-playing entity the world has ever seen. The science has primarily been the work of Demis Hassabis, rewarded with the CBE for his efforts, and a $400 million sale to Google of his company, Deep Mind. The achievements of Demis, and the brilliantly quasi illogical strategies and tactics of AlphaZero, were likewise already covered in my column Arise Sir Demis . The games were contested against the most powerful available commercial chess programme, called Stockfish itself many times stronger than the IBM Deep Blue programme which defeated Garry Kasparov himself in 1997.

The 1993 World Title Challenger, the British Grandmaster Nigel Short,described the AlphaZero games as being of such beauty that he felt he was in the presence of God. Demis himself explained that his self-taught programme, which had already mastered the near infinite complexities of the oriental games of Shogi (Japanese Chess) and Go, was the key to understanding intelligence itself.

But the rise of the all-conquering thinking engines has been a double-edged sword, arguably undermining the prestige of the human world champion. Further recent developments have reinforced this perception and the aura of the human world chess championship has consistently declined.

This week I return to a further contributing development, the meteoricrise, lasting domination, but sudden abdication of the Norwegian World Chess Champion, Magnus Carlsen.

The culmination of a long line of champions, which stretches back into the 18th century, Carlsen is also a uniquely talented representative of the modern era. Magnus has attained the highest-ever chess rating recorded, outclassing even the mighty Kasparov.

Magnus wins virtually every competition which he enters, and has adapted seamlessly to the coronavirus crisis, which, as we have seen, has obliged chess to migrate online to a huge extent. Magnus has prudently avoided the damage to his reputation occasioned by suffering defeats against chess computers, a fate which overtook both Garry Kasparov and Vladimir Kramnik.Finally, Magnus has leveraged all the opportunities afforded by his title of World Chess Champion, adapting perfectly to the modern environment, even to the extent of floating his online chess company, Play Magnus, for $85 million dollars, while simultaneously earning a fortune as a trendy ambassador for the fashion line G-Star Raw, often appearing alongside the Hollywood superstar Liv Tyler.

The title of World Chess Champion dates to no later than 1886, when Wilhelm Steinitz defeated Johannes Zukertort in a gladiatorial contest, specifically designed to resolve the question of who was the strongest player in the world after Paul Morphys death in 1884, though Steinitz had claimed that status since 1866. Less clear is whether the great predecessors of Steinitz also merited that proud title. Part of the difficulty of authentication is lack of evidence of important contests and gaps in the record.

The story begins in the 18th century, when the French chess expertFranois-Andr Danican Philidorwon an important match in 1747 against the erudite Philip Stamma, translator of oriental languages to the court of King George II. Sadly, none of those games has survived. Following Philidor, who died in 1795, there comes a hiatus, until the brief flourishing of La Bourdonnais during the 1830s. After this, there is a further gap in the record until the 1840s, when the French heir to the Philidor tradition, Saint-Amant, was overthrown in Paris, the epicentre of European chess life at that time, by the English champion Howard Staunton.

Fortunately, from Staunton onwards, there is a relatively unbroken line of succession, with each champion being dethroned by the next in line. The exceptions are the trinity of Morphy, Fischer (both of whom simply downed tools), and Alekhine (who died in office), thus permanently preserving their hallowed nimbus of invincibility. Until the death of Alekhine, the title was in effect the personal property of the champion himself.

The first great player who could be considered a World Champion was Philidor, whodominatedthe chess scene of his day. The term World Champion was not used when describing him, with commentators preferring to employ such metaphors as wielding the sceptre. There is also the problem that very few of Philidors games on level terms have survived, his reputation largely being constructed on his blindfold simultaneous displays, which so electrified London chess enthusiasts. Philidor was able to conduct three games blindfold at once, a feat that led to a letter of admonishment from the French encyclopaedist, Denis Diderot, warning Philidor that such exploits might lead to brain damage.

It is interesting to note that Philidor was the first great apostle of pawn power in chess. According to Philidor, pawns determined the structure of thegame;they were in fact the soul of chess, not mere cannon fodder, whose sole task was to make way for the power of the pieces. In this respect his chess teachings paralleled the rise of the masses embodied in the French Revolution of 1789.

France was the dominant chess nation at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, and the next player after Philidorwho couldbe considered an early world champion was the 19th-century French master Louis-Charles Mah de La Bourdonnais. His claim to fame rests primarily on his mammoth series of matches against Alexander McDonnell, contested in London in 1834. This represented the finest corpus of games ever created up to that time and numerous generations of chess devotees learned their basic chess strategies and tactics from these ingenious and well contested battles. Both protagonists appear to have become mentally exhausted by their efforts and died shortly after their epic series.

In the panoply of proto-champions, Howard Staunton, the Victorian polymath, Shakespearean scholar, and assiduous chronicler of the English schools system, is the only English player who could legitimately be considered as world champion. In a series of matches between 1843 and 1846, Staunton defeated the French master Pierre Charles Fournier de Saint-Amant, followed closely by victories against the German master Bernhard Horwitz and Daniel Harrwitz, originally from Poland. Stauntons match against Saint-Amant was the first contest at the highest level that closely resembled the template for modern World Championship competitions. The design of chess pieces in regular use for important competitions, including the2018 Londoncontest between Carlsen and his challenger, Fabiano Caruana, are named the Staunton pattern, after Howard Staunton.

The German master Adolf Anderssen seized the sceptre from Howard Staunton when he decisively defeated the English champion in the very first international tournament in London 1851. Anderssen was one of that select group, which includes Mikhail Botvinnik and Viswanathan Anand, who initially assumed the accolade of supreme chess master from a tournament rather than a match. The London event was in fact put together by Staunton, who thereby created a perfect pretext for losing out to Anderssen in their knockout match, it being notoriously difficult to compete in an event, whilst simultaneously organising it.

Paul Morphy was the American meteor who took the world by storm over thetwo momentous, whirlwind years of 1857 and 1858. His grand tour of Europe culminated in a match victory against Adolf Anderssen, after which Morphy was universally acknowledged as the worlds greatest player. Thereafter Morphy issued a challenge to anyone in the world to take him on at odds (Morphy starting the game with a pawn handicap) but no one accepted. At this point the meteor had burnt itself out and Morphy, tragically, retired from chess, a curious forerunner of Bobby Fischers behaviour following his famous 1972 World Championship victory against Boris Spassky.

Morphy understood the principles of chess better than anyone who came before him. Anderssens tactical brilliance sprang like Athene from the head of Zeus, without necessarily having grown from regular organic pre-conditions. Morphy, on the other hand, constructed his positions along sound strategic and positional lines, before unleashing his devastating arsenal of tactical weaponry.On Morphys retirement, Anderssen resumed the position of world leadership which had belonged so fleetingly to the first great genius of American chess.

Anderssen can claim to be one of the supreme tacticians of all time. Three of his wins are of imperishable beauty. On their own they would justify anyones devotion to chess. They are his Immortal Game against Kieseritsky (played at Simpsons-in-the-Strand, not the tournament) of London, 1851; his Evergreen game against the pseudonymous Dufresne (in reality the German player E. S. Freund) of Berlin 1856, and his majestic sacrificial masterpiece against Zukertort of Breslau,1869.

Anderssen lost a match in 1866 toWilhelm Steinitz, the first player who could definitively be describedas an official World Champion. The previous wielders of the sceptre, Philidor, La Bourdonnais,Staunton, Morphy and Anderssen himself,were all, at the time, acknowledged as the leading chess practitioners of their day, but it is less clear that the title world champion had been universally accepted. Steinitz, on the other hand, insisted on this description and he himself dated his tenure from his 1866 match victory, also in London, against Anderssen. Steinitzs pre-eminence wasconfirmed 20 years later when he demolished Johannes Zukertort in their 1886 match in the US, which was the first to be specifically described as a World Championship contest.

Thus if the 18th century laid the foundations for a world championship, it was the 19th century that grounded the roots. The 20th century maintained thevolcanic procession of greats with thecolossusEmanuel Lasker spanning thefin de sicle. Capablanca, Alekhine, Botvinnik, Karpov, and Kasparov dominated nearly all of this most modern epoch, with Anand bridging the 20th and 21st centuries. In this century, there has been one singleforceirrsistiblein the form of Magnus Carlsen.

From 1946 onwards the prestige of the world title was largely upheld by the world governing body FID and partly by my own organisations, which carried the torch in 1993 (Kasparov v Short) and 2000 (Kasparov v Kramnik).

However, in recent years, primarily during the reign of Carlsen, the length of the championship match has shrunk from its traditional 24 games to a mere 12 (plusrapid play offs).The most recent world championship match, staged in Dubai last year, was run entirely under the auspices of FID, the authority of which is now universally accepted under the Presidency of the Russian Arkady Dvorkovich.

The implication is thatchess at this exalted level is a sport, both mentalandphysical an appropriately termed Mind Sport. As the Championship was in process a wonderful flash of confirmatory news emerged from the media: Magnus Carlsen was nominated, in Norway, to win the Sports Personality of the Year. This Championship had emerged as a realBattle of the Titans. Magnus had now won five world title bouts, twice versus Anand, once each against Karjakin , Caruana and Nepomniachtchi. Two ended with the tie-breaks, at which Magnus excels. On the second such occasion, Magnus praised Fabiano, as being his most difficult opponent.

With victory in Dubai, Magnus had secured his tenure as World Champion until 2023. He would then have held the title for 10 years, thus moving into an equal category of championship longevity with such greats as Capablanca, Petrosian, Karpov , Kramnik and Anand, ahead of the short-lived tenures of Euwe, Smyslov, Tal, Spassky and Fischer. Only Steinitz, Lasker, Alekhine, Botvinnik, and Kasparov held the title for significantly longer periods. In the modern world, where everything has speeded up, could Carlsen go on to outperform all these titans?

The answer we now know to be: no.

In abdicating the title Carlsen has left ambiguity over whether he will return. Had he, with Boris Johnson,mimicked the Terminators popular quip (Hastala vista, Baby), wecould still wonder whether this was just goodbye or, alternatively, see you later. Carlsens farewell, though, seems a touch more final.

This week sfinal gameexemplifies the key ingredients of a Magnus triumph. The game was the decisive win which clinched Magnus World Title defence against the notorious Putin supporter Sergei Karjakin. Just as Karjakin seemed on the point of gaining counterplay, Magnus struck his rival down with a surprise Queen sacrifice.

Unlike Karjakin and Caruana, his two previous counterparts in contesting the crown, Ian Nepomniachtchi has maintained his challengers form into a second successive cycle. He has earned his right to lay down another challenge, but should this prove unsuccessful, we must wonder what transformation would await the world of Caissa if Ding Liren (the runner-up in the qualifying tournament, pictured above) were to prove victorious in the now mandatory ersatz championship against Nepomniachtchi. Could Ding be crowned the first Chinese World Champion in classical chess ?

Raymond Keenes latest book Fifty Shades of Ray: Chess in the year of the Coronavirus, containing some of his best pieces from TheArticle, is now available from Blackwells .

We are the only publication thats committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one thats needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout the pandemic. So please, make a donation.

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Beyond Carlsen: the devaluation of the World Chess Championship - TheArticle

Express News Service

MAHABALIPURAM: In one corner was Alexei Shirov, one of the most aggressive players of the modern era. Sitting opposite him, eyeball-to-eyeball length, was D Gukesh, a player in the middle of a wave. A few weeks ago, he had become one of the youngest ever to breach the 2700 club. If this match was going to be decided on experience, Shirov would win. The Spaniard had become a GM in 1990, 16 years before Gukesh was born.

Even leaving aside the aspect of experience, the Spaniard, who lost to Viswanathan Anand in the final of the World Championship in 2000, was favourite the moment the draw was made on Monday. For, the 50-year-old was playing with white. All chess engines agree that there is always an advantage when you open. So, Gukesh, playing with black for a third time in five games, at some level, would always be reacting.

So, the teenager decided to mix it up a bit. He decided to provoke Shirov from the start. Older heads may have decided to engage him in a slowburner but the kids think differently. He initiated an exchange of queens in the 23rd move knowing it would weaken the Spaniards position if the latter took up that offer. Shirov obliged and Gukesh knew all that provocation from the start had produced the desired results. I had the same (provoking him) from the start, he said after the match.

My strategy was to provoke him. He is a very aggressive player and couldnt resist. Such a calculated strategy is why many people within the game feel that he has one of the highest ceilings among this current batch of wunderkinds. Gukesh, whose live ratings (2714.1) puts him in third place among Indians (after Anand and P Harikrishna), though, is nonplussed about all the attention. I just try to play my game, he said. I am not sure if things are happening too fast. Only time will tell. For now, things are going well. Thats an understatement. He has won all five of his games.

This very clear strategy and the ability to think without worrying about opponents one of the biggest aspects of chess is playing the board and not the player is the strength of the B team that continues to lead the leaderboard in the Open section after five rounds. In relation to this Olympiad, this is the biggest win by an Indian player. Apart from Gukesh, Adhiban B won while Nihal Sarin drew. However, it wasnt all smooth sailing for the team as R Praggnanandhaa lost.

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Gukesh provokes Shirov to engineer huge win - The New Indian Express

Up those stairs, in a decadent auditorium, beneath a painted ceiling, grand masters Miguel Santos and Jose Gascon provided live, Spanish-language commentary. In a room that could easily hold a hundred, perhaps two dozen spectators in gold velvet chairs listened attentively. The players had arrived and quickly began to play in a closed room down the hall.

At this level, a chessboard is a particle accelerator, powerful and productive, spitting out ideas from a violent clash.

The Candidates is a double round-robin; 14 rounds take place over 18 days, each player facing each other with both the white and black pieces.

Nepomniachtchi, the solidly built Russian, was facing Teimour Radjabov, the ruggedly handsome Azerbaijani. Caruana, the sparrow-like American, battled Jan-Krzysztof Duda, the young, clean-cut Pole (no relation to the Polish president). Ding Liren, the greatest player in the history of China, played Richard Rapport, the beguiling and creative Hungarian. And Hikaru Nakamura, the American speed-chess specialist and YouTube personality, played Alireza Firouzja, a baby-faced, 19-year-old French-Iranian prodigy.

Fittingly for this international summit, chess is at home in Spain. The game has undergone dramatic changes in its 1500-year history, some of them instigated here.

One theory holds that the queen, the most powerful piece in the modern game, got those powers in honour of Isabella of Castile. She rises in bronze monuments above Madrid. And 16th-century priest Ruy Lopez de Segura, from the south-western hills of this country, authored an influential treatise on the game, Arte del Juego del Axedrez, expounding on the best opening moves. Centuries later, the Ruy Lopez opening, also known as the Spanish Game, remains a prominent strategy.

Among many games, chess in particular is more effective than any other in many ways, Lopez wrote in 1561. It is a game of science and seems not to be a dishonest pastime.

Arkady Dvorkovich, president of FIDE, at the opening of this years Candidates tournament.Getty

The world chess champion is Magnus Carlsen, 31, of Norway. Hes held the title since 2013, has ranked No. 1 in the world since 2011 and lays a strong claim to being the greatest chess player ever. Hes the closest thing the game has to a celebrity; with strong-jawed good looks, hes modelled alongside Liv Tyler and appeared on a Cosmopolitan magazine sexiest-man list. Its Carlsen, demigod of the modern game, Mozart of chess, who the eight Candidates were striving to dethrone.

But Carlsen is bored. He is, evidently, so lonely at the top of this game that he announced in July he wont bother defending his title. He had said that he would play only if Firouzja, forerunner of the next generation, won the Candidates.

Perhaps it was an old ploy, like a prizefighter refusing to box, holding out for a bigger purse. Perhaps he was tired; the world championship, its format and the preparation it demands are a lengthy grind. Perhaps he was having a laugh. Perhaps he was trying to write history, orchestrating, at worst, a transfer of the mantle to a new wunderkind. Or perhaps Carlsen is truly happy with his achievements, content with life beyond chess.

Whatever the reason, he is not like other chess players. We are miserable, Anish Giri, a top player, told Chess.com, referring to mere mortal grand masters. Carlsen is beyond that.

With the title now vacant, Russian Nepomniachtchi will play Ding of China for the top ranking.

No one but Carlsen knew if Carlsen would play, and that uncertainty hung over the Candidates and its toiling miserables like a noxious fog. In a sense, it was unclear what they were all playing for. What good is winning the Candidates if the champion then simply steps aside, like a matador dodges a bull? By rule, if the reigning champion declines to defend his crown, the first- and second-place Candidates play for the world title.

There are metapolitics governing chess politics. The world championship and the Candidates fall under the auspices of Fide (pronounced fee-day), chesss international governing body. For more than two decades, until 2018, Fide was run by a Russian named Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the former president of the Republic of Kalmykia. Ilyumzhinov is on record saying hes been abducted by aliens and that chess is a gift from extraterrestrial civilisations. He was sanctioned by the US in 2015 and barred from entering the country for his financial support of Bashar al-Assads regime in Syria.

Nowadays, Fide is run by a Russian named Arkady Dvorkovich, a former deputy prime minister who chaired the organising committee for the 2018 FIFA World Cup. About the war, Dvorkovich told Mother Jones magazine, My thoughts are with Ukrainian civilians. He was later quoted in Russian media saying that the main thing is that a solid peace and a more just order will finally be established on our planet, where theres no place for Nazism or the domination of some countries over others, apparently adopting the Putin line that Ukraine needed to be denazified.

When asked by chess24.com, a popular news site, if he was close with the Kremlin regime, he said, I was before 2018, but not after that. I can call, but I dont use it.

Chess has long been a proud Russian national sport, right up there with ice hockey, ballet and novel writing. Soviet players dominated the game in the 20th century, comprising a string of world champions interrupted only briefly by American Bobby Fischer at the height of the Cold War in 1972.

But while one Russian was leading the Candidates, another famous Russian was missing from Madrid. Sergey Karjakin, who challenged Carlsen in 2016, was banned from chess for six months for his public support of Russias invasion into Ukraine. A Fide disciplinary commission found that his statements damage the reputation of the game of chess...The likelihood that these statements will damage the reputation of Sergey Karjakin personally is also considerable. His absence opened a spot for Ding, the Chinese world No. 2.

There will be a Fide presidential election this month. Ukrainian-born Andrey Baryshpolets is running on a ticket with Carlsens coach, Peter Heine Nielsen, a Danish grand master. Baryshpolets circulated a petition arguing that the Russian Federation has been using Fide as a soft power to whiten its reputation. It continues to do so amid its military aggression against Ukraine.

The world championship is slated for early next year. No dates or host city have yet been announced.

Only one woman, Judit Polgar, has ever played in the Candidates, most recently in 2007.Getty

Most spectators at the Candidates never see the players playing chess, at least not in person. So sensitive are the players to distraction, and so demanding of attention is their game, that they play in a sort of quarantine. The venue proved an effective barrier against all rumblings of the world outside; neither the NATO summit nor the war beyond were hot topics. The hallways leading to their sanctum were always closely guarded, and signs lining the corridors ordered silencio.

Nevertheless, devotees streamed into the palace, up the gilded stairway and through stately rooms. The commercial advertising on display spoke to a transformed game from stodgy old pastime to rising e-sport and grist for the content mill.

At a ChessKid booth, staffers were discussing outreach efforts to mommy bloggers. Chessable was hawking its online education service, which includes a $US250 ($358) video course on the intricacies of the Spanish Game. Anna Cramling, a 20-year-old internet personality with grand master parents and 217,000 followers on Twitch, was livestreaming, walking backwards to face her cameraman.

I was extended an invitation into the inner sanctum where the games are played by a Fide official. I was asked to put my phone in a lockbox before passing through a heavy curtain and a glass door. The room was surprisingly small and sparsely populated only the players, me and my Fide minder, and a couple of arbiters from Fide, immaculately suited.

On the arbiters table sat a thick stack of scoresheets, on which the players write down every move played using something called algebraic notation, and a pile of spare chess clocks. Time was ample but strictly controlled. Candidates get two hours for their first 40 moves, an hour for the next 20 and 15 minutes and 30 seconds a move for anything after that.

The room was deathly quiet, only the hum of air-conditioning and the occasional creak of very old floor. (Id already been scolded for taking a work call two floors above the playing room. At some tournaments, players sit in a soundproof glass cage.) And it was incredibly bright; a metal lattice on the ceiling supported many powerful lights. They illuminated the subtly high-tech chessboards and pieces, with electronic sensors embedded inside, which broadcast their positions live to the world.

A large black backdrop had been installed behind the four players tables, covering what appeared to be a bucolic hunting mural. It displayed the tournaments sponsors, most prominently Chess.com, El Pas and Scheinberg Family, the last of which includes the billionaire founders of PokerStars, an online card room.

Chess.com, a news site that also hosts online games, wielded an outsize influence over the proceedings, dominating the press corps, producing broadcasts on site and conducting official post-game interviews. (Many pizzas were delivered to the pressroom one afternoon; while helping myself to a slice I was told, curtly, Thats Chess.coms.)

The players came in a bold palette of dress-shirt hues, blues, purples, pinks. (Only one woman, Judit Polgar, has ever played in the Candidates, most recently in 2007.) They sat in high-back (very high-back) office chairs which were the butt of many jokes at the tournament.

The players arent constrained to their chairs; they can wander around, observe each others games, grab snacks, use the toilet. This wandering happens often, and its not uncommon for neither player to be sitting at a given game. With blazers hung on the backs of the tall chairs, this sometimes gave the impression of a match taking place between two invisible competitors.

In a dim, private side room, suitable for breaks and nervous pacing, a TV displayed the live positions of the games. Players would wander in, becoming illuminated solely by the blue glow of their own chess.

Placards were affixed to each table with players Elo ratings a statistical calculation quantifying a players strength (Caruana = 2783, Nepomniachtchi = 2766) and their national flags, except for Nepomniachtchi, who played under the generic Fide flag. (Its motto: Gens una sumus, we are one people.)

The grand masters moved their pieces with the nimble and elegant motions of a concert pianist. And while they could easily play their games blindfolded, chess positions being like language to them, their eyes darted around the board like a hawks at altitude. Occasionally, they closed their eyes, searching, it seems, for a higher dimension of thought. There is also a near-universal tendency to fiddle with captured pieces.

After a few minutes, my Fide minder left the room, leaving me alone with the Candidates. I stayed for another half-hour, staring at the pieces and the players. Occasionally, they stared back at me. It was an uncomfortably zoological experience.

Worse, as the players got stuck deep into complex middlegames and endgames, clinging to positional edges and pawns like a free-solo climber clings to a ledge, their clocks ticking and tournament lives on the line, it was like watching people being tortured.

Much of the action in the room was inscrutable, though the temptation to engage in pseudo-scientific body-language analysis was strong.

It seemed easy to tell how Caruana was playing. When things were going well, he perched above the board, perfectly still and alert. When they werent, he fidgeted, shifting from perch to perch. This day, Caruana was shifting. Nepomniachtchi, meanwhile, was unflappable, both in chess performance and demeanour. Im just trying to keep my head calm and not let any emotions drive me, hed said before the game. Im just trying to do my job, more or less.

Ding Liren, the greatest player in the history of China, left, faces Russian Ian Nepomniachtchi last year.

The octet of Candidates had been preparing for six months or more. As well as the glory, there is healthy prize money: 48,000 ($71,000) for first place, 36,000 for second, 24,000 for third and 3500 for every half-point scored. They hired coaches and seconds, chesss aides-de-camp who sharpen their strategic lances and make sure arrows are stocked in their tactical quivers. They withdrew to secluded locations with their teams and their laptops, running their engines on high-powered clusters in the cloud.

After this arms race, the Candidates is a war of attrition and, as the tournament wore on, the fatigue became obvious and mistakes more common. Rapport was asked how a previous game had gone. I dont know, he said. I dont really care any more. He was half-joking at most.

The prospect of playing elite chess, a game with far more possible positions than there are atoms in the universe, is daunting at best, especially doing so every day for weeks.

For, how should I say, normal people, its not so easy, said Radjabov after a particularly grinding game. Hed briefly delayed the press conference to check a tricky position from the game on his phone.

The American Caruana had already started showing cracks. After a promising first half in which hed won three games out of seven with no losses, hed dropped two games out of the next three.

In round 11, Caruana and Ding opened in the Spanish Game, working their way through its subspecies, the Morphy Defence, the Closed Ruy Lopez and the Anti-Marshall. (Chess players, like taxonomists, love to name things.) Caruana resigned after more than six hours of play.

Meanwhile, the Russian was running away. After Caruanas loss, Nepomniachtchi had opened a yawning 1.5-point lead over the field with three rounds to go. He quickly consolidated this edge the next day, securing a draw in a famous line in the Spanish Game against Nakamura that lasted about only eight minutes, making for a very short day at the office.

Sergey Karjakin was banned from chess for six months for his public support of Russias invasion into Ukraine.

Nepomniachtchi won the Candidates Tournament with a round to spare; he wouldnt lose a single game. For the first time, as Nepomniachtchi emerged from the sanctum and walked down the hall, the auditorium filled with applause. He smiled and clutched his hands to his chest in thanks. I dont feel anything, Nepomniachtchi said. I feel like Im extremely tired. Its an insanely difficult tournament. He was asked if he had anything to say to Carlsen. He made an obscure reference to chess positions and said nothing else on the matter.

Last year, Nepomniachtchi failed spectacularly in the world championship in Dubai, blundering repeatedly to hand the title to Carlsen for continued caretaking. But he exhibited none of those careless tendencies in Madrid. If Nepomniachtchi were to win the world championship, hed join other great Russians Vasily Smyslov, Boris Spassky and Garry Kasparov who won first world titles on second attempts.

Chess, like every other sport, has been navigating its way through the war in Ukraine. Wimbledon, which was running concurrent with the Candidates, had banned all Russian players. In March, Nepomniachtchi signed an open letter with some other Russian chess notables: We oppose military actions on the territory of Ukraine and call for an early ceasefire and a peaceful solution to the conflict through dialogue and diplomatic negotiations.

Shortly after the Candidates, Karjakin, the banned Russian, doubled down on his pro-war stance, writing on Telegram to shed light on the vicissitudes of Russian chess. He lambasted the anti-Russian views of those, like Nepomniachtchi, who opposed what Karjakin called the special operation. He dismissed the open letter as Nepomniachtchis ticket to western events... Nepomniachtchis victory shouldnt mislead anyone. Russian professional chess has been in decline lately.

Nakamura suspected that world champ Carlsen and his bluster were full of, um, baloney; lets put it that way. He added, Hes done a bit of trolling, as well. In what certainly seemed like an act of trolling, Carlsen turned up in Madrid towards the end of the Candidates. He took on all comers in speed chess on a sweltering afternoon in El Retiro Park. Then he was gone, headed to Las Vegas to play in the World Series of Poker, where he busted out on the first day.

While in Madrid, Carlsen met Dvorkovich, the Fide president, El Pas reported, and agreed to play, if the world championship format was changed. Carlsen has long called for alterations to the championship match, to include faster games alongside the slower, classical ones. That would move the match-ups closer to the modern game as it is played online and lessen players dependence on The Machine and their memorising of its lessons. In response to a report suggesting he might play, Carlsen tweeted: Fake news.

On July 20, on a podcast for his sponsor, Unibet, Carlsen announced, apparently for real this time, that he was out. I am not motivated to play another match, he said. I simply feel that I dont have a lot to gain, I dont particularly like it, and although Im sure a match would be interesting for historical reasons and all of that, I dont have any inclination to play and I will simply not play the match.

Only two previous world champions did not defend their titles: Alexander Alekhine, because he died, and Bobby Fischer, who disappeared from public life.

I watched the final games from the pressroom in a forgotten high corner of the palace. I noticed that an extra chair, the exact high-back model the Candidates had been sitting in, was stashed there. Before I left, I took a seat.

I imagined what it might be like to be a grand master, to manipulate the positions of little wooden statues just so for money and glory, to fire up this particle accelerator in search of new discoveries, to speak an ancient game like a mother tongue. I leaned back and thought it all remarkably comfortable. I closed my eyes.

Financial Times

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Inside the most important chess tournament in the world - The Australian Financial Review

Kids and teens

BARTHOLOMEW COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY, 536 Fifth St., Columbus. Scheduled: First Day of School Ice Cream Party!, 3:30 p.m., Aug. 4; French Storytime, 4 p.m., Aug. 4; American Sign Language chat/practice, 5:30 p.m., Aug. 4, 11, 18, 25 and 1:30 p.m., Aug. 5, 12, 19, 26; Teen Games, 3:30 p.m., Aug. 5; Teen Trivia: Mario Edition, 3:30 p.m., Aug. 8; Storytime, 6 p.m., Aug. 8, 22, 29; Toddler Time, 10 a.m., Aug. 9, 16, 23, 30; Kids Yoga, 10:30 a.m., Aug. 9; Storytime, 11 a.m., Aug. 9, 16, 23, 30; Patio Playdate, 11:30 a.m., Aug. 9, 16, 23, 30; Teen STEAM: Geocaching, 3:30 p.m., Aug. 9; Storytime and Playdate with the Historical Society, 11 a.m., Aug. 10; Watch-It Wednesday, 3:30 p.m., Aug. 10, 17, 24, 31; Library Babies, 10 a.m., Aug. 11, 18, 25; Storytime: Ages 1-5, 1 p.m., Aug. 11, 18, 25; Thursgame: Life-Size Clue, 3:30 p.m., Aug. 11; Teen Pizza Party Society, 3 p.m., Aug. 13; Teen Pro Gamer, 3:30 p.m., Aug. 15; Family STEAM Night, 6 p.m., Aug. 15; Teen STEAM: LEGO Bridge Competition, 4 p.m., Aug. 16; Whatever the Weather Storytime and Playdate, 10 a.m., Aug. 17, 24, 31; Teen One-Shot RPG: Marvel Multiverse, 3:30 p.m., Aug. 18; Teen DIY: Triangles on Canvas, 3:30 p.m., Aug. 19; Zine Workshop, 1 p.m., Aug. 20; Kids Yoga, 3:30 p.m., Aug. 22; Teen Games at Hope, 3 p.m., Aug. 23; Teen STEAM: Natures Notebook, 4 p.m., Aug. 23; Teen Dungeons and Dragons, 4 p.m., Aug. 25; Teen Stuffed Fables, 3:30 p.m., Aug. 26; Origami Workshop, 4 p.m., Aug. 26; Teen DIY: Triangles on Canvas, 2 p.m., Aug. 27; Builders Guild Jr., 3:30 p.m., Aug. 29; Block OClock, 3:30 p.m., Aug. 29; Teen Anime Club, 3:30 p.m., Aug. 29; Teen DIY at Hope: Triangles on Canvas, 3 p.m., Aug. 30; Teen STEAM: Digital Music Production, 4 p.m., Aug. 30.

Music and theater

AN OPRY TRIBUTE MUSIC SHOW, 5:30 p.m., Aug. 19, 20, 26, 27, 12:30 p.m., Aug. 21, Willow Leaves of Hope, 326 Jackson St., Hope. The show includes impersonations of Pasty Cline, Elvis, Johnny Cash, Tammy Wynette, Billy Joel, The Judds, Tanya Tucker, K.T. Oslin & more (Minnie Pearl will be there). Cost is $35 per person (dinner, dessert, & show). Doors open 5:30 p.m., dinner 6 p.m., and show 7 p.m. Sunday-doors open 12:30 p.m., dinner 1 p.m., and show 2 p.m. For reservations, call 812-341-7251

THE GHOST ROSES, 6 to 7 p.m., Aug. 20, Bartholomew County Public Library, 536 Fifth St., Columbus. Join us on the Library Plaza for a concert by The Ghost Roses. Bring your own chairs. This event can also be viewed live at facebook.com/mybcpl.

STELLAR SUMMER NIGHTS, 6 p.m., Aug. 26, Stellar Plaza, downtown North Vernon. Live music, entertainment and more sponsored by North Vernon Main Street. Free and open to the public.

SOUTHERN INDIANA TAIKO, 6 to 7 p.m., Aug. 26, Bartholomew County Public Library, 536 Fifth St., Columbus. Join us on the Library Plaza for a concert by Southern Indiana Taiko. Bring your own chairs. This event can also be viewed live at facebook.com/mybcpl. Rain puts this event in the Red Room.

Educational

FOUNDERS FRIDAYS, 8 to 9 a.m., Fridays through Aug. 29, Lucabe Coffee Co., 310 4th St., Columbus. Each week, one business founder shares the ups and downs of his or her entrepreneurial journey. The free event is held in the meeting room at Lucabe Coffee Co. Coffee will be provided. The event is open to the public. Participants enjoy the opportunity for questions and answers from the areas leading innovators in a relaxed environment.

DINING WITH DIABETES, 1:30 to 3:30 p.m., Aug. 9, 16, 23, 30, Mill Race Center, 900 Lindsey St., Columbus and 6 to 8 p.m., Second Baptist Church, 1325 10th St., Columbus. Do you have diabetes? Want to make the best choices for your health? Adults with type 2 diabetes (or who are at risk) are invited to participate. Family members, caregivers, and support persons, too. A set of four Tuesdays plus a three-month follow-up, are all offered at two different times. Cost is $15 per person or $20 per couple. Registration is available at cvent.me/gnO17V through Aug. 5. Call the Purdue Extension Office-Bartholomew County to receive more information, 812-379-1665, or email Harriet Armstrong at [emailprotected]

Sports, exercise, wellness

BEGINNER PICKLEBALL CLINIC, 5:30 to 7 p.m., Aug. 18, 25, Sept. 1, Richards Elementary tennis courts, Par 3 Drive, Columbus. The three-week clinic for those 18 and older will introduce the fundamentals of the game. Clinic is $45/person. Equipment will be provided. Please wear court shoes & comfortable clothing, bring plenty of water and/or sports drink, sun protection (hat, sun glasses, & sun screen), bug spray, and a camping chair to rest at breaks. Pre-registration required. To register or for more information, visit columbusparksandrec.com or call 812-376-2680.

BLACKWELL PARK STORYWALK, Blackwell Park, 1550 Whitney Court, Columbus. Enjoy some fresh air while strolling the Bartholomew County Public Librarys StoryWalk. Together with the Columbus Parks and Recreation Department, the library is excited to bring you Isabel and Her Colores Go to School by Alexandra Alessandri in August. The StoryWalk is located along the People Trail near the Pollinator Park in Blackwell Park.

LEARN TO PLAY HOCKEY, 4:15 to 5:15 p.m., most Saturdays through Oct. 1, Hamilton Community Center and Ice Arena, 2501 Lincoln Park Dr., Columbus. A noncompetitive environment in which children ages 4 to 10 can learn the basic skills of hockey without distractions that are often associated with an overemphasis on winning. Free equipment is available to use. Cost is $5 per child. Arrive 30 minutes early to get fitted for equipment.

GIRLS HOCKEY, 6 to 7 p.m., Mondays through Oct. 10, Hamilton Community Center and Ice Arena, 2501 Lincoln Park Dr., Columbus. Are you a girl interested in hockey? Come join us for a girls-only hockey class and learn the fundamentals and basic skills of hockey. For ages 7-16. $10 drop in fee.

SWIMMING FOR EXERCISE, Foundation for Youth, 405 Hope Ave., Columbus. Lap swimming, water aerobics and public swim are available. You must preregister for current swim sessions. Information: foundationforyouth.com.

Seasonal

COLUMBUS FARMERS MARKET, 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., Saturdays through Sept. 17, south of Columbus City Hall, 123 Washington St., Columbus. The market averages more than 100 full- and part-time vendors offering a range of plants, made-to-order food, lotions/soaps, coffee, honey, crafts, meats, eggs, baked goods, produce and more! More details can be found at columbusfarmersmarket.org or follow on Facebook for weekly entertainment updates.

JENNINGS COUNTY FARMERS MARKET, 8 a.m.-noon, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays through mid-October, North Vernon City Park, 604 N. State St. More information is available on the Jennings County Farmers Market Facebook page.

Miscellaneous

BARTHOLOMEW COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY, 536 Fifth St., Columbus. Scheduled: Drawing as Seeing, 9:30 a.m., Aug. 4, 11, 18, 25; American Sign Language Chat/Practice, 5:30 p.m., Aug. 4, 11, 18, 25; and 1:30 p.m., Aug. 5, 12, 19, 26; Dementia Friends Information Session, 2 p.m., Aug. 5; Cbus Chess Crew, 2 p.m., Aug. 6, 20; Bartholomew County Writers Group, 6 p.m., Aug. 11; Remembering Hartsville College, 6 p.m., Aug. 11; New Adult Game Night: Stuffed Fables, 5 p.m., Aug. 15; Columbus Viewfinders, 6 p.m., Aug. 15; Zine Workshop, 1 p.m., Aug. 20; Adults Reading YA Book Club: Historical Fiction, 6 p.m., Aug. 22; All Bookd Book Club, 5:30 p.m., Aug. 30; Digital Civics Using Congress.gov, 5:30 p.m., Aug. 31.

BLUE AND WHITE NIGHT, 4 to 9:30 p.m., Aug. 6, Columbus North, 1400 25th St., Columbus. Blue and White Night is the annual athletic kickoff for Columbus North athletics. This years main attraction is the Dog Bowl, where athletes from all sports and seasons will compete in field-day-style events. Come out, cheer on your favorite teams, grab a delicious smoked pork BBQ dinner, enjoy games and prizes, and gear up for the season with official swag!

ELKS LODGE BINGO, 6:30 p.m. Fridays and 12:30 p.m. Sundays, Elks 521 Lodge Bingo Hall, 4664 Ray Boll Blvd., Columbus. Doors open at 5 p.m. on Friday and 11 a.m. on Sunday. The first game is at 6:30 p.m. on Friday and 12:30 p.m. on Sunday. Open to the public. Information: 812-379-4386.

VFW POST 1987 BINGO, 215 N. National Road, Columbus. Mondays and Wednesdays from 5 to 9:30 p.m. (doors open at 5 p.m.), Aug. 13 and the second Saturday of each month from 2 to 6 p.m. (doors open at noon). Open to the public.

AMERICAN LEGION BINGO & KARAOKE, American Legion Post 25, 2515 25th St., Columbus. Bingo is on Tuesdays starting at 6 p.m. Karaoke is on Wednesdays starting at 6 p.m.

COLUMBUS CHESS CLUB, 5 to 9 p.m., Thursdays, Lewellen Chapel, corner of Middle Road and Grissom Street, Columbus. Equipment is furnished. Open to chess players 16 and older. Information: 812-603-3893.

COLUMBUS AREA RAILROAD CLUB OPEN HOUSE, noon to 4 p.m. Aug. 20 and the third Saturday of each month. Trains will be operating layouts in four scales HO, N, O, and On30. The club is located at the Johnson County Park headquarters building adjacent to Camp Atterbury. Information: Greg Harter, 812-350-8636, columbusarearailroadclub.com, or on Facebook at Columbus Area Railroad Club.

AMERICAN SEWING GUILD NEIGHBORHOOD MEETING, 9 to 11:30 a.m., Aug. 6 and the first Saturday of each month, Bartholomew County REMC, 1697 W. Deaver Road, Columbus. Each monthly meeting focuses on learning a new sewing/creative skill or group sewing on a philanthropic project. Sewing enthusiasts of all ages and skills are welcome. Contact Marilyn at [emailprotected] with questions.

GRACES TABLE DRIVE-IN FREE MEAL, 5 p.m., Aug. 14 and the second Sunday of each month, East Columbus United Methodist Church, 2439 Indiana Ave., Columbus. Drive-in free meal as well as music and storytelling. Enter the church parking lot on Indiana Avenue. Tables are available for walk-ups.

Galleries, museums, exhibits

BARTHOLOMEW COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY, 524 Third St., Columbus. The museum is open Tuesday through Thursday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. BCHS hosts two permanent exhibits that share the history and heritage of Bartholomew County. Learn about our county through interactive, hands-on exhibits that include a map table, notable people, county timeline, Then and Now, Did You Know, early industrialists and videos of Reeves steam engines. The historical society also hosts rotating exhibits throughout the year featuring items from their extensive collection. Information: 812-372-3541, bartholomewhistory.org.

GALLERY 506, Columbus Indiana Visitors Center, 506 Fifth St., Columbus. Open Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

YELLOW TRAIL MUSEUM/VISITOR CENTER, west side of Hope Town Square, 644 Main St., Hope. The museum is open on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 1 to 5 p.m. and Saturdays from Noon to 4 p.m. or by appointment. Cruise-ins will be on Friday, Aug. 5 and Sept. 2. The Research Center is open on Monday and Wednesday from 10 a.m. to noon or by appointment. Contact the museum at 812-546-8020. Follow the Facebook page Yellow Trail Museum/Hope Visitors Center for updated information.

ATTERBURY-BAKALAR AIR MUSEUM, located at Columbus Municipal Airport, 4742 Ray Boll Blvd., Columbus, is open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Special tours may be scheduled by calling 812-372-4356. The museum preserves the history of the former Atterbury Army Air Field, later named Bakalar Air Force Base. Free admission. Visit the museum online at atterburybakalarairmuseum.org and on Facebook.

T.C. STEELE STATE HISTORIC SITE, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday, 4220 T.C. Steele Road, Nashville. Staff is offering special indoor tours each with a limited number of people. Tours are included with site admission, but preregistration is recommended by calling 812-988-2785. Information: indianamuseum.org/tcsteele.

TRI-STATE ARTISANS, 422 Washington St., Columbus. Handmade retail gallery of more than 60 local artisans. Unique gifts, fine art, art classes for youth and adults, youth art programs, art parties and home parties. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sundays. Information: tsartisans.com.

JENNINGS COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY AND MUSEUM, 335 Brown St., Vernon. Museum hours are Wednesday through Friday from 11 a.m.-4 p.m. or by appointment. Information: 812-346-8989, jenningscounty.org.

BROWN COUNTY ART GUILD, 48 S. Van Buren St., Nashville. Monday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and noon to 4 p.m. Sundays.

THE REPUBLIC BUILDING GALLERY, 333 Second St., Columbus. The gallery is open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

411 GALLERY, 411 Sixth St., Columbus, noon-4 p.m. Fridays or by appointment. 411 is a community arts gallery and cultural space for exhibitions, events and collaborations with Columbus arts and cultural organizations. Learn more about the current exhibition and artists at artsincolumbus.org/411.

HOOSIER ARTIST GALLERY, 45 S. Jefferson St., Nashville. Hoosier Artist Gallery is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Masks are required. Information: hoosierartist.com.

BROWN COUNTY ART GALLERY, 1 Artist Drive, Nashville. Open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. COVID-19 protocols are in place, with masks required. Information: 812-988-4609, [emailprotected], browncountyartgallery.org.

CHARLENE MARSH STUDIO & GALLERY, 4013 Lanam Ridge Road, Nashville. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Mondays, noon to 5 p.m. Sundays. For more information, please call the studio/gallery at 812-988-4497 or visit charlenemarshstudio.com.

Ongoing

FABULOUS FIRST FRIDAYS WITH MISS POLLY, 12:15 p.m. Aug. 5 and the first Friday of each month. Viewpoint Books, 548 Washington St., Columbus. Information: 812-376-0778.

FOUNDATION FOR YOUTH BOYS & GIRLS CLUB, 405 Hope Ave., Columbus. The Boys & Girls Club is open to children ages 5-18. Information: 812-372-7867.

KIDSCOMMONS, 309 Washington St., Columbus. Ongoing activities are all free with museum admission. Information: 812-378-3046.

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Go! Guide Aug. 4 - The Republic

Chess engine is the unique software which is built into the program shell (e.g. "Fritz", "Arena", "Shredder") thus multiplying the force of the game shell. For example, "Kasparov Chess" is very good and clever shell. The maximum rating which can be set in it is 2600. And the rating of the chess engines reaches 3000-3200. That is why the chess engines are so popular. Where do the chess engines originate from and who makes them? This question is not trivial, vice versa it is quite actual, so it is worth talking about.

The first record of the chess engine was made about 20 years ago. That was just the time when the UCI standard was developed - the universal chess interface, allowing the chess engine to be connected to the graphic interface of the program shell. The engine made to this standard can be easily connected to any chess program. The standard was worked out by Stephan Meyer-Kahlen, German programmer, who was born in 1968 in Dusseldorf. He is also the founder of one of the most famous chess programs - Shredder, which is the 12-times world champion among chess machines. The UCI standard was presented to the world by Rudolf Huber. The standard has great advantages. For example, if the engine does not save the database of the games played (although it is better if this task is performed by the engine), then one can easily manage this database by UCI. As the UCI protocol is absolutely free, it gives it the advantage over the other protocols. It can be used for private purposes and as the open-source as well. This protocol was used by only a few programs until Chessbase Company (producing Fritz) began to support this protocol in 2002. Nowadays, this protocol is used by about 100 chess programs.

The majority of the chess engines are made very thoroughly and published in the net absolutely free of charge. In Russia there are the developers making engines, as well. E.g. SmarThink developed by Sergey Markov, GreKo developed by Vladimir Medvedev, Strelka developed by Yuri Osipov. These engines, as well as many others, can be downloaded from our website. As the number of the chess engines is growing, we chose the best ones, as there is simply no possibility to present all of them here.

Komodo 13.01 Version Windows

Komodo 11 Version Windows 64

Komodo 10 2016 - Developer Mark Lefler. Version for Android, Linux, OSX, Windows ALL.

Houdini - Developer Robert Blow (Belgium). Houdini 6 x64 x32 UCI

Houdini - Developer Robert Blow (Belgium). 5.01 UCI Chess Engines [Full]

Komodo 8 - Champions 2015 - Developer Mark Lefler. Version for Android, Linux, OSX, Windows 7, 8 (32/64).

Houdini 4 PRO - Developer Robert Blow (Belgium). Version 4 PRO.

Houdini 2.0 - Developer Robert Blow (Belgium). Version 2.0. To date, the best engine. And you can Download Houdini 2.0 for a direct link.

Deep Rybka 4 - developer Vas Rajlich. Version 4 (w32)

Stockfish - Developers Tord Romstad, Marco Kostalba Kiiski and Joon. Version 2.11

Critter - Developer Richard Vida. Version 1.1.37

Naum - Developer Alexander Naumov (Canada). Version 4.2

Spark - Version 1.0

WildCat - Developer Igor Korshunov (Belarus). Version 8.0

SmarThink - Developer Sergei Markov (Russia). Version 0.17a

SOS - Designer Rudolf Huber (Germany). Version 11.99

Zchess - Designer Franck Zibi (France). Version 2.22

Gromit - Developers Frank Schneider and Kai Skibbe (Germany). Version 3.0

Ufim - Developer Niaz Hasanov (Russia). Version 8.2

Mustang - Developer Alex Korneichuk (Belarus). Version 4.97

GreKo - Developer Vladimir Medvedev (Russia). Version 8.2 + sour

Kaissa2 - Developer Vladimir Elin (Belarus). Version 1.8a

Adamant - Developer George Varentsov (Russia). Version 1.7

Booot - Developer of Alexei Morozov (Ukraine). Version 5.1.0 + sources

Eeyore - Developer Meidel Anton (Russia). Version 1.52 (32 & 64bit)

Zeus - Developer Vadim Bykov (Russia). Version 1.29

Arics - Developer Vladimir Fadeev (Belarus). Version 0.95a

Anechka - Developer Sergey Nefedov (Russia). Version 0.08

Patriot - Developer Vladimir Elin (Belarus). Version 2006

AlChess - Developer Alex Lobanov (Russia). Version 1.5b

OBender - Designer Evgeny Kornilov (Russia). Version 3.2.4x

Counter - Developer Vadim Chizhov (Russia). Version 1.2

Strelka - Designer Yuri Osipov (Russia). Version 2.0B + sources

Belka - Developers Yuri Osipov, Igor Korshunov (Russia - Belarus). Version 1.8.20

Ifrit - Developer Brenkman Andrew (Russia). Version 4.4 + source

Bison - Developer Ivan Bonkin (Russia). Version 9.11 + sour

Uralochka - Developer Ivan Maklyakov (Russia). Version 1.1b

Marginal - Designer Alexander Turikov (Russia). Version 0.1

Chess - Designer Evgeny Kornilov (Russia). Version 3

Woodpecker - Designer Evgeny Kornilov (Russia). Version 2

Gull - Developer Vadim Demishev (Russia). Version 1.2

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Download free Chess Engines - Komodo 11, Houdini

Unofficial World Computer Chess Championship

Top Chess Engine Championship, formerly known as Thoresen Chess Engines Competition (TCEC or nTCEC), is a computer chess tournament that has been run since 2010. It was organized, directed, and hosted by Martin Thoresen until the end of Season 6; from Season 7 onward it has been organized by Chessdom. It is often regarded as the Unofficial World Computer Chess Championship because of its strong participant line-up and long time-control matches on high-end hardware, giving rise to very high-class chess.[1][2][3] The tournament has attracted nearly all the top engines compared to the World Computer Chess Championship.

After a short break in 2012,[4] TCEC was restarted in early 2013 (as nTCEC)[5] and is currently active (renamed as TCEC in early 2014) with 24/7 live broadcasts of chess matches on its website.

Since season 5, TCEC has been sponsored by Chessdom Arena.[6][7]

The TCEC competition is divided into seasons, where each season happens over a course of a few months, with matches played round-the-clock and broadcast live over the internet. Each season is divided into several tournaments, a Leagues Season, a Cup, a Swiss tournament, and a Fischer Random Chess tournament.

Prior to season 21, there was originally one tournament in each season. This tournament consisted of several qualifying stages and one "superfinal", and the winner of the superfinal is called the "TCEC Grand Champion" until the next season. Prior to season 11, the tournament used a cup format, while starting in Season 11, the tournament used a division system. Starting in season 13, there was also a cup tournament consisting of the top 32 engines in the main tournament, resulting in a 5-round single elimination tournament.[8]

Pondering is set to off. All engines run on mostly the same hardware[9] and use the same opening book, which is set by the organizers and changed in every stage. Large pages are disabled, but access to various endgame tablebases is permitted. Engines are allowed updates between stages; if there is a critical play-limiting bug, they are also allowed to be updated once during the stage. In previous seasons, if an engine crashes 3 times in one event, it is disqualified to avoid distorting the results for the other engines; however starting in TCEC Season 20, an engine is allowed to crash as many times as possible without being disqualified from the current event; however, the engine will still be disqualified from future events unless the crash is fixed.[10] TCEC generates an Elo rating list from the matches played during the tournament. An initial rating is given to any new participant based on its rating in other chess engine rating lists.

There is no definite criterion for entering into the competition, other than inviting the top participants under active development from various rating lists which can run on their Linux platform. Originally, TCEC used Windows instead of Linux. In addition, either XBoard or UCI protocol are required to participate.

Usually chess engines that support multiprocessor mode are preferred (8-cores or higher), and engines in active development are given preference. Since TCEC 12, engines like LCZero which use GPUs for neural processing were supported.

Initially, the list of participants was personally chosen by Thoresen before the start of a season. His stated goal was to include "every major engine that is not a direct clone".[11] In TCEC 13, DeusX was banned due to being a clone of Leela, and in TCEC 20, Houdini, Fire, Rybka (engine in Fritz up to TCEC 16), and Critter were banned due to allegations of plagiarism.

This section needs to be updated. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. (September 2021)

Starting in season 21, each season has been expanded to include the Cup, a Fischer Random Chess tournament, and a Swiss tournament, and thus the original tournament has been renamed to the Leagues Season.[12]

The structure of the TCEC VSOB varies from event to event. Most of them have been in a round-robin format.

However, the latest VSOB event, VSOB 21, has a different format, where each opening gets tested to see how unbalanced the position is, and then assigned to a pair of engines depending on the strength differential between the pair of engines: equal positions were assigned to a pair of engines where one engine was vastly stronger than the other, while heavily unequal positions were assigned to a pair of engines about roughly equal strength.

This section needs to be updated. The reason given is: Houdini has been disqualified since TCEC season 20 and its results in previous seasons have been nullified.. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. (March 2022)

The tables display the results of each TCEC Season that was a multi-stage tournament.

The tables display the results of each TCEC Season that was a league system.

After season 20, each season was expanded to include the Swiss, the Cup, and the FRC tournament, and so the original event is now called the Leagues Season.[13]

TCEC allows viewers to submit chess openings to TCEC, upon which the openings will be played by various engines in a series of exhibition games.

This section needs to be updated. The reason given is: Houdini has been disqualified since TCEC season 20 and its results in previous seasons have been nullified.. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. (March 2022)

This table includes Main/Leagues, Cup, FRC and Swiss results.[15]

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Top Chess Engine Championship - Wikipedia

ProjectResolute has been a chess fan since he was a kid. He now enjoys playing on chess (dot) com and various computer chess programs.

These chess engines are super powerful! You'll love these!

sk

Chess engines are a great tool to have. Whether they are used for analyzing games, accurately converting a large advantage into a win, studying openings, or watching cyber chess warfare, if they are used correctly, they can help any chess player improve.

Any avid chess player can and should download at least one strong chess engine. However, there are thousands of engines out there and not all of them are created equal. Some of them have a fairly good rating on various chess engine rating lists, but they dont function well. Some have various problems such as the inability to set search depth, searches longer than the set time limit, or crashes every now and then.

This can be a pain, although most engines that have these issues are free for anyone to download. To avoid this potential frustration, Ive decided to make a list of the five best free chess engines. These engines all follow the Universal Chess Interface protocol (UCI for short), and can be used in any UCI-compatible chess program.

All of these engines are 100% functional and have quite a few configurations to play with. They are also all extremely strong, although some can be set to play at a more human level, too. Please note that the rating given to these UCI chess engines arent mine, but I get them from a 3rd-party source, which tests hundreds of chess engines and apply a rating to them. The link above will take you to the rating list I used for this article.

Okay, Ive blabbered around long enough! Lets continue to see what some of the best free chess engines are.

Rating3339

Stockfish is the strongest free chess engine. Stockfish 7, the latest version as of this moment of writing, has a rating of 3339. Although computer rating lists and official rating lists dont necessarily match up, it is easy to say that Stockfish 7 is well beyond the skill of any grandmaster. It is also about 40 points above the next best chess engine!

The main co-authors of this engine are Tord Romstad, Marco Costalba, Joona Kiiski, and Gary Linscott. It must be noted that although these four are the main developers, this engine is open-sourced and thus was developed by a whole community of people. It is licensed under GPLv3, which basically means you can share to anybody, sell it as part of a larger project, and change the source code, as long as you either point back to where you got it, or supply the original source code.

The Stockfish project is actually a fork off of a chess engine called Glaurung, which is also open-sourced. People gradually started moving to stockfish, until finally Glaurung was abandoned altogether. It is interesting to note that the Glaurung chess engines rating is 2902, so Stockfish has improved upon its predecessor by 430 rating points.

Stockfish has several interesting configurations; the most noticeable in my opinion is the ability to scale down the skill level, so an average human can beat it. It has 21 different playing levels, and at level 0, although I have to think, I can beat it.

Another configuration that caught my eye is contempt. This setting is to make it play more risky moves. A setting of zero is default and considered neutral, a positive number up to 100 is more aggressive setting, and a setting of below zero up to -100, it will play for a draw.

While Stockfish is undeniably a strong engine, it is not the strongest. There is one engine that is stronger than stockfish according to most rating lists.

Scroll to Continue

Rating3296

Komodo chess engine is actually the strongest chess engine in the world. The reason why it isnt first place in the list is because the latest version isnt free. The most recent version of this engine is Komodo 10.1, which costs $59.96. This version has a current rating of 3379, which is 40 points above its archenemy, Stockfish.

However, with every new version of Komodo that is unveiled, there also becomes a past version available for free. Currently, Komodo 8 is available without charge, and this version has a rating of 3296. The free version is about 40 points below Stockfish 7 and 80 points below Komodo 10.1. So even with Komodo 8, youre going to have a world-class chess engine.

The thing I wish Komodo would have but doesnt is a setting to weaken its play. This is true for all versions. It is a minor inconvenience though because I mostly use UCI chess engines for game analysis, and if I want to, I can still limit its skill by search depth, which when set to one ply, plays quite stupidly.

Komodo 8 does have a configuration to control its aggressiveness, called draw score. The default setting is -7, and if you set it lower, (i.e. -15) it will play more aggressively, and if higher, it will try to play for a draw more often.

So, although the free Komodo chess engine isnt quite as strong as Stockfish 7, I cant think of a reason why one wouldnt want to take time and download the chess engine. In fact, I bought the engine back when it was the latest and the greatest, and although it was a while back, its still among the strongest.

Andscacs Logo

Rating3211

The Andscacs chess engine was first released in September of 2013. Since then, its only grown in strength. Its current release, Andscacs 0.872, has a rating of 3211 according to CCRL and has participated in stage 3 of season 9, where it came in 5th place.

The creator of this chess engine, Daniel Jos Queralt, lives in the country Andorra. Hence the name of the engine, Andscacs, And for his country, scacs for the Catalan word escacs, meaning chess. Daniel got his inspiration for creating this chess engine from a variety of open-source engines such as Stockfish and Gull.

Unfortunately, this chess engine is no longer available for download. That said this article is long overdue for an update, and I will do so very soon.

Rating3208

Fire is another one of the top free chess engines. Originally called Firebird, this chess engine is usually among the top 10 in many rating lists. It's debatable whether Fire or Andscacs is the better engine since they are within 10 points difference in the CCRL rating list.

It originally started out as an open-source project, but later the code became closed. However, there is a fork off of fire 2.2, which has been rename Firenzina, which is still open-sourced. When the Fire chess engine became closed, the code was completely rewritten and doesn't contain any code from the chess engine Ippolit, as the original open-source version did.

Rating3197

The Houdini chess engine is a very popular chess engine even though it is a distant 3rd place on most chess engine rating lists. Houdini 4 is the most recent version and it has a rating of 3255 on CCRL. It is a 3 time champion in the TCEC tournaments, which is considered by many to be the world computer chess championship. Only Komodo holds as many titles.

Rumor has it that Houdini 5 will be released for the final stages of TCEC season 9. Houdini 4 improved upon its predecessor by approximately 50 elo points. Will this Houdini 5 have a rating of around 3300? Were going to have to wait and see. I personally have my doubts, since at the moment Im writing this, Stage 3 of season 9 is already under way, and theres no sign of Houdini 5 as of yet.

Whether or not a new version will ever be released, the free Houdini chess engine is also very strong. With a rating of 3197, Houdini 1.5a is a chess engine that a human will never stand a chance at winning. Whats more is that Houdini has an interesting style of play. Many chess players have remarked that this chess engine has a very romantic style of play, similar to such players like Paul Morphy and Mikhail Tal.

Rybka Chess Logo

Rybka

Rating3024

I know that the Rybka chess engine is fairly outdated. Rybka 4, the last release, has a rating of 3160. This is around 30 points lower than the free version of Houdini! However, the latest release is still available for sale on Amazon & Chessbase. On Amazon, the engine costs about $50 and on Chessbase it costs a whopping $90.75! Even the latest version of Komodos cheaper!

Thankfully, theres a free version too Rybka 2.3.2a which has a relatively minuscule rating of 3024. So, why am I recommending this engine as one that every chess player should have? Because of a configuration that I think is quite handy! You can set the rating at which it works. With a range of 1200 to 2400, the lower one sets this rating the more mistakes they make.

The rating will not match up with a Fide rating though, so dont go into a tournament saying that you have a rating of 1300 because you beat Rybka at that rating. That said, if you win a game at 1200, your rating will likely be higher than this. I have trouble defeating it at this level, and my rating on chess.com is around 1600!

Thus ends my listing of some of the best free chess engines. Although the article is now drawing to a close, I encourage you to check back, since Im planning on adding more engines to this page.

2016 ProjectResolute

Sorrowdy on April 24, 2020:

And where is Raubfisch? According my engine tournaments it is the best engine ever. And it's also free.

noob on March 10, 2020:

It's 2020 and this article makes zero mention of the new Neural Network engines Lc0, Leelenstein, Stoofvlees, all of which are significantly better than every engine above except Stockfish.

Chess Player on February 25, 2018:

Thanks! Good Job for the Source!

Erik on November 26, 2017:

Thanks, good job. Nice would be comparing chess GUIs, too.

Erik

Really? on October 27, 2017:

Check your spelling and grammar. Nothing added here beyond a rating list and some nonsense. You can find actual reviews elsewhere online, and links that aren't "hard to find." A chess "fan," really? Not a player, a fan? lol

ciarli on September 29, 2017:

what about 'demon' engine! I heard that it is prohibited because he can make any move and win again and is insulting Godmaster way of thinking!

Md. Shahinur Islam on August 30, 2017:

Whats the position of Chessmaster & Fritz in terms of ratings??

Reign Tibudan on July 27, 2017:

Thank you, you are so helpful

Kainoa Thomas Henao on May 24, 2017:

Great idea

Hal on April 01, 2017:

Thank you.. 🙂

Thomas on October 23, 2016:

Very nice and competent review of the best chess programs - thanks! I wonder, however, if the new version of Houdini is not even stronger given it's current performance in TCEC Rapid - perhaps 100 -150 Elo points over version 4? Anyway - we'll see in the TCEC Super Final! Best Regards Thomas

Read the original here:

Best Free Chess Engines Every Chess Player Should Download

The most powerful chess engines of all time are all well-known to most chess players. If you are wondering which available engine is the strongest, then look no furtherStockfish is the king of chess engines.

Let's learn more about this mighty engine. Here is what you need to know about Stockfish:

Stockfish is the strongest chess engine available to the public and has been for a considerable amount of time. It is a free open-source engine that is currently developed by an entire community. Stockfish was based on a chess engine created by Tord Romstad in 2004 that was developed further by Marco Costalba in 2008. Joona Kiiski and Gary Linscott are also considered founders.

Stockfish is not only the most powerful available chess engine but is also extremely accessible. It is readily available on many platforms, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, iOS, and Android.

Stockfish's accomplishments are more impressive than those of any other chess engine. It has won eight Top Chess Engine Championships (TCEC) through 2020. Stockfish has also dominated Chess.com's Computer Chess Championship since 2018, winning the first six events and more.

Stockfish had firmly established itself as the strongest chess engine in the world before 2017, which is why the chess world was shaken to its core when it lost a one-sided match to a neural network computer program called AlphaZero. This loss to AlphaZero led to the development of other neural network projects (most notably Leela Chess Zero,Leelenstein, and Alliestein).

Although Stockfish has kept its spot atop the chess engine list, the neural network engines had been getting closer and closer to Stockfish's strength. In September 2020, Stockfish 12 was released, and it was announced that Stockfish had absorbed the Stockfish+NNUE project (NNUE stands for Efficiently Updatable Neural Network). What does this move mean? Well, now the raw power of the traditional brute-force Stockfish has been improved by the evaluation abilities of a neural network enginea mind-boggling combination!

As of October 2020, Stockfish is the highest-rated engine according to the computer chess rating list (CCRL) with a rating of 3514it is the only engine with a rating above 3500. According to the July 2020 Swedish Chess Computer Association (SSDF) rating list, Stockfish 9 is ranked #3, Stockfish 10 is ranked #2, and Stockfish 11 is ranked #1 with a rating of 3558. Taking the top three spots with three different versions is quite impressive.

According to this great video on the strongest chess engines of all time (based on the SSDF rating lists), Stockfish is the strongest engine of all timea sentiment that is widely shared in the chess community.

As mentioned, Stockfish has dominated the TCEC since it started participating. It has won eight TCEC championships and also has six second-place finishesit has placed first or second in every season it has participated since 2013 with only one exception. From 2018-2020 it won seven out of nine TCEC seasons ahead of Komodo, Leela Chess Zero, Shredder, Houdini, and other top-level engines.

Stockfish also won the 2014 TCEC Fischer Random tournament, the TCEC season 10 Rapid tournament, and three TCEC cups (in 2018, 2019, and 2020 respectively).

Chess.com's Computer Chess Championship has also been a common winning ground for Stockfish. It has won eight of the 13 events through 2020 and placed second in four others. Stockfish continues to defeat the neural network engines in most competitions.

The first game example is from the 2018 Stockfish-AlphaZero match. Stockfish wins quickly and easilycan you ask for more than defeating the strongest chess entity that the world has ever seen in a mere 22 moves?Stockfish sacrifices a pawn early in the opening and gains a large advantage after 13. Rd3. After 18. Rh4, all of Stockfish's pieces are active and developed, while all of AlphaZero's pieces are on the back rank (except for the queen):

The sacrifices with 19. Bc4! and 20. Nce4! are powerful and finish the game quickly.

In this second game example, we see Stockfish dispatch another famous chess engine that stood atop the chess engine world for years: Rybka. Stockfish gains a nice advantage out of the opening that it keeps throughout the game. The fireworks start with Stockfish's 28. Bxh6+!

Stockfish keeps up the pressure with an exchange sacrifice on move 31 and dominates the rest of the game after Rybka's 33...Kh7:

In this fantastic video by Chess.com's NM Sam Copeland, Stockfish+NNUE dismantles the neural network engine Stoofvlees:

Stockfish is the engine for analysis on Chess.com. It is very easy to use on this site in several ways. One is to go to Chess.com/analysis and load your PGN or FEN:

Another easy-to-use method of analyzing your games on Chess.com with Stockfish is to select "Analyze" after you complete a game in Live Chess.

Yet another way to analyze your games with Stockfish on Chess.com is with Chess.com's analysis board. Simply go to Live Chess and select the drop-down menu below the Tournaments tab:

After you select this menu, simply press "Analysis Board." Then you can analyze with Stockfish!

The Analysis Board is very easy to use and can help you with any phase of the game. This article explains how to use it.

In this video, Chess.com's IM Danny Rensch explains some of the Stockfish analysis features available on Chess.com:

You now know what Stockfish is, why it is important, how to analyze with Stockfish on Chess.com, and more. Head over to Chess.com/CCC to watch Stockfish and other top engines battling at any time on any day!

Originally posted here:

Stockfish - Chess Engines - Chess.com

ProjectResolute has been a chess fan since he was a kid. He now enjoys playing on chess (dot) com and various computer chess programs.

Discover more about UCI chess engines.

Luiz Hanfilaque via Unsplash

Computers rule and humans drool in the world of chess. Since the moment Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov, the abyss of skill between human and computers has been getting wider. Nowadays, every avid chess enthusiast can download a chess program and watch intense chess battles being played with precision and skill beyond the dreams of even the top grandmasters, and it can easily be done for free (provided you already have a computer and an internet connection).

When I first downloaded a UCI chess engine, I was a bit confused as to how it all worked. I Googled something along the lines of, best free computer chess program, clicked the first thing that caught my eye, and before I knew it, I had a file named Stockfish 5 64 bit.exe that could play at super grandmaster strength. I wanted a challenge, and it seemed that I had one! I excitedly double-clicked the file and, alas, a black window popped up with the three names of the programmers who wrote the marvelous piece of code but nothing else.

What I didnt know was that I had to have separate software to use the chess engine, something called a GUI. GUI is short for graphical user interface, and though it was a little confusing at first, I eventually got Stockfish running and got the worst whipping in my life.

The concept of an interaction between a chess engine and its GUI is really quite easy to understand. Here's an analogy that best explains it: Lets say this UCI chess engine was a car engine. This engine wouldn't do any good without the rest of the car. You need wheels, a place to sit, a steering wheel, brakes, etc., or it would just be a worthless piece of junk. The same goes for the UCI chess engine. The GUI program provides a way for the user to interact with the engine, which does all the work and is always 2030 moves ahead of you.

There are many different GUIs to choose from, some paid and some free. This article focuses on the free ones. Remember that all GUIs have their own pros and cons. I personally use all of the GUIs mentioned here, because I like to use at least a feature or two on each one:

Here's a screenshot of the UCI Chess Engines in Lucas GUI.

The Lucas Chess GUI is a UCI-compatible chess program created by Lucas Monge and others. It is an open-sourced project, and its likely that many different people lent a hand in creating this software.

An outstanding feature of this GUI is the number of chess engines that it comes with. The website says there are over 30 different engines that have a variety of skill levels. This is a huge plus for users who dont want to go through the hassle of installing a chess engine. However, as with almost all GUIs, users can install as many other chess engines into Lucas Chess as they want.

Another big plus is Lucas Chess has training positions preinstalled, including everything from tactical problems to endgames. There are enough puzzles to last you for months, if not years. I am not sure exactly how many puzzles there are, but I know its in the tens of thousands. If thats not enough puzzles, you can also manually set up your own chess puzzles to practice. If you have a tactical chess puzzle book handy, you could easily copy those over as well (although I discovered it can take time).

What I like most about this software is its analysis feature. I can analyze any game I put into Lucas Chess with a chess engine. I put the game into the program, hit analyze, set the time per move I want it to analyze, and it scrolls through each individual move and color codes which ones are excellent, good, neutral, mistake, or just plain bad! I then click on a move the chess engine deemed bad, and I can see the move the chess engine would have played along with the move I played and what it predicted would've happened afterward.

I wish Lucas Chess offered the ability to print out stored games on a scoresheet, so I could have a nice-looking hard copy of all my favorite games. I did find this feature in another program, Chessbase Reader 2013. However, it would save time when playing a game in Lucas Chess to not have to copy and paste the game over to another program.

The program is only available for Windows OS. However, I believe that it's possible to use on Linux by compiling the program yourself if you're a computer whiz. Another option is using WINE, which lets you run Windows applications on Mac and Linux.

Scroll to Continue

Here is Arena chess program's engine menu.

The Lucas Chess GUI program is useful for analyzing games, practicing tactics, and playing against various chess engines. However, the Arena Chess GUI program is my go-to chess software when experimenting with various chess engines, and I do have quite a few.

One thing that I love doing is pitching engine vs engine tournaments, and Arena makes this quite easy to do. All you need to do is select the engine menu and hit tournament, select which engines to use and length of time to think, and hit start. The GUI will handle everything else (scoring, pairing, saving the games played, etc.). Its quite fascinating to watch!

Its worth noting that the Lucas Chess GUI can also handle engine vs. engine tournaments, but it doesnt have nearly as many options as Arena. With Arena, you can set the skill level by search depth, time to think per move, and blitz. With Lucas chess, only blitz is allowed. If you want to pitch engine vs. engine chess battles, Arena is the preferred choice among the free GUIs.

Another thing that I love about the Arena GUI is the ability to see the UCI engines current search depth, nodes (means positions) per second its searching, and much more. If you love computers and chess as much as I do, it can become quite hypnotizing!

Another feature that's worth noting is it's possible to limit an engines playing strength by a certain percentage of the time allowed to calculate. For example, if it has calculated for two minutes on one position, and I set it at 50%, it really would only have calculated for one minute.

This is something I discovered just recently, and the reason Im excited about this is that even at a skill level of one second per move, I still cant ever hope to beat Komodo 10. However, at 1% of a second, this computer chess titan is much more manageable. Although I havent yet beaten him at this setting, it doesnt leave me feeling like a complete moron at the end of a game. That is, as long as I dont think too much about how little time it has to think about a move.

The only con I can think of that applies to the Arena chess GUI is with all its bells and whistles, it can be quite daunting to learn to use. For me, I love figuring out software, but I understand if some people just dont want to take the time. If this sounds like you, scroll down because the next chess software will make you smile!

Chess GUI Arena is available only in the Windows format. However, it should run in the WINE software for Mac and Linux. The program comes with two opening books, a game database, several engines, and Gaviota 3-man endgame tablebase.

Here is a picture of the Tarrasch Chess Program.

The Tarrasch chess GUI is named after a great chess legend, Siegbert Tarrasch, who lived in the 1800s/1900s. Many of the great chess players of the time criticized his ideas, and he was greatly underappreciated by the chess world. Thus, the developer decided to name this chess software after him as a commemoration to him and to rebalance this injustice.

As I hinted at earlier, the main benefit of this chess program is its simplicity. The Tarrasch chess GUI is very intuitive by design. For example, there are two options to move the pieces with the mouse:

This feature isnt the only thing I like about this chess software. I read a lot of chess ebooks, and Tarrasch is the perfect assistant. Not only can I quickly set up a chess position from the chess book on the GUI, but I can also copy and paste a string of moves from the ebook into the GUI if the moves are written in algebraic notation.

If there are no moves entered into the game yet, the Tarrasch chess program will automatically assume the moves are the moves of the game. However, if there are moves already in the moves box, the text pasted will be as a comment, and one has to promote a comment to variation via the edit menu.

Currently, two versions of the Tarrasch Gui are available for download. Unfortunately, it's only available for Windows OS.

Here's the tree window in SCID vs PC (note the opening statistics!).

Theres no denying that SCID vs. PC is a very powerful piece of software. If I spend a bit of time experimenting with it, the GUI could very well replace Arena. The reason why I dont use it very often is that to me its more confusing than any of the other UCI-compatible chess programs I've tried.

That said, it doesn't stop me from using the program to go through large pgn databases of say, 1000+ games. This is really what the developers were focusing on when creating this program. Its primary function is as a database manager, and its evident through the following features:

The options and features mentioned here are by no means exhaustive; I've only just begun to scratch the surface. If anyone has a lot of games they would like to analyze and sort through, this is probably the best choice of free chess software.

As far as playing against a chess engine and/or analyzing your games for blunders, this will work, but there are better choices, and Id recommend the Lucas Chess program for that. For pitching chess engine tournaments and whatnot, Arena still has the most configurations, even though SCID vs PC has the capability to do blitz tournaments.

This program has versions available both for Windows and Macintosh (Mac). Linux users can use this program also (click the installation tab for instructions).

The Chessbase Reader is another UCI-Compatible chess program.

The ChessBase Reader 12 is the only chess software GUI that is available for free from ChessBase. The others youre going to have to spend some money to obtain, such as Fritz 15. I personally downloaded the freeware to get some decent printouts of some of my favorite chess games and was quite impressed with the scoresheets it created from my pgn files.

This is by no means the only thing this UCI-compatible chess program can be used for. It can also be used with any of the lessons for sale on its website. I personally cant tell you the quality of the lessons, nor can I tell how well the ChessBase reader displays the lessons primarily because I dont have any lessons from the site.

The free version of ChessBase is only available in Windows, and since it was at one time a commercial program, I'm not sure how well it'll run in WINE.

Now that I have listed the top five UCI-compatible chess programs, which one do I recommend downloading? In all honesty, all of them! They are all free, so why not? They all have their unique pros and cons, and once you learn to use all of them, there really isn't anything you cant do!

There is a lot of other chess software that is available for free, and if anyone can think of one that isn't mentioned on this page and is comparable to the top 5 listed above, please let me know. Here are several:

2016 ProjectResolute

TOTTO210 on December 11, 2017:

ARENA IS THE BEAST!

Read the original here:

Free UCI-Compatible Chess Programs for the Stockfish Engine

Bartholomew County Public Library is the hub for many free events for all ages and interests.

The Republic file photo

Kids and teens

BARTHOLOMEW COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY, 536 Fifth St., Columbus. Scheduled: Library Babies, 10 a.m., June 23, 30; Block OClock, 11 a.m., June 23, 30; Storytime: Ages 1-5, 1 p.m., June 23, 30; Teen Thursgame: Pirate LARP, 3 p.m., June 23; Reading with Lottie, 3:45 p.m., June 23, July 7; Paint Along with Greg Potter, 6 p.m., June 23; Kids Art Studio, 12:30 p.m., June 24, July 1, 8; Teen DIY: Sea Slime, 3 p.m., June 24; Origami Workshop, 4 p.m., June 24; Bermuda Triangle Escape Room, 10 & 11:30 a.m., June 25; Teen Bermuda Triangle Escape Room, 2 p.m., June 25; Mondays at Mill Race Storytime, 10 a.m., June 27; D.I.G. Time, 2 p.m., June 27; Teen Poetry Workshop: Zines!, 3 p.m., June 27; Drama Club, 4 p.m., June 27; Storytime, 6 p.m., June 27; Toddler Time, 10 a.m., June 28; Storytime, 11 a.m., June 28; Patio Playdate, 11:30 a.m., June 28; Teen Pride Month Book Club, 4 p.m., June 28; Game Time, 12:30 p.m., June 29, July 6; Cardio Drumming, 4 p.m., June 29; Watch-It WednesGAY: Heartsopper, 4 p.m., June 29; Teen Thursgame: Happy Little Dinosaurs, 2 p.m., June 30; Teen DIY: Moss Ball Habitats, 3 p.m., July 1; Builders Guild, 4 p.m., July 1; Artistic Tuesday, 12:30 p.m., July 5; Teen STEAM: Gardening, 4 p.m., July 5; Watch-It Wednesday: Jaws, 4 p.m., July 6; French Storytime, 4 p.m., July 7: Thursgame: Casino Nite, 4 p.m., July 7; Table Toppers, 4 p.m., July 8; Stitching is Fun for Everyone, 10 a.m., July 9; Teen Pro Gamer Club, 3 p.m., July 9.

STORYTIME WITH MR. DAVE!, 10 to 10:30 a.m., Thursdays, June 23, 30, Hope Town Square, 635 Harrison St., Hope. Call Mr. Dave at 812-546-5310 for more information.

THE GREAT BRICKISH MAKE-OFF CHALLENGE, through June 25, Bartholomew County Public Library, 536 Fifth St., Columbus. Its time for the Summer 2022 Great Brickish Make-Off Challenge! We invite you to use brick-style blocks to create an original design inspired by this years theme: oceans! You can use your own bricks at home, or you can use Legos provided at the library. Entries will be displayed in the library where they are submitted, and a fan favorite and up to three entries per age group will be chosen to win a new Lego set! Pick up an information sheet and a registration form at the library. Submissions accepted through June 25. Voting period June 27-July 9. Prize winners notified July 15.

STONE BELT ART DISPLAY, all day, to July 31, Bartholomew County Public Library, 536 Fifth St., Columbus. Come and enjoy artwork created by artists at Stone Belt Disability Services by visiting an ocean- and environmental-themed exhibition at BCPL.

Music and theater

STELLAR SUMMER NIGHTS, 6 p.m., June 24 and the fourth Friday of July and August, Stellar Plaza, downtown North Vernon. Live music, entertainment and more sponsored by Main Street North Vernon. Free and open to the public.

Educational

FOUNDERS FRIDAYS, 8 to 9 a.m., Fridays through Aug. 29, Lucabe Coffee Co., 310 4th St., Columbus. Each week, one business founder shares the ups and downs of his or her entrepreneurial journey. The free event is held each Friday (with the exception of July 1) in the meeting room at Lucabe Coffee Co. Coffee will be provided. The event is open to the public. Participants enjoy the opportunity for questions and answers from the areas leading innovators in a relaxed environment.

PRESERVE IT NOW ENJOY IT LATER, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., July 8, Columbus East High School, 230 S. Marr Road, Columbus. Learn the basics of safe home canning: pressure canner & boiling water canner. Lecture/resources with hands-on practice and take home product. Presenters are Purdue Extension Mastering Home Food Preservation Instructors. Cost is $50. Register online by July 5 at cvent.me/kagOyz. For registration questions, contact [emailprotected]

Sports, exercise, wellness

FAMILY FUN RUN/WALK, 6 p.m., June 23, White River Running, 325 Fifth St., Columbus. Choose from a one- or three-mile loop. Summer raffle entry available. More information: flourishcolumbus.com.

AMERICAN RED CROSS BLOOD DRIVE, 1 to 6 p.m., July 5, Bartholomew County Public Library, 536 Fifth St., Columbus. Your blood donation matters. Register at redcrossblood.org.

BLACKWELL PARK STORYWALK, Blackwell Park, 1550 Whitney Court, Columbus. Enjoy some fresh air while strolling the Bartholomew County Public Librarys StoryWalk. Together with the Columbus Parks and Recreation Department, the library is excited to bring you Dont Worry, Little Crab by Chris Haughton in June and Marlo by Christopher Browne in July. The StoryWalk is located along the People Trail near the Pollinator Park in Blackwell Park.

LEARN TO PLAY HOCKEY, 4:15 to 5:15 p.m., most Saturdays through Oct. 1, Hamilton Community Center and Ice Arena, 2501 Lincoln Park Dr., Columbus. A noncompetitive environment in which children ages 4 to 10 can learn the basic skills of hockey without distractions that are often associated with an overemphasis on winning. Free equipment is available to use. Cost is $5 per child. Arrive 30 minutes early to get fitted for equipment.

GIRLS HOCKEY, 6 to 7 p.m., Mondays, through Oct. 10, Hamilton Community Center and Ice Arena, 2501 Lincoln Park Dr., Columbus. Are you a girl interested in hockey? Come join us for a girls-only hockey class and learn the fundamentals and basic skills of hockey. For ages 7-16. $10 drop in fee.

SWIMMING FOR EXERCISE, Foundation for Youth, 405 Hope Ave., Columbus. Lap swimming, water aerobics and public swim are available. You must preregister for current swim sessions. Information: foundationforyouth.com.

Seasonal

COLUMBUS FARMERS MARKET, 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., Saturdays through Sept. 17, south of Columbus City Hall, 123 Washington St., Columbus. The market averages more than 100 full- and part-time vendors offering a range of plants, made-to-order food, lotions/soaps, coffee, honey, crafts, meats, eggs, baked goods, produce and more! More details can be found at columbusfarmersmarket.org or follow on Facebook for weekly entertainment updates.

JENNINGS COUNTY FARMERS MARKET, 8 a.m.-noon, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays through mid-October, North Vernon City Park, 604 N. State St. More information is available on the Jennings Countys Farmers Market Facebook page.

Miscellaneous

BARTHOLOMEW COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY, 536 Fifth St., Columbus. Scheduled: Paint Along with Greg Potter, 6 p.m., June 23; Bermuda Triangle Escape Room, 3:30 p.m., June 25; Adult Craft Night, 6 p.m., June 27; All Bookd Book Club, 5:30 p.m., June 28; Dementia Friends Information Session, 2 p.m., July 1; Cbus Chess Crew, 2 p.m., July 2; Stitching is Fun for Everyone, 10 a.m., July 9.

STATE STREET TACO TOUR, 5 to 8 p.m., June 25, State St., Columbus. Are you ready for cilantro, onion, and your favorite Mexican meat all bundled up in a warm tortilla drizzled with your favorite salsa topped with a fresh juicy lime? Join us this year as we host the third annual Taco Tour on State Street! More details will be added to the Facebook event site so stay tuned for more info at facebook.com/events/332477205448914/.

PANCAKE AND SAUSAGE BREAKFAST, 6 to 11 a.m., July 4, North Vernon Fire Department, 2000 N. Madison Ave., North Vernon. North Vernon/Center Township Fire Department is hosting an annual pancake & sausage breakfast with a free will donation.

ELKS LODGE BINGO, 6:30 p.m. Friday and 12:30 p.m. Sunday, Elks 521 Lodge Bingo Hall, 4664 Ray Boll Blvd., Columbus. Doors open at 5 p.m. on Friday and 11 a.m. on Sunday. The first game is at 6:30 p.m. on Friday and 12:30 p.m. on Sunday. Open to the public. Information: 812-379-4386.

VFW POST 1987 BINGO, 215 N. National Road, Columbus. Monday and Wednesday from 5 to 9:30 p.m. (doors open at 5 p.m.), second Saturday of the month from 2 to 6 p.m. (doors open at noon). Open to the public.

AMERICAN LEGION BINGO & KARAOKE, American Legion Post 25, 2515 25th St., Columbus. Bingo is on Tuesdays starting at 6 p.m. Karaoke is on Wednesdays starting at 6 p.m.

COLUMBUS CHESS CLUB, 5 to 9 p.m., Thursdays, Lewellen Chapel, corner of Middle Road and Grissom Street, Columbus. Equipment is furnished. Open to chess players 16 and older. Information: 812-603-3893.

COLUMBUS AREA RAILROAD CLUB OPEN HOUSE, noon to 4 p.m. July 16 and the third Saturday of each month. Trains will be operating layouts in four scales HO, N, O, and On30. The club is located at the Johnson County Park headquarters building adjacent to Camp Atterbury. Information: Greg Harter, 812-350-8636, columbusarearailroadclub.com, or on Facebook at Columbus Area Railroad Club.

AMERICAN SEWING GUILD NEIGHBORHOOD MEETING, 9 to 11:30 a.m., July 2 and the first Saturday of each month, Bartholomew County REMC, 1697 W. Deaver Road, Columbus. Each monthly meeting focuses on learning a new sewing/creative skill or group sewing on a philanthropic project. Sewing enthusiasts of all ages and skills are welcome. Contact Marilyn at [emailprotected] with questions.

GRACES TABLE DRIVE-IN FREE MEAL, 5 p.m., second Sunday of each month, East Columbus United Methodist Church, 2439 Indiana Ave., Columbus. Drive-in free meal as well as music and storytelling. Enter the church parking lot on Indiana Avenue. Tables are available for walk-ups.

Galleries, museums, exhibits

BARTHOLOMEW COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY, 524 Third St., Columbus. The museum is open Tuesday through Thursday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. BCHS hosts two permanent exhibits that share the history and heritage of Bartholomew County. Learn about our county through interactive, hands-on exhibits that include a map table, notable people, county timeline, Then and Now, Did You Know, early industrialists and videos of Reeves steam engines. The historical society also hosts rotating exhibits throughout the year featuring items from their extensive collection. Information: 812-372-3541, bartholomewhistory.org.

GALLERY 506, Columbus Indiana Visitors Center, 506 Fifth St., Columbus. Open Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

YELLOW TRAIL MUSEUM/VISITOR CENTER, west side of Hope Town Square, 644 Main St., Hope. The museum is open on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 1 to 5 p.m. and Saturdays from Noon to 4 p.m. or by appointment. Cruise-ins will be July 1 and the first Friday of August and September. The Research Center is open on Monday and Wednesday from 10 a.m. to noon or by appointment. Contact the museum at 812-546-8020. Follow the Facebook page Yellow Trail Museum/Hope Visitors Center for updated information.

ATTERBURY-BAKALAR AIR MUSEUM, located at Columbus Municipal Airport, 4742 Ray Boll Blvd., Columbus, is open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Special tours may be scheduled by calling 812-372-4356. The museum preserves the history of the former Atterbury Army Air Field, later named Bakalar Air Force Base. Free admission. Visit the museum online at atterburybakalarairmuseum.org and on Facebook.

T.C. STEELE STATE HISTORIC SITE, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday, 4220 T.C. Steele Road, Nashville. Staff is offering special indoor tours each with a limited number of people. Tours are included with site admission, but preregistration is recommended by calling 812-988-2785. Information: indianamuseum.org/tcsteele.

TRI-STATE ARTISANS, 422 Washington St., Columbus. Handmade retail gallery of more than 60 local artisans. Unique gifts, fine art, art classes for youth and adults, youth art programs, art parties and home parties. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sundays. Information: tsartisans.com.

JENNINGS COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY AND MUSEUM, 335 Brown St., Vernon. Museum hours are Wednesday through Friday from 11 a.m.-4 p.m. or by appointment. Information: 812-346-8989, jenningscounty.org.

BROWN COUNTY ART GUILD, 48 S. Van Buren St., Nashville. Monday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and noon to 4 p.m. Sundays. Featuring Art in the Garden, 5-8 p.m. June 25, a fundraiser benefitting Brown County Art Guild. Enjoy an evening of live music, heavy hors doeuvres, drinks and plein air painting and fine art demonstrations in the gardens of a longtime Brown County resident. Tickets are $100 per person. More information and tickets are available at browncountyartguild.org/product/art-in-the-garden-ticket.

THE REPUBLIC BUILDING GALLERY, 333 Second St., Columbus. The gallery is open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

411 GALLERY, 411 Sixth St., Columbus. 411 is a community arts gallery and cultural space for exhibitions, events and collaborations with Columbus arts and cultural organizations. Learn more about the current exhibition and artists at http://www.artsincolumbus.org/411.

HOOSIER ARTIST GALLERY, 45 S. Jefferson St., Nashville. Hoosier Artist Gallery is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Masks are required. Information: hoosierartist.com.

BROWN COUNTY ART GALLERY, 1 Artist Drive, Nashville. Open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. COVID-19 protocols are in place, with masks required. Information: 812-988-4609, [emailprotected], browncountyartgallery.org.

CHARLENE MARSH STUDIO & GALLERY, 4013 Lanam Ridge Road, Nashville. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday and Monday, noon to 5 p.m. on Sunday. For more information, please call the studio/gallery at 812-988-4497 or visit charlenemarshstudio.com.

Ongoing

FABULOUS FIRST FRIDAYS WITH MISS POLLY, 12:15 p.m. the first Friday of each month. Viewpoint Books, 548 Washington St., Columbus. Information: 812-376-0778.

FOUNDATION FOR YOUTH BOYS & GIRLS CLUB, 405 Hope Ave., Columbus. The Boys & Girls Club is open to children ages 5-18. Information: 812-372-7867.

KIDSCOMMONS, 309 Washington St., Columbus. Ongoing activities are all free with museum admission. Information: 812-378-3046.

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Go! Guide July 23 - The Republic

In 2021, Nikhil Kamath, founder of Zerodha, defeated five-time world champion Vishwanathan Anand in chess with the help of computers (he confessed later on) at a celebrity fundraiser. The controversy sparked discussions around the use of AI in the game of chess.

As India is all set to host the 44th edition of the Chess Olympiad in Mahabalipuram starting on July 28, lets look at how AI has impacted the game of chess.

The earliest mention of technology in chess can be traced back to the 18th century when Austrian empress Maria Theresa commissioned a chess-playing machine. Many players competed against the Mechanical Turk, thinking it was an automated machine. However, it turned out to be a scam. A human hidden inside the machine was operating it.

In the mid-1940s, British mathematician Alan Turing began theorising how a computer could play chess against a human. In 1949, Claude Shannon published a seminal paper describing a potential program to do exactly that. In 1950, Alan Turing created a program capable of playing chess. Soon after, the Dietrich Prinz and Bernstein chess program burst into the scene.

Computer chess appeared for the first time in the 1970s. MicroChess, the first commercial chess program for microcomputers, in 1976; Chess Challenger in 1977; and Sargon, which won the worlds first computer chess tournament for microcomputers, in 1978.

The robotic chess computers came about in the 1980s. Boris Handroid, Novag Robot Adversary and Milton Bradley Grandmaster are some examples. The most popular was Chessmaster 2000, which ruled the chess video and computer games industry for the next two decades.

As chess computers were gaining popularity in the 1980s, Gary Kasparov, the then world chess champion, claimed AI-driven chess engines could not defeat top-level chess grandmasters. However, in 1989 and 1996, Kasparov beat IBMs powerful chess engines, Deep Thought and Deep Blue.

Things started to change in the late 1990s. In 1997, Deep Blue defeated Kasparov. A year later, Kasparov came up with the idea of Cyborg chess or centaur chess, in which human and computer skills are combined to up the level of the game. The first cyborg chess was held in 1998.

In 2017, AlphaZero, a computer program developed by DeepMind, defeated the worlds strongest chess engine Stockfish. AlphaZero used the reinforcement learning technique in which the algorithm mimicked humans learning process to train its neural networks.

In 2018, TalkChess.com released Leela Chess Zero, developed by Gary Linscott (who also developed Stockfish). Without having any chess-specific knowledge, Leela Chess Zero learned the game based on deep reinforcement learning using an open-source implementation of AlphaZero.

In 2019, DeepMind came up with another algorithm based on reinforcement learning called MuZero.

Chess players use AI-driven chess engines to analyse their and competitors games. As a result, AI has helped in improving the quality of games.

Post pandemic a lot of chess competitions were moved online. In the European Online Chess Championship, as many as 80 participants were disqualified for cheating. FIDE, the international chess body, has approved an artificial intelligence-driven behaviour-tracking module for the FIDE Online Arena games. Chess.com, an internet chess server, uses a cheat detection system to assess the probability of a human player matching the moves of a chess engine or surpassing the games of some of the greatest chess players with the help of a statistical model. DeepMind is also working to develop a new cheat detection software.

AI has also brought down the cost and effort of training and helped develop new chess strategies.

AI has indeed changed the dynamics of the game. However, using AI in chess has raised a few issues. Computer chess engines have significantly improved gameplay. However, people have also raised concerns that players of this age depend too much on machine-driven analysis.

Even when it comes to detecting cheating, AI poses a few issues. First, there is a possibility a player might be wrongly red-flagged by AI. For example, a Chess.com player and grandmaster, Akshat Chandra, was banned after a win against Hikaru as his moves supposedly matched Komodo, a strong positional chess engine. Though Chandra has been proved innocent, his reputation took a hit.

Chess engines and deep learning-based neural networks present enormous possibilities. Moreover, the complex nature and the strategic orientation of the game have provided a ground for assessing any progress in the field of artificial intelligence. They (games) are the perfect platform to develop and test ideas for AI algorithms. Its very efficient to use games for AI development, as you can run thousands of experiments in parallel on computers in the cloud and often faster than real-time, and generate as much training data as your systems need to learn from. Conveniently, games also normally have a clear objective or score, so it is easy to measure the progress of the algorithms to see if they are incrementally improving over time, and therefore if the research is going in the right direction, said DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis.

Read more:

Chennai Chess Olympiad and AI - Analytics India Magazine

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Tilting Point and Polygon Studios announced a multi-year partnership on Web3 games. Tilting Point will publish its games it has 10 games in the works using the Polygon Network to integrate Web3 features.

Out of the 10 games that grow from the partnership, three are existing titles. These include Astrokings, from Tilting Points recently acquired developer AN Games, The Walking Dead: Casino Slots, and Chess Universe.

Polygons Ryan Wyatt said in a statement, Tilting Point is set to bring a new level of quality to Web3 gaming, accumulated from a decade of building and publishing mobile games. This partnership will help solidify Web3s place in the gaming industry, and were excited to start developing games that champion user ownership and immersive gameplay.

According to Tilting Point CEO Samir Agili, the partnership will make Tilting Point the ideal developer for both native Web3 developers and those looking to bridge their games from Web2. As he told GamesBeat in an interview, Tilting Points strength has been in having fantastic developers over the years, working with some of the best independent developers on the market, bringing fantastic, big IPs Spongebob, Walking Dead, Star Trek to existing engines and making them better.

In addition to Polygon, Tilting Point also partnered with Stardust, a platform that helps developers integrate NFTs into their titles. It announced this partnership earlier this year.

GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it. Learn more about membership.

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Tilting Point partners with Polygon on Web3 games - VentureBeat

A chess engine usually analyzes thousands of outcomes before making an efficient move. Since the hardware and programming techniques are getting better year by year, chess engines are becoming more intelligent. Modern engines are more selective and have a better positional understanding.

If you construct a complete tree of all possible moves in a chessboard, you will get a total of 10120 moves. Thats an extremely large number.

To put this into perspective, there have been only 1026nanosecondssince the Big Bang and estimated1075atoms in the entire universe. These numbers are dwarfed by the number of possible moves in chess, making it one of the most complex board games.

There are literally hundreds of rating lists that measure the relative strength of chess engines, based on how many moves they make per minute. In addition to ranking chess engines from best to worst, these lists also provide margins of errors on the given ratings.

Among these rating lists, the most famous are CCRL (Computer Chess Rating Lists) and CEGT (Chess Engines Grand Tournament). Keeping both these ratings in mind, we are presenting the most advanced Chess Engines that demonstrate the machines domination over humanity.

CCRL Rating: 3229CEGT Rating: 3094

Hannibal is a Universal Chess Interface (UCI) engine that incorporates ideas from earlier engines, Twisted Logic, and LearningLemming. It uses the alpha-beta technique with many other chess specific heuristics and relies on a selective search method.

Besides incredible endgame knowledge, the engine has a good understanding of material imbalances.It also understands the fortresses and trapped pieces and can sacrifice material for the initiative on king attacks.

Furthermore, Hannibals time management is tuned for the Fischer time controls.

CCRL Rating: 3232CEGT Rating: 3098

Critter is the UCI chess engine available for Windows, Mac, Android, and Linux. You can use it for private purposes only. It was initially written in Delphi but later converted to C++ using Bitboard technology. This was done to enhance its performance on 64-bit processors.

This chess engine features null move pruning, forward pruning, principal variation search, parallel search with up to 8 threads, and blockage detection in the endgames.

CCRL Rating: 3533

SugaR engine is derived from Stockfish and supports up to 128 cores. Like other popular engines such as Stockfish, SugaR is not a complete chess program. It requires compatible GUI, such as XBoard with Arena, PolyGlot, Shredder, Sigma Chess, and Chess Partner.

Since the engine is distributed under the General Public License, you are allowed to modify and sell it.

CCRL Rating:3506

asmFish is a Stockfish engine port written in x86 assembly language. It usesBMI2 and AVX2 instructions optionally. It is assembled with FASM for Linux and Windows platforms.

asmFish is built with some structural optimization techniques, such as the elimination of piece lists. Critical functions dont conform to the x86 ABI, concerning the usage of register and calling convention. However, less time-critical functions were ported through GCC assembly output.

Nevertheless, the engine is NUMA (non-uniform memory access) aware and supports parallel search and large pages.

CCRL Rating: 3241CEGT Rating: 3123

Chiron is the commercial chess engine that supports both Universal Chess Interface and Chess Engine Communication Protocol, as well as several endgame tablebase and bitbase formats.

It applies a parallel search on multiprocessor architectures and implements pawn blockage detection that not only detects blockages in pawn endgame but also identifies other pieces on the board.

The latest version has been tuned deeply, especially in the context of passing pawns and mobility. Several advanced search enhancements have also been introduced, such asLazy symmetric multiprocessing, forward pruning, and NUMA awareness

CCRL Rating: 3253CEGT Rating: 3122

Equinox is a symmetric multiprocessing chess engine primarily developed by Giancarlo Delli Colli. It is inspired by popular open-source engines like Stockfish, Crafty, and Ippolit.

Equinox is active in several private engine tournaments, including Italian Open Chess Software Cups and Thoresen Chess Engine Competition.

CCRL Rating: 3261CEGT Rating: 3183

GullChess is an open-source chess engine that applies magic bitboards to determine sliding piece attacks. It is mostly written in the C++ programming language and contains only one source file.

Gull Engine features generic function templates in recursive search routines, as well as several other functions for move generation (excluding hash move and side to move).

CCRL Rating: 3284

Schooner uses alpha-beta search, late move reductions (LMR), principle search window (PVS), and single hash entry. It supports a subset of Universal Chess Interface to automatically play games without hogging a lot of resources.

Its performance has been improved significantly in recent years: a simpler evaluation inspired by Xiphos, staged move generation, and tons of testing and tuning are responsible for those improvements.

CCRL Rating: 3324CEGT Rating:3193

Xiphos is an open-source chess engine written in C and distributed under GNU General Public License. Its a UCI compliant engine that utilizes bitboards withERLEFmapping.

Xiphos uses sliding piece attacks, which are evaluated by either PEXT bitboards (for BMI2) or magic bitboards. If you want to try, you can run this engine on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

CCRL Rating: 3324CEGT Rating: 3153

Shredder is a commercial chess engine developed in 1993. It has won more than 20 titles, including World Microcomputer Chess Championship (1996, 2000), World Computer Chess Championship (1999, 2003), World Chess Software Championship (2010), and World Computer Speed Chess Championship (5 times).

Deep Shredder is the multiprocessor version of Shredder. It comes with a graphical user interface, developed by Millennium Chess System, which supports Universal Chess Interface and is compatible with other UCI engines available for Mac OS, Windows, and Linux.

WCCC 2011,Boootvs.Alex Morozov

CCRL Rating: 3326CEGT Rating: 3234

Booot is an open-source chess engine written in Delphi 6. It determines sliding piece attacks with rotated bitboards. It is packed with lazy SMP and a fully redesigned evaluation function.

The engine applies PVS with all basic search enhancements like late move reductions, null move pruning, and internal iterative deepening. The latest version supports multiprocessor architecture and has several assembly variants for 32 and 64 bits.

CCRL Rating: 3337CEGT Rating: 3209

First published in 2014,Andscacssoon evolved into one of the worlds best chess engines. It uses magicbitboardto speed up the attack calculations. It applies a principal variation searchwith a transposition tableinside an iterative framework.

Andscacs features static exchange evaluation and threaded parallel search. And it tries a hash move in quiescence search.

In order to make the engine more powerful and efficient (or minimize the standard deviation of static evaluation), researchers optimized 200 evaluation features with 750,000 positions.

Read: Googles AlphaZero AI Masters Chess and Go Within 24 Hours

CCRL Rating: 3347CEGT Rating:3211

Fizbois a Chess Engine Communication Protocol, first released in 2014. It is based onbitboardand uses population count instruction. For now, the engine is compatible with Windows and requires CPU withpop-countinstruction.

Besides iterative deepening, Fizbo performs parallel searches based on an enhanced PV splitting algorithm. Furthermore, the transposition table with 8-byte entries is used in the quiescence search.

CCRL Rating: 3386CEGT Rating: 3290

Ethereal is an open-source engine developed by Andrew Grant. Its a UCI-compliant chess engine first released in 2016 under the GNU GPL license.

Ethereal is greatly influenced by Stockfish, MadChess, and Crafty. In addition to the conventional alpha-beta framework, it uses various improvements, ranging from reduction and pruning to extension.

CCRL Rating: 3430CEGT Rating: 3319

Fireis a free chess engine that was used to be open source but later became a closedWindows executable, available for new Intel processors. It was initially known as Firebird and later renamed to Fire due to the trademarknamingconflict.

The Fire engine features magicbitboards, Syzygytablebases, configurable hash, andmultiPV. You can configure it with over 70 Universal Chess Interface options, and applySMP parallel search.

CCRL Rating: 3508CEGT Rating:3424

Komodo was derived from an older search engine, Doch, as a major rewrite and a port of Komodo to C++11. Since it relies on evaluation (instead of depth), it has a quite different positional style.

The engine supports up to 64 cores, Syzygy endgame tablebase, and Fischer random chess. Kodomo lets you save the engines analysis of a position so you can check it later and resume analysis. You can also control how the engine makes long-term sacrifices of pawn structure for dynamic play.

Komodo has won three-times Top Chess Engine Championship.

CCRL Rating: 3529CEGT Rating:3444

Houdini is known for its engines positional style, ability to defend strongly, tenacity in hard positions, and escape with a draw.

So far, it has won 3 seasons of Top Chess Engine Championship.

The new version of Houdini comes in 2 variations Standard and Pro. While the previous version supported up to 8 processor cores only, the Pro version supports up to 128 cores and 128 GB of RAM. It is NUMA aware and can utilizeNailmov endgame table bases.

Read: 15 Advanced Artificial Intelligence Projects

CCRL Rating: 3463CEGT Rating: 3467

Inspired by Deepminds research about AlphaZero and AlphaGo Zero, Leela Chess Zero relies on a self-taught neural network to make smart moves. The network learns through deep learning techniques by playing against itself millions of times.

Instead of using conventional AlphaBeta search with handcrafted evaluation function, it utilizes a type of Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) known as puct. To achieve its full potential, you need to run the chess engine on CUDA-supported GPU.

CCRL Rating: 3564CEGT Rating: 3512

Stockfish is an open-source UCI engine available for various desktop and mobile platforms. It is based on another open-source chess engine namedGlaurung.

Read: 8 Best Artificial Intelligence Programming Languages

Written in C++, the engine can utilize up to 512 CPU cores. The maximum size of its transposition table is 1 Terabyte. Beside implementing an alpha-beta search, the engine features aggressive pruning and late move reductions.

Note: Since CCRL and CEGT rating lists change continuously, the ranking can differ from time to time.

Originally posted here:

18 Best Chess Engines of 2021 | Based On Their Ratings ...

According to studies, chess has a total of 10120 possible moves. These are so many moves for the human mind to comprehend. Chess has been around for over 1400 years and continues to improve with the growth of technology and the passage of time.

Today, chess engines are used to analyze the millions of possible outcomes in a bid to come up with the most efficient moves. Chess engines have been around for several decades and they continue to get better with the growth of technology.

The engines are now more selective and have better understanding of different chess positions. In this article, we analyze the top 10 strongest chess engines in 2021.

Before diving into the top 10 list of the strongest chess engines in 2021, it is important to know how these engines are rated. Very many chess engines rating lists are available.

The rating lists are based on the number of moves they can make per minute and their margins of error.

The most famous rating lists include Computer Chess Rating Lists (CCRL) and Chess Engines Grand Tournament (CEGT). We use these rating lists to present to you the best chess engines that have surpassed and dominated humanity.

Xiphose has a CCRL rating of 3324 and CEGT rating of 3193. Distributed under General Public License (GNU), Xiphos is an open-source chess engine written in C. Under the watchful eye of PEXT bitboards or magic bitboards, this chess engine can run on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux operating systems.

Developed in 1993, Shredder is a chess engine with a CCRL rating of 3324 and a CEGT rating of 3153. It has been able to withstand the test of time through its constant success and the ability to get the job done.

Since its inception, this search engine has won over 20 titles which include the World Microcomputer Chess Championship held in 1996 and 200. Shredder has also won double World Computer Chess Championships, a World Chess Software Championship and 5 times World Computer Speed Championships.

Shredder is supported by Mac OS, Windows and Linux operating systems. Its graphical interface is top-notch, which comes as a little surprise considering that it was developed by the legendary Millennium Chess System.

With CCRL rating of 3326 and CEGT rating of 3234, Boot chess engine is one of the strongest in the universe. Written in Delphi 6, this chess engine figures sliding piece attacks with rotated bitboards.

It comes with a lazy SMP and its evaluation function is fully redesigned. To rank amongst the best, this chess engine solves problems such as decreasing late moves, deepening internal iterative and prunes null moves.

It has multiple processors that can support computers with both 32 and 64 bit processors.

Chess Master Vasik Rajlich is responsible for designing this chess engine. From 2007 to 2012, Rybka was a force to reckon. It has single-handedly won many computer chess tournaments and continues to do so up to today.

In the period between 2007 and 2010, this search engine won four consecutive World Computer Chess Championships even though the titles were later stripped for plagiarism.

However, the International Computer Games Association (ICGA) ordered Rajlich to merge with ChessBases late in 2015.

Stockfish has a CCRL rating of 3390. It is an open source UCI chess engine and it is available for free for chess gamers. The software works perfectly for both mobile devices and desktops.

The chess engine has been dominant since 2014 and has won several world computer chess championships between then and now.

Even though it was developed in 2014, this chess engine quickly grew into a force to reckon. Its main stronghold is the ability to speed up the attack calculations and come up with perfect results. It uses the principal variation search with the aid of a transposition table inside an iterative framework.

To make Andscacs more powerful, chess researchers came up with 200 evaluation features that encompassed 750,000 positions.

With a CCRL rating of 3430 and CEGT rating of 3319, Fire is one of the best chess engines currently in the market. At first, Fire was an open source chess engine. However, that quickly changed into a closed Windows and is only available for brand new Intel processors.

When it was first developed, this chess engine was known as Firebird but was later changed to Fire because there was a conflict in the trademark name. Even with all these internal changes, Fire continues to scale new heights and it is definitely one of the best chess engines in 2021.

Developed by Don Dailey and Mark Lefler, Komodo is a chess engine with CCRL rating of 3508 and CEGT rating of 3424. Today, Komodo is a commercial chess engine but its older versions are available for free. Komodo ranks amongst the best because of its ability to find moves in situations where other chess engines struggle. Chess players claim that it sets them up to win.

Houdini has a CCRL rating of 3529 and CEGT rating of 3444. It is famous for its positional style and the ability to build strong defenses. To date, Houdini has won the Top Chess Engine Championship 3 times and continues to scale new heights.

Leela Chess Zero chess engine has a CCRL rating of 3463 and CEGT rating of 3467. It ranks amongst the best because of its ability to rely on self-taught neural networks to make superb chess moves. The chess engine learns from itself by playing against itself as many times as possible.

Coming up with a list of the top 10 strongest chess engines is not easy considering that they continue to evolve with the growth of technology. However, we have managed to come up with the above list after researching and analyzing the chess engines best features as it stands.

Chess engines are beneficial because they can analyze the many possible moves that chess presents and come up with the best options.

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Top 10 Strongest Chess Engines In 2021 - Hercules Chess

Chess engines play a huge role in 21st century chess. Mostly due to their presence we now see 15, 14, 13 and even 12 year old grandmasters, something that was unthinkable just 20 years ago.

Ability to have a precise analysis of any given position changed the way players are preparing for the competition. Here is the list of 10 strongest free chess engines in the world.

Note: the engines were tested on identical 64-bit 4 CPUs machines.

Stockfish is the most powerful, free, open source chess engine in the world. Rated only 20 ELO points below the top commercial chess engine Houdini 4, Stockfish is definitely a great alternative for most chess players.

Stockfish plays better and faster than humans. And its one of the strongest chess engines in the world, appearing near or at the top of most chess engine rating lists.

Official Website

Critter is one of the youngest and strongest chess engines in the world. The first version was created in 2008. Critter does not have a distinct playing style (yet) and relies more on tactics. All I can say, its doing it pretty well.

Official Website

Fire is another awfully strong chess engine, rated almost 300 points higher than the highest rated human chess player. After a multiple updates from the publisher, Fire scores high on many of the top computer rating lists.

Official Website

Gull is a free, fast and very strong open source chess engine.

Official Website

Strelka is a Russian designed chess engine which is now one of the strongest in the world. It is especially good at quick time control chess such as blitz and bullet.

Official Website

Hannibal is a state-of-the-art chess engine with a distinct playing style. Hannibal is a strategic player and relies on its very selective search, good endgame knowledge and an understanding of material imbalances.

Official Website

Protector is yet another very strong chess engine, rated above 3000 ELO.

Official Website

BlackMamba build to imitate strengths of human players (such as piece sacrifices) but not the mistakes.

Official Website

Spike was developed from the scratch but uses many ideas already tested on our two other engines: Cheetah and IceSpell. It has an aggressive playing style and spiking its opponents.

Official Website

Spark is a new chess engine with a unique playing style.

Official Website

What is your favorite chess engine?

If you like this article you may want to check our the following:

Credits:

The ratings used in the article are from CCRL as of March 1, 2014.

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10 Strongest Free Chess Engines [all above 3000 ELO] at ...

The 2021 FIDE World Rapid & Blitz Championshipswill start on December 26. We covered the greatest rapid games ever several weeks ago. What about blitz?

How to watch the 2021 FIDE World Rapid & Blitz Championship live

A great blitz game is often more than a matter of accuracy, but of stunning and unpredictable moves that keep the commentators and viewersand, for the players, their opponentson their toes. But the very best players can also win at blitz with high levels of accurate play. Both types of games, the dramatic and the accurate, can make for historically great blitz games.

From the invention of chess until at least the 1960s and up to even a few years ago, however, "historically great blitz" would have been considered an oxymoron. Now, almost in 2022, blitz chess has grown to be treated as an equally legitimate form of the game as the classical hours-long variety. It certainly has a reputation as friendlier to modern audiences, with our short attention spans and... What was I talking about again?

So, what are the best blitz games ever? There's almost too many to choose from, with literally billions having been played by now. But we tried to pick out 10 fascinating thrill rides.

When Chess.com held our Immortal Games contest in April 2021, this game came out on top, and for good reason. In just 18 moves, Brazil's GM Luis Paulo Supi defeated GM Magnus Carlsen (yes, that Magnus Carlsen) with a stunning sacrifice. It's one of those rare moves that speaks for itself.

Particularly amazing is that what looks like a slow buildup, Supi sacrificing a piece to double on the open a-file, becomes forced checkmate in what feels like an instant.

Don't discount the possibility that Supi had seen this pattern before. If you read our piece above on the best rapid games ever, you saw Kramnik-Anand 2008, which featured a mirror image of the same mating idea.

But if Supi had seen the idea, Carlsen may not have. He was caught totally by surprisejust see his expression in this thumbnail:

Blitz chess was a thing before 1970, but only casually. The Herceg Novi blitz tournament was the first major event of its kind, and would be the only one for nearly two decades. GM Bobby Fischer was at the height of his powers in 1970, and he proved it at Herceg Novi with an absurd 19/22 score,winning the tournament by 4.5 points.

There are several Fischer games from this event to choose from, but his game with Black against GM Viktor Korchnoi was perhaps his best of the event.

Fischer's notes say more than enough about the game. About his tournament performance, Chess Life & Review wrote in July 1970: "The Soviet blitz specialists... all expected that Bobby would absorb some good lessons [but] instead of taking lessons he gave them to his peerless opponents."

A big part of the drama in blitz isn't the moves themselves, but the time available in which to make them. Time is of the absolute essence, but in 1994, GM Viswanathan Anand showed that patience can pay off as well. With five minutes to play an armegeddon game, Anand spent 1:43 on move four.

Try not to tense up as commentators GM Daniel King and GM Maurice Ashley lose patience with Anand's forever-taking in the opening (uploaded here by an account unaffiliated with us).

As the announcers noted, Smirin's move order was unusual. Anand was trying to remember all the intricacies of this move order before committing. Here's the full game:

No one could have known in advance, but the time Vishy took ultimately paid off as he won the game. In his 2019 bookMind Master he reached this conclusion from the game: "It's a lesson that almost runs as a leitmotif through my career: It's not the worst idea to take a two-minute pause and get some clarity."

Once Smirin missed 18...Be4, as he must have when playing 17.Qxb7, and Anand saw it to keep his piece, the game was over. Even without a ton of time, Anand never lost the advantage afterwards, another display of his amazing speed as a younger player in the 90seven if he did take 103 seconds on one move early in the game.

If Magnus ever did play a world championship against GM Ding Lirena significant "if" at this pointhe could not necessarily get away with drawing every classical game, with Ding having already proven he can take Magnus in speed chess even when the stakes are high.

The 2019 Sinquefield Cup went to tiebreaks after and Ding and Carlsen both scored 6.5/11, which Magnus achieved by winning his last two games after nine draws. (In fact, in the main event, 54 of the 66 games were draws, and 10 of the 11 players played three decisive games or fewer. The only exception: GM Ian Nepomniachtchi with six, which he split 3-3.)

Entering the tiebreaker round, Carlsen had won all of his last 10 tiebreaks, going back 12 years. Not only did Ding end that streak, but he did it in style. Chess.com named the second blitz tiebreak game as the eighth-best game of 2019, and that's at any time control.

Titled Tuesday is played 52 times a year, by hundreds of titled players each week, and for 11 rounds every tournament. Naturally, it has produced many great games, but this one played on August 24, 2021 may take the cake for pure wildness. It's one of those games that gets far too complicated for even masters to play perfectly in three minutes. That's why a great blitz game is sometimes about more than accuracy.

Let's let NM James Canty III take it away in our modestly-titled video about the contestThe Craziest Blitz Game Ever Played:

Perhaps the earliest famous examples of GM Hikaru Nakamura's online brilliance were these troll jobs on older engines, played without increment at the Internet Chess Club.

Well, the endings were troll-like, but the opening and middlegames weren't. NM Sam Copeland explains the Rybka game here, so the game for our list is the one vs. Crafty. It was played earlier, in 2007. And, although it's a matter of taste, underpromoting to a bunch of knights and checkmating is probably more amusing than doing the same thing with bishops.

ChessGames.com had the perfect pun for this contest"Horsing Around":

It was also a purer effort than the one against Rybka; no exchange sac trickery this time. Just the closed-position destruction still possible for a top human against a mid-aughts engine. Now, of course, even the best humans would need to get odds to compete with a computer. And in three minutes without increment, it would take some pretty heavy odds.

From a four-player tournament in St. Louis starring the top three U.S. players and GM Garry Kasparov. Nakamura won the overall event, and by 2016 Kasparov was still capable of doing better than 2.5/18 in a high-level blitz tournament, but GM Wesley So's win over Kasparov was the game of the tournament. He didn't need any time to warm up, either, pulling it off in the first round of the tournament.

If you like pins and sacrifices, you won't want to miss it:

It was an instant classic, receiving raves from nearly every publication that covered the event.

Supi won the immortal game contest, so a different game was needed for the best queen sac. GM Shakhriyar Mamedyarov earned it with this effort.

Watch Mamyedyarov pull it off here:

The computer prefers 11.Qe4, but the sac is a legitimate option, obviously scores the most style points, and Black has to give the queen back with 12...Qxc7 to stay competitive. Falling into a mate-in-one at the end isn't necessary either, but the only good move, 17...Kf6, sure doesn't feel like a good move, especially in blitz.

This game features the lowest-rated competitors on the list, but you'll see why it makes it by move 17. It was runner-up to Supi-Carlsen in the Immortal Games contest.

Yes, this game actually happened and is not a puzzle. Somehow Black's 16...a6 traps his entire queenside after White's 17.a5 response. The knight on b8 now has zero squares, with a6, c6, and d7 all occupied and blockaded. Because of that, the rook on a8 can't go anywhere besides a7 and back. And the same pawns blocking the knight also shut in the light-squared bishop. Now that's a bad bishop!

After trading everything else off, White begins trolling his pieces away. Amusingly, this actually blows the advantage, but White is never losing the game despite being down two pieces, and the computer actually needs a few seconds to decide that the position is equal, not losing, for White after 25.Re8+ (a move Smerdon admitted to as being a bit "cheeky"). It's always nice to trick a computer these days, even briefly.

When the dust settles, White's free bishop and rampant kingside pawns checkmate Black just as Black is finally trying to break back out. A silly ending fitting for a silly game.

Uncovered when we wrote and recorded about Nakamura's best moves on Chess.com was this dandy.

Nakamura played GM Hans Niemann 20 times on this date, won all but one, and was above 90% accuracy in nearly every game. Some of us have a hard enough time getting 90% once in 20 times, but you don't need me to tell you that's why Hikaru's Hikaru.

If you want all 10 of our games in a single PGN, here you go:

Not a single game from the World Rapid & Blitz made our list, nor did any Carlsen game. But there's a first time for everything, and maybe the next great blitz game is coming right up.

What other games would you have put on this list? Let us know in the comments!

See more here:

The 10 Greatest Blitz Chess Games Of All Time - Chess.com

Join AI & data leaders at Transform 2021 on July 12th for the AI/ML Automation Technology Summit. Register today.

In what was supposed to be the quietest of weeks, we got some real news. Amazon announced that would open-source its Lumberyard game engine as the Open 3D Engine, overseen by the Linux Foundation and supported by 20 companies. Then Our Machinery announced its lightweight and hackable game engine, The Machinery.

And Nintendo announced it would ship the Nintendo Switch OLED model with a new screen and slightly better audio. It fell short of having rumored features that would be likely part of a still possible Nintendo Switch Pro. Its got a better OLED screen, but it doesnt run 4K graphics even though it will cost $350 when it debuts in October at $50 more than the regular Switch.

During this otherwise slow week, its fun to look at the strategic significance of these chess moves, and how they will impact the competition in game engines and further divide game developers into factions. The console wars affect gamers. But the game engine wars have big consequences for developers.

Above: Nintendos Metroid: Dread is one of the Switchs biggest upcoming games.

Image Credit: Nintendo

Nintendos move represents a small defensive move against Sony and Microsoft, which are selling their new game consoles against the older Switch technology. Yet Nintendos focus on hybrid home and mobile means that it doesnt really directly compete with Sony and Microsoft. This move simply lets Nintendo go after hardcore Switch fans and new Nintendo customers with the combo of the Switch OLED and Metroid: Dread this fall. Its about capturing a bigger piece of the holiday spending pie this fall. Nintendo may still launch a better Switch Pro, but it doesnt have to rush it out amid the semiconductor shortage that is restraining all sales now.

This is at its heart just good marketing and merchandising by Nintendo, whereas the engine developments feel more important. And I have a feeling this could compete well against the Microsoft and Sony consoles that sales bots (and rarely, people) can buy, and the Switch OLED should do well when your other choice for something new is Microsofts new Xbox minifridge.

Sony struck back with a short State of Play event highlighting the unveiling of Moss: Book II, the sequel to the award-winning Moss of 2018 from Polyarc. It took us for a spin with some other new games like Deathloop. And, of course, Microsoft celebrated that because it came from Bethesda, which Microsoft now owns. Every week, these companies just like taking little jabs at each other.

Above: Deadhaus Sonata is an example of a game made with the Open 3D Engine.

Image Credit: Apocalypse Studios

The Machinerys move was a surprise, with an engine focused on programming needs and the preference for a modular and hackable product. It represents another choice in the market beyond Unity and Unreal, and it has a chance t0 gain a foothold.

On the open source engine side, its not surprising that Amazon went this route. The Lumberyard engine wasnt successful in its bid to compete with Unreal and Unity. It had Amazons own game studios as its users, but one of its biggest customers, Roberts Space Industries (the maker of Star Citizen) still hasnt shipped its flagship game. Many interpret the delays as bad news.

Amazons own studios have had a hard time as well, with a number of cancellations over the years, such as a recently canceled game based on The Lord of the Rings and the short-lived Crucible title. Amazon Games is still shipping other titles such as the New World massively multiplayer online game. But with such mixed results, its no surprise that Amazon threw in the towel on a proprietary engine and converted it to open source, where dozens of companies could contribute to making it better.

Insiders said that they believe its main purpose at Amazon was to steer the game industry to use Amazon Web Services, which was easily integrated into Lumberyard. And if we remember this important point, Amazon Games San Diego studio leader John Smedley once said that former CEO Jeff Bezos at Amazon told the game makers that he wanted them to make games with ridiculous computation. I take that to mean that they really cared about Amazon Web Services, and they can still make that a bigger cash cow even if they dont own the engine.

I think that if we look at the competition, it makes sense that open source would eventually become relevant in the engine market, as it has transformed sectors such as the mobile operating system market (iOS vs. Android) and the PC market (Windows and MacOS vs. Linux). Open source always keeps the other commercial vendors honest and offers freedom of choice for those who value it.

Its hard to say if Amazons move will put much pressure on Epic Games and Unity.

For Epic Games, Fortnite has generated huge revenues that dwarf what the company brings in from the Unreal game engine. Thanks to the Epic v. Apple antitrust trial, we know that Epics internal documents show that it made $3.8 billion in revenue from Fortnite in 2019 and just $98 million from Unreal Engine royalties. The fledgling Epic Games Store, started in 2018, was expected to outpace the 25-year-old engine divisions revenue in 2020 by 4-to-1. Where once games were made to be expressions of what the game engine can do, now the engine exists so that the company can generate outsized revenues from hit games like Fortnite.

As an aside, it was interesting to see Denis Dyack, the CEO of Apocalypse Games, as the lead bannerman for Open 3D Engine. Dyack once sued Epic Games while at Silicon Knights in 2007, alleging Epic held back its most-advanced version of its engine from licensees such as as Silicon Knights. Dyack lost the lawsuit, but he became a figure in the game engine wars by backing the Open 3D Engine.

Above: Echo goes up against the Ancient in an Unreal Engine 5 demo.

Image Credit: Epic Games

Yet game engines can be strategic. For one, they can be kingmakers for smaller platforms. The engines programmers do this by porting a game engine so that a game created on it can run on a wide variety of platforms. As I noted back in 2014, Unity got traction early on by convincing platforms to give it money to port its engine so that games created with Unity could run on the designated platforms. The smaller platforms would do this so they could get more games on their platforms and get a cut of that revenue.

This porting capability of game engines is important because it fulfills the mission of the engine, which is just a tool for game makers. It enables developers to offload the hard engineering work of porting their games to many different platforms. And those game developers can simply focus on making their games better, writing it once and having it run on many platforms to maximize revenues. This helped Unity become known as a kingmaker and an enabler, and that did good things for Unitys valuation. It went public last fall and is worth $29 billion.

Epic Games charges a 5% royalty on successful games, while Unity charges a fee for every copy of its engine used by developers. Unitys model gets harder to do with Epics tactic of giving out grants to startups that use its engine (though it does give some money to non-Unreal startups). Both Epic and Unity are expanding the pie of revenues by reaching into new markets, like movies and other entertainment. But Unity makes more money through its Unity Ads platform, which integrates advertising into games, for a fee.

Well see how much adoption the O3DE will get over time, but I see good things coming from increased competition in every part of the game market, including the market for engines and tools. And lets not forget that engines are only so important in the absence of games like Fortnite. Epic Games recently raised $1 billion at a $28 billion valuation.

Why is it worth so much? Well, the engine is pretty important for the companies that want to use technology tools to create the metaverse. And Unreal Engine 5 is coming soon, and that should enable a new generation of games, including new games coming from Epic itself. And so, you see, yet another DeanBeat column comes back around to the notion of themetaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, like in novels such asSnow CrashandReady Player One.

Read more here:

The DeanBeat: The week in the console and game engine wars - VentureBeat

The question of who is the greatest chess player of all time is constantly being asked and debated. For English grandmaster, mathematician and writer Jonathan Speelman, the strongest players of recent times are Bobby Fischer, Anatoly Karpov, Garry Kasparov and Magnus Carlsen, in that order. One can add Viswanathan Anand and Vladimir Kramnik to that list, keep-ing to world champions only.

In the 19th into the 20th centuries, Germanys Emanuel Lasker, Cubas Jose Raul Capablanca and Russias Dr Alexander Alekhine, all world champions, were unmatched. Lasker, for example, held the world championship title for a record 27 years.

Earlier than that, American Paul Morphy was a prodigious talent. He crushed everyone in his path although he was never world champion. His biography, Paul Morphy: The Pride and Sorrow of Chess, reveals that in his short career of about a year and a half, he was the finest natural player of his generation. But he retired early from chess and grew to despise the game. Fischer had written of him: Morphy was perhaps the most accurate chess player who ever lived In a set match Morphy could beat anybody alive today. Grandmaster Reuben Fine put it even more strikingly: Imagine Joe Louis at his prime in a country where his most dangerous opponent was 56 and weighed 150 pounds. Who can begin to conceive of Morphys real strength? All we have left are the splendid games Morphy played.

Speelman may have mentioned Fischer first, primus inter pares, because he attained a FIDE rating of 2785 following his victory over Russias Boris Spassky in 1972. That would be number five on todays ELO rating list. Fischer was 100 points above Spassky when they played for the champion-ship title. Also, the facts speak for themselves. In the Candidates matches of 1971, up to the world championship, the results were as follows:

1. Fischer vs Mark Taimanov6-0

2 .Fischer vs Bent Larsen6-0

3. Fischer vs Tigran Petrosian6 1-2

4. Fischer vs Boris Spassky12-8 .

US grandmaster Yasser Seirawan named his top five chess players as Kasparov, Karpov, Fischer, Carlsen, and Anand in that order.

In my view, Fischer was the best simply because he was a workaholic, working at chess tirelessly. And in Fischers time there were no chess engines or databases, everything accomplished through studious work. To measure or not to measure? Somehow, I believe the arguments are destined to go on.

Follow this link:

Who is the greatest of all time? - Stabroek News

TheMunicipal House,an important Art-Nouveaubuilding in the centre of Prague, was host to a charity simultaneous chess exhibition by the top-rated Czech Grandmaster David Navara against 20 opponents on June 29,raising about 160,700 Czech Korunas (about 6,285 Euros)or 5,57,000 Indian Rupees. A brainchild of Pavel Matocha, organiser of the famous Chess Train event, the simul in support of Covid-19 vaccination drive in the Indian state ofKeralareceived a massive support from the civil society when Prime Minister of the Czech RepublicAndrej Babihimself turned up as one of the participants, in the presence of the ambassador of India to the Czech Republic,Hemant H Kotalwar.

The Municipal House at Prague, next to the Powder Gate, in the centre of Prague | Photo: Wikimedia

Simultaneous display by David Navara in progress | Photo: Prague Chess Society

David Navara making a move against the Prime Minister of Czech Republic, Andrej Babi | Photo: Prague Chess Society

This extraordinary event has a backstory, borne out of a friendship between two chess organisers who visited each others unique events and fell in love with the ambience and local culture, and extending a helping hand to the other at such trying times of the global pandemic.

A former national level player and Olympian, N RAnil Kumar (Correspondence International Master and retired English Professor), travelled to Prague in 2019 and participated in the unique Chess Train event and enjoyed it thoroughly.

Master Class Vol. 12: Viswanathan Anand

This DVD allows you to learn from the example of one of the best players in the history of chess and from the explanations of the authors how to successfully organise your games strategically, consequently how to keep your opponent permanently under press

N R Anil Kumar as a participant at the Chess Train 2019 | Photo: Prague Chess Society

He liked the novel idea of playing chess on wheels, appreciating the uniqueness and the friendly touristic experience among a chess-loving crowd, the event being well crafted by Pavel Matocha with whom he formed a warm friendship.

He also realised the potential of the state of Kerala in conducting such an event on waves around its abundant backwaters, subsequently forming the organisation Orient Chess Moves with a few of his friends to create the unique Chess Houseboat event at the Gods own country, the state of Kerala in India. Joe Parappilly and P Manoj Kumar, two former national level players, and Ajit Kumar Raja and Joju Tharakan, two educationists who are Principal and Director respectively of theSakthan Thamburan college, Thrissur, Kerala were the other founder members of the Orient Chess Moves.

The Orient Chess Moves and Chess Train crowd. Sitting: Johann Linzer (Austria) Karel Glacner (Czech Republic) Norbert Krueger (Germany). Standing: Joju Tharakan, Mrs Jiri & Jiri Navratil (Czech Republic), N.R.Anil Kumar, Ajith Kumar Raja, Joe Parappilly , Walter Anema (Netherlands) and the Matocha family | Photo: Orient Chess Moves

The inaugural Chess Houseboat event was conducted during Jan - Feb 2020, and attracted a moderate crowd. The uniqueness of the event caught the attention of Kerala Governments State Tourism department, which also joined hands with the organisers, thus making it an official event for the state. Pavel Matocha travelled all the way to Kerala with his family to participate in the event, enjoying the hospitality, sights, cuisine and the chess, strengthening his endearment for the land.

The most beautiful chess tournament venue ever the chess houseboat floating at the Vembanad Lake, the backwaters of Kerala | Photo: Orient Chess Moves

Game on at the Houseboat | Photo: Orient Chess Moves

It was not just about the game great cuisine was on offer too | Photo: Orient Chess Moves

...delighting the young and old alike | Photo: Orient Chess Moves

The Kerala Tourism, belonging to the state government, has an interestingly designed logo depicting various attractions of the land

The Chess Houseboat event created a huge visual impact from its inaugural edition, encouraging the organisers to make more ambitious plans for its future, just when the pandemic unfortunately hit the state of Kerala, just as it did with the rest of India.

Anilkumar and Parappilly have also been part of Chess Kerala, a collective of chess lovers in the state who have been conducting events regularly since 2017, a short programme with Nigel Short during December 2019 being one of their major events before the pandemic.

Greatest Hits Vol. 1

Nigel Short takes us on an electrifying journey through a very rich chess career, which saw him beat no less than twelve world champions. His experience in tournaments and matches all over the world Short has visited a total of 89 countries can be seen in the narratives that precede the games which he annotates with humour and instructive insights.

Nigel Short arrives in Kerala | Photo: Chess Kerala

Nigel Short Simul at Cochin, Kerala | Photo: Chess Kerala

Ever since the beginning of 2020, Chess Kerala has been organising various fundraising events to contribute to the Kerala Governments Covid-19 treatment and vaccination drives. Their recent initiative has been theCovid Vaccine Challenge Grand Prix series 2021online event through which they raised Rs.3,46,106, contributing to the KeralaChief Ministers Distress Relief Fund(CMDRF). The initiative was supported by the breadth of Indian chess community.

Anil Kumar and members of Chess Kerala presenting the Chief Minister of the state Pinarayi Vijayan (White Shirt) a contribution of Rs.4,55,000/- (about 5,155 Euro) raised from the online event Checkmate Covid-19 conducted during May 2020. Note the traditional dress worn around the waist by Anil Kumar and the Chief Minister - it is the Kerala special Mundu, denoting simplicity as well as majesticity | Photo: Chess Kerala

Chess Kerala is a vibrant organisation, with consistent chess activities of a charitable bend. A remarkable feature of the organisation is a band of hard-working women, who among themselves conducted the successful Chess Kerala Women Grandprix 2021 during May 2021.

The women team of Chess Kerala, who exclusively organised the Chess Kerala Women Grandprix 2021 | Photo: Chess Kerala

Noting the efforts of his friends from Chess Kerala, Pavel Matocha too decided to engage the chess community of the Czech Republic to help the state of Kerala by organising a charity event in Prague. He roped in the top player of Czech, David Navara to play a Simultaneous Display for 20 boards, with the participation being free of charge but expecting everyone to contribute to the fund, to be in turn sent to the CMDRF.

David Navara with two young participants of the Simul | Photo: Prague Chess Society

The Government of the Czech Republic showed amazing enthusiasm for the event, with the participation of the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic Andrej Babi, former Minister of Healthcare Roman Prymula (a FIDE Master) and Member of the Czech Parliament Patrik Nacher.

Prime Minister of Czech Republic, Andrej Babi | Photo: Prague Chess Society

Member of the Czech Parliament Patrik Nacher | Photo: Prague Chess Society

FIDE Master Roman Prymula, a former Minister of Healthcare | Photo: Prague Chess Society

A short and well-produced video presentation of the event:

Charitativn simultnka pro Indii (charity simultaneous) for India | Video: Aneka Krukov

No doubt, Matochas credentials and standing helps - he is the founder of the Prague Chess Society, organiser of the Chess Train, owner and CEO of the Sach Mat s.r.o. (CheckMate Ltd.) a trading company, and chairman of the Czech Television Council.

Typical mistakes by 1600-1900 players

Some mistakes repeat themselves often in amateur games. With themes such as "Miscalculating Forcing Lines", "Being Too Materialistic" and "King Safety" Nick Pert shows you how to avoid making typical mistakes.

Sometimes, you have to get on the ground and push Pavel Matocha in action during the Chess Train event | Photo: Prague Chess Society

The partner of the event was Motorpal, a.s, the Czech manufacturer of fuel injectors for diesel engines, with a contribution of 50,000 CZK (about 2,000 EUR), their chairman of the board and CEO Radim Valas personally attending the event.

The Municipal House was the grand venue, where a video message from Anilkumar was played at the beginning of the event.

With all the participants and organisers ready for the Simul, N R Anil Kumars video message was played out, conveying the gratitude of Chess Kerala and the people of the state for this hearty charitable gesture all the way from the Czech Republic | Photo: Prague Chess Society

Navara won 18 games and drew 2 (against lawyer Michal Vavra and statistician Libor Nentvich).

Things always start briskly on the chessboard Nacher makes a move on his board, keenly watched by Babi | Photo: Prague Chess Society

Things may even seem to be going your way for a while... | Photo: Prague Chess Society

...but they are bound to get overwhelming, when the opposition is a David Navara Nacher and Babi do not seem to be doing well on the chessboard. But you have to really give it to their involvement! | Photo: Prague Chess Society

Organisation was classy, as these little details reveal | Photo: Prague Chess Society

An enthusiastic and involved support also came from the Ambassador of India to the Czech Republic, Hemant H Kotalwar, who made it a point to attend the simultaneous display, kept in contact with the Chess Kerala troupe back in India during the event, and also tweeted from the venue.

Ambassador of India to the Czech Republic, Hemant H Kotalwar delivers his address, flanked by Matocha and Navara. Note Matochas dress - he is wearing the Indian Sherwani presented to him during his visit to the Chess Houseboat event | Photo: Prague Chess Society

When I contacted Hemant Kotalwar to understand better this warm and noble gesture of a Prime Minister of a country and other luminaries turning up for a charity simul just for one of the numerous states of India, I found someone who enjoys his job. India and Czech have a historically strong friendship over centuries. The subject of Indology (study of Indian languages) and the ancient language of Sanskrit have been faculties of the Charles University of Prague since the 1860s. The famous Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore has a demi-god status in the Czech Republic, with a street (Thkurova) even named after him. His famous work Gitanjali was translated directly to the Czech language from Bengali in the 1930s, and many from Czech went over to India since the 1920s to study at his college at the Shantiniketan. It is obvious from his narrative that such a historical tie between the two nations naturally leads to such hearty gestures as this charity simul.

A sample view of the beautiful Visva Bharati University situated at Shantiniketan, West Bengal India. Founded by Rabindranath Tagore in 1921, it is a much revered institution, where classes are still held in the open under the shade of huge mango trees and students and tutors alike still travel by cycles to keep pollution at bay | Photo: Wikicommons

The Czech connection can also be felt through Indian history, if one remembers names such as Bata and Jawa. The popular brands are so etched in the commercial landscape that an average Indian has all the reasons to believe they are desi brands rather than originating from the Czech Republic. The Bata footwear started manufacturing in 1894 in India, and even got the neighbourhood named as the Bata Nagar. The Jawa motorbikes have a cult following in India to this day, known for their track record for maintenance friendly, enjoying a revival in the recent few years.

The Czech Brand Bata which every Indian thinks of as Indian | Photo: Wikicommons

Kotalwar underlines many such reasons for this warm relationship, and also indicates a personal liking for the cool culture of the Czech republic, where even a Prime Minister - also the fourth richest of the country - easily mingles in public, and turns up for playing in such charity events.

Former chairman of Grandmaster Association Bessel Kok who visited the event to support his friend Matocha, seen here with Hemant Kotalwar and his son Aditya Kotalwar | Photo: Prague Chess Society

Back in Kerala, the event was received with enthusiasm by the media, many of the leading newspapers and TV Channels of Kerala reporting on the event, the uniqueness of the gesture not being lost.

From the Kerala daily Desabhimani on 30th June 2021. The language is Malayalam, based on which the state of Kerala was originally founded

From another Malayalam daily Veekshanam on 30th June 2021, a large report

From The Hindu daily on 30th June 2021

From 24 News, a Malayalam news channel

From Kairali News, a Malayalam news channel

Overwhelmed by the event, I finally probe Matocha on what endeared him so much to Kerala to come up with this hearty and noble gesture. One week in Kerala that I spent last year at the end of January! With my wife and our youngest child we took part in the Chess Houseboat, a wonderful chess and tourist event, organised by my friend N R Anilkumar. After the few days of Chess Houseboat, we became friends with many chess players of Kerala, of this Gods own country, and my conviction is that it is our duty to help our friends!

The Matochas - when a visit to the Gods own country forged a special friendship | Photo: Orient Chess Moves

Matocha typically started playing in his childhood, and turned into an active organiser about two decades ago. He has brought many of the Czech political heavyweights to chess events in the past, and quips when I ask how he convinced such luminaries as the Prime Minister of Czech and other parliamentarians to attend the simul, It is not hard to persuade people who love chess to take part in a chess event!

It is simply impossible to stand in India and not to be overwhelmed by this hearty gesture from a faraway land, which worships Rabindranath Tagore, the Bard of Bengal, that crown jewel of Indian creativity who was the first to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. Tagore wove magic with words, found inspiration in - befitting of this event - the harmonies of the universe, and some of his famous verses from the Gitanjali offer the relevant poignant conclusion:

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet.

The infinite sky is motionless overhead and the restless water is boisterous. On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet with shouts and dances.

Visit link:

A hearty chess gesture from the Czech Republic to the Indian state of Kerala - Chessbase News

In December the worlds biggest military contractor, Lockheed Martin LMT , disclosed plans to acquire Aerojet Rocketdyne AJRD . Aerojet is the second-biggest builder of rocket engines in the U.S., a key player in military and civil-space markets.

Many observers assumed the deal would receive favorable treatment from regulators, because in 2018 Northrop Grumman NOC was permitted to acquire Orbital ATK, Aerojets main competitor in the domestic market for rocket engines.

Orbitals engine business at the time was considerably larger than Aerojets, due mainly to its near-monopoly in the future manufacture of large solid-fuel rocket engines for launch vehicles and nuclear missiles.

It retains that status as part of Northrop Grumman today. In fact, the only opportunity Aerojet has for building large solids in the near future is its role as a supplier to prime contractor Northrop on a replacement of the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile. Northrop secured that contract in 2019.

Aerojet Rocketdyne provides propulsion for the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, which intercepts ... [+] fast-moving ballistic missiles.

I should mention that I have had relationships of one sort or another with every company mentioned in this commentary. As a result, I have a fairly good grasp of the interests at stake, and in particular the reasons why Aerojet is eager to become part of Lockheed Martin.

I believe the government should approve the proposed merger, but with conditions. The principal condition should be an enforceable guarantee that Lockheed will act as a merchant supplier of rocket engines to the marketplace once it acquires Aerojet, rather than being allowed to leverage Aerojets product lines to disadvantage rivals.

The Federal Trade Commission imposed a similar constraint on Northrop when it acquired Orbital, in the form of a consent decree. The condition is necessary so that when Lockheed competes against companies like Boeing BA and Raytheon in the future for missile work, it does not receive an unfair advantage due to its ownership of former Aerojet propulsion products.

Perhaps at this point you are asking why the government should approve the proposed transaction at all. Why go to the trouble of having to enforce compliance with a consent decree or some equivalent mechanism when the government could simply block the merger?

Here, in descending order of importance, are my five reasons why it is in the interests of warfighters and taxpayers to permit Lockheed Martins acquisition of Aerojet Rocketdyne. Collectively, they make a convincing case for the proposed transaction.

Aerojet is a fragile enterprise that wont survive as a stand-alone player in the marketplace. At $2 billion in annual revenues, Aerojet Rocketdyne is no industrial colossus. In fact, annual revenues are roughly equivalent to only 35 hours worth of sales at Walmart WMT . Moreover, the highly energetic systems it markets carry much more risk than the products of other industries. Its fragility is compounded by the companys dependence on a federal marketplace where major military and civil-space programs can be derailed by an election outcome.

For example, the biggest new opportunities Aerojet has to sell its engines are (1) a next-generation interceptor for missile defense; (2) hypersonic weapons for the Army, Air Force and Navy; and (3) the successor to the Minuteman III ICBM. None of these programs has an assured future. All will be subject to political wrangling, and even if they were not, Aerojet must depend on the good will of the prime contractors to stay on board. What if Northrop decides to kick Aerojet off the ICBM team? Aerojets future is by no means certain.

A different merger partner could be more problematic. Aerojets management recognizes the fragility of its business, and the need to be part of a bigger, better-resourced enterprise. One way or another, the company is going to be acquired. But the pool of potential suitors comes down to two types of candidates: other aerospace companies that have their own conflicts, and financial buyers such as private equity.

Given the risks associated with building rocket engines, there wouldnt be many suitors even in aerospace. Boeing might be interested, but is in no position to do acquisitions at the moment. Raytheon might be interested, but its Pratt & Whitney unit sold Rocketdyne in 2013 and its missile business would raise the same competitive issues as Lockheeds. Private equity would seek to reduce risk and hasten returns, hobbling innovation. Lockheed Martin at least has a similar culture and technology focus.

Blocking the merger would confer an unfair advantage on Northrop Grumman. As the Wall Street Journal reported on December 23, the proposed merger is more a case of vertical integration than elimination of the competition. If the FTC nonetheless decides the transaction raises too many competitive concerns, then what does this say about letting Northrop Grumman acquire Orbital three years ago? Orbital was a bigger player and arguably better positioned in the engine business. Blocking Aerojets acquisition while letting Orbitals stand would amount to implementing a double standard in antitrust cases.

The proposed merger is sure to reduce government costs. Aerojet does 33% of its business with Lockheed Martin (43% if you include sales to the Lockheed-Boeing joint venture called United Launch Alliance). The way the relationship currently works, Aerojet includes a profit margin in the price it charges for its engines, and then Lockheed adds its own profit margin when it bills the government for the finished product. Under federal accounting rules, this fee-on-fee arrangement would disappear if Aerojet became part of Lockheed. Additional savings to the government would accrue from rationalizing infrastructure and workforcesa necessary step to justify the price Lockheed is paying for Aerojet (roughly two times 2020 sales).

Lockheed-Aerojet could stimulate competition in civil space. The civil and commercial segments of the space launch business these days sometimes seem like a chess game between dueling billionaires. Elon Musks SpaceX and Jeff Bezos Blue Origin increasingly dominate the board, with lesser players dwarfed by the resources the worlds two richest men dedicate to their space passions. But their ardor might flag in the future. The government and private satellite operators need other players whose involvement doesnt depend on mercurial personalities. Combining Lockheed and Aerojet will likely bolster competition at a time when the launch sector would otherwise be facing a shakeout.

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Five Issues Washington Should Consider In Reviewing A Lockheed-Aerojet Merger - Forbes