A Political Yahoo

Tired of Amazon Yahoos? So am I. The previous Yahoo post, May Amazon Yahoos Crumble (May 2019), wondered,

I have no idea why Amazon keeps pushing this book. [...] I won't be buying it from Amazon. Let's see how long the ads continue.

Every time I look at a book on Amazon, Yahoo follows me for days with ads for that book or for related books. That last episode continued for almost a week. The ads stopped for three weeks then came roaring back when I looked at Linder books for the recent post Chess Historians Discuss Linder. Enough already!

Fortunately, Yahoo served a legitimate -- even interesting -- chess story this month. It's shown in the following screen capture.

2019-06-01: Falklands fallout over chess game held on islands by Argentina (yahoo.com; The Telegraph). The story that starts in that snippet continues,

A decades-long rivalry over the Falkland Islands is playing out in the least likely of forums - the civil world of chess. An ugly row is brewing over a recent decision by the Argentinian Chess Federation (ACF) to host a tournament on the island and list the location as "Puerto Argentino" - the name given to the capital Stanley by Argentine troops when they occupied it for 10 weeks during the war. Staged in a hotel near a memorial of Margaret Thatcher it has prompted an uproar among the English Chess Federation (ECF), which has accused Argentina of a "diplomatic provocation", and ignited lingering tensions around the 1982 conflict.

The photo isn't from the Falkland Islands tournament; it's from the 2018 Berlin Candidates tournament. The story didn't attract many comments, but they were all pro-British, anti-Argentine, like 'Not a smart move'. FIDE quickly issued a statement.

2019-06-03: Statement of the FIDE Presidential Board (fide.com).

FIDE has received a complaint that, between September 2018 and March 2019, two tournaments and a chess match, which took place in Stanley, in the British Overseas Territory of the Falkland Islands, were filed for consideration for FIDE rating by the Argentine Chess Federation. Federations reserve the exclusive right to submit tournaments for rating which take place in their territory. Because this was not done, and no attempt was made to seek permission or even inform the English Chess Federation, under whose purview chess in the Falkland Islands comes, the FIDE Qualification Commission will exclude these tournaments from rating.

The statement ended with a general admonishment.

FIDE urges all federations to refrain from using chess tournaments for political purposes.

It's OK to use chess players for political purposes, but keep away from tournaments.

'Chess in the Movies' Checkpoint

It's time to take a checkpoint on a subject introduced in Chess Obsessed (May 2019). I wrote,

Back to that 'Chess in the Movies' page, I created it sometime around 2005. It might be worthwhile to survey images I've collected since then and, if I have enough examples, add another sub-page on the same topic.

The referenced page is Chess in the Movies, and so far, without any real effort, I found 152 photos to work through. The following composite shows the first eight (ordered according to my internal file naming convention, which is random).

Top row: (info from the text accompanying the photo)

• 1940 The Sea Hawk ['Chess in the Movies' different scene]
• 1958 Fraulein.
• 1963 Il fornaretto di Venezia (aka The Scapegoat)
• 1962. Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color; Episode: The Prince and the Pauper - The Merciful Law of the King

Bottom row:

• 1970 Flap [behind the scenes shot]
• 1972 Rat' mal, wer heut bei uns schlaft... (aka The Swinging Pussycats)
• 1957 The One That Got Away
• 1970 The Passion of Anna (aka En Passion)

Out of the eight photos, six are usable. The first one on the top row, '1940 The Sea Hawk', is a repeat, and the first one on the bottom row, '1970 Flap', is a behind the scenes shot. If the percentages hold up -- which I have no way of knowing -- I have around 110 usable photos. Since a new 'Chess in the Movies' sub-page requires 24 photos, I have enough material for four new pages. That is on top of the three pages I already have.

Another aspect to consider is how I name foreign language films. I currently have both

• La Vérité (The Truth, 1960) and
• Brainwashed (Schachnovelle, 1961)

In the samples above, I have at least three foreign films: French, German, and Italian. Which should be the main title, the English version or the original version?

TCEC Not-so-Rapid Bonus; CCC9 Stage Two

So where was I in reviewing the two ongoing engine-to-engine competitions? To summarize last week's post, More TCEC Bonus Events; CCC9 Starts:-

TCEC: The 'Champions Bonus' ended as expected. The Stockfish version that won S14 finished first, the version that won S13 finished second, and so on. The TCEC is currently running a 'Rapid Bonus' with 14 engines. • CCC: The site is currently running 'CCC9: The Gauntlet Qualification', with 12 engines, including Leela and Stockfish.

Both competitions have advanced enough that I couldn't skip a post this week.

TCEC: The 'Rapid Bonus' is still running with Stockfish and Leela currently tied for first. The event should finish later this week. The TCEC published a blow-by-blow report of season 15 with TCEC15: the 15th Top Chess Engine Championship (chessdom.com). Although the TCEC is the front runner in organizing engine-to-engine competitions, the report struggles with some basic concepts. It doesn't specify which engines run on the two configurations -- CPU & GPU -- and it speaks of ‘Shannon AB’, ‘AB conventional’, 'neural-network', and 'non-Shannon' engines. Insiders understand, outsiders don't.

CCC: The 'Gauntlet Qualification' finished with the results shown in the following chart, where Leela finished ahead of Stockfish by a significant margin. Stockfish lost one game because of a bug handling a tablebase, but it had no impact on the final standing.

The red and green bars to the left of the chart show which engines were seeded into the next stage, the 'Gauntlet Quarterfinals'. According to CCC planning - CCC9 The Gauntlet (docs.google.com), Stockfish and Leela play at every stage. In the quarterfinal they are joined by four qualifying engines from the previous stage (the green bar in the chart) and 'strong finishers from CCC8'. Along with Stockfish and Leela, two engines will qualify into the semifinal, where they will be joined by Komodo and Houdini. Got it? The engine Dark Queen, the last to qualify from the first stage, is worth a note:-

!dq: Dark Queen is a neural network that focuses on using q-learning for its value head, still in its early development stages. It is currently trained completely on lichess games. It uses LC0 binary.

What's q-learning and how does it relate to reinforcement / deep learning? Wikipedia's Q-learning page is a typical Wikipedia science article, where you have to understand the subject to understand the article, so: Pass! (for now).

[For further information from the various stakeholders in the engine-to-engine events, see the tab 'TCEC/CCC Links' at the top of this page. • NB: Leela = LC0 = LCzero]

Chess Historians Discuss Linder

The most recent post in the series on The Sociology of Chess was last month's Books on Soviet Chess History. There I wrote, 'There are 11 titles on the list, of which I have all but three'. The most intriguing of the three was Linder's 'Chess in Old Russia'. I had often encountered his name, but knew little about him.

Of 'Chess in Old Russia', I found little and will keep looking. Isaak [Isaac] Linder died in 2015, and the top pages about him are obituaries: Obituary of Isaak M. Linder (kwabc.org), for example. Also featured prominently are his books on the early World Champions. To date, there have been five translated into English, all listed on Isaak Linder: Books (amazon.com). The introductory material to 'Emanuel Lasker: Second World Chess Champion' explains the circumstances of the book's publication. Here's the start of the 'Foreword' by Andy Soltis, June 2010:-

When he began his My Great Predecessors series in 2003, Garry Kasparov adopted a literary device: After telling the story of a world champion, Kasparov quoted what the champions successors had to say about him. Kasparov said he did this because it "has become customary." Perhaps so. But it became customary only after it was used in Kings of the Chess World (2001) by Dr. Isaak Linder and Vladimir Linder. This book is arguably the finest work of chess history in more than 30 years. One of the Kings chapters has been improved and transformed into the book you are reading.

You may not be familiar with the authors because the Linders, father and son, have been published mainly in Russian and German, and only a fraction of their vast contribution to chess literature has been translated into English. Other chess historians know them for their meticulous approach to the craft. They know Isaak Linder in particular for his personal ties to some of the great figures he's written about. For example, during the memorial service for Vasily Smyslov at the Central Chess Club in Moscow in early 2010 he recalled playing Smyslov in Soviet junior events back in the 1930s. A photo survives of Dr. Linder playing Emanuel Lasker in a 1935 simul in Moscow. And he is probably the only historian to appear in a chess movie.

From the 'Publisher's Note' (Russell Enterprises):-

This book originally appeared in Russian, part of the massive historical tome published in 2001, Korolyi Shakhmatnovo Mira (Kings of the Chess World). By the time we had the pleasure of meeting with Isaak Linder and his son Vladimir in Moscow in March 2008, the original single-volume work of almost one thousand triple-column, small-font, large-format pages had been split into individual books, one for each world champion. We quickly reached an agreement with the Linders to bring out these books in what would become in English The World Chess Champion Series.

The first in the series was about Jose Raul Capablanca, the great Cuban world champion. This book on Lasker is the second in the series. With the permission and encouragement of the authors, we made some changes to the original Russian edition. The original contained a fine selection of Lasker's games. We brought in German grandmaster Karsten Mueller to provide refreshing new notes to these classic games. American grandmaster Andy Soltis, who has himself written about Lasker, contributed a new Foreword. And crosstables of minor matches played by Lasker, not included in the original edition, were also added.

From 'A Word about the Authors', Yuri Averbakh, April 2010:-

At the authors' request, I have edited a few of their recent voluminous works, and I must admit to being bowled over by the breadth of their conceptions! Very few people would be capable of taking such large swaths of chess history and recasting them into such an unusual literary form. How have they been able to put their ideas into concrete form?! Above all, because they have a system for dividing up the work. The elder takes charge of the historical approach, and the analytical duties; the son handles the literary decorations and the statistical basis of their works. As a reader, I can say that the results are a delectation for chess gourmets.

The next books in the series, also introduced by GM Soltis, were on Steinitz, Alekhine, and Euwe (although not in that order). Will there be more? The Amazon reader reviews are not particularly encouraging.

Tabulating the Rabbit Hole

Last week's post, Mapping the Rabbit Hole, ended with an action:-

It's time to wrap up the series on early 19th century chess periodicals. It began with '2019-02-14: Down the Rabbit Hole • Google Books' [...] The next step, which shouldn't take much time, will be to catalog the various periodicals by year.

The following chart shows periodicals published by country and by year.

Creating that chart didn't take much time, but interpreting it is another matter. I count 25 intersections of year and country with more than a single periodical. Looking into those will take time. For starters, here are two intersections with more than two periodicals:-

1861 - UK: 3
1868 - FR: 5

The first is 'The Chess Player's Chronicle' (1861); the second is 'Le Philidorien' (1868). A quick look at the Google scans established that these are indeed duplicate copies, but I couldn't decide which versions should be used in the future.

Embedded Chess Puzzles

A few days ago Chessbase.com published an article Tactical puzzles for your web site. The lead sentence said,

With the relaunch of our training site tactics.chessbase.com, it was time to renew the embeddable tactics board which you can put into your own web site.

I followed the instructions and produced a page on this blog:-

• Chessbase Puzzles

See the tab of the same name at the top of this page (as well as every page on the blog). It works fine, but the puzzles are too basic to be interesting to anyone beyond beginner. The option for 'More Difficult' goes to the Chessbase site. I looked for a similar function on other chess sites, found one on Lichess.org, and created another page:-

• Lichess Puzzle

This 'puzzle' is just a fancy link. When you click on it, it goes directly to Lichess.org, where you can solve it. Good idea, bad execution, so I decided not to make it a tab at the top of every page. I'll keep looking for a challenging tactics trainer that works while staying on this blog.

The Gamification of Chess

After Playing the FWFRCC (June 2019) -- that stands for 'FIDE World Fischer Random Chess Championship' and the post is on my chess960 blog -- the next time I signed into Chess.com I had to clear a half-dozen popup messages for trophies or something. I mentioned this to a friend who told me, 'That's what they call "gamification"'. I had to admit that I wasn't familiar with the concept. In Gamification, Wikipedia informs,

Gamification is the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts. It can also be defined as a set of activities and processes to solve problems by using or applying the characteristics of game elements. Gamification commonly employs game design elements to improve user engagement, organizational productivity, flow, learning, crowdsourcing, employee recruitment and evaluation, ease of use, usefulness of systems, physical exercise, traffic violations, voter apathy, and more. A collection of research on gamification shows that a majority of studies on gamification find it has positive effects on individuals. However, individual and contextual differences exist.

That paragraph was littered with more references (like '[20]') than I've ever seen in a Wikipedia introduction. The following images shows the awards (not trophies!) I won for playing the chess960 tournament.

Top row / 2nd row (left to right):-

• Killer Queen: You delivered checkmate with a Queen!
• Random Thoughts: Your 1st game of Chess960!
• Mix Master: You played 10 Chess960 games [What? No '!'?]
• Quick Knockout: You checkmated in less than 20 moves!
• Full House: You won without losing any pieces!

The last award is from February 2019.

• Club Member: You joined a club!

That was probably while I was working on the post TCEC S14 Final, CCC5/-6 (February 2019), for an ongoing weekly series about engine tournaments. The club was the 'CCCC Club' -- I forget what all the C's mean -- which has little activity.

Back to the five awards I won for playing the chess960 tournament, three of them -- Killer Queen, Quick Knockout, and Full House -- were for a single game where I checkmated my opponent on the 9th move. The other two -- Random Thoughts and Mix Master -- don't add up. My first game of Chess960? No, I've played correspondence chess960 on the site. I played ten chess960 games? No, I played five games in the tournament and haven't played on the site since.

Anyway, I'll take the awards. The 'Achievements' page where I found them lists 120 awards. I can't imagine that anyone has won all 120. What's the record for winning awards?

• Award Monster: You have won a zillion awards!

Who would have thought you could turn playing chess into a game?

More TCEC Bonus Events; CCC9 Starts

A Monday post means another look at the two world class engine-to-engine competitions that I've been following for the past few months. A week ago, in TCEC S15/S16 Bonus; CCC8/-9 Demos, the highlights were:-

TCEC: The 'S15 - Champions Bonus' is still running with about 75% of the games having been played. Leela, the winner of S15 is trailing the four versions of Stockfish that won S11 through S14. The TCEC has released a few details about S16. • CCC: The CCC is still running a series of exhibition events. The current event, dubbed 'Rapid Romp', has three engines and is also about 75% completed. Leela is trailing both Brainfish and Leelenstein, with a minus score against both adversaries.

Let's have an update on that.

TCEC: The 'Champions Bonus' ended as expected. The Stockfish version that won S14 finished first, the version that won S13 finished second, and so on. The only variance from the expected rank was Leela's fifth place finish. As winner of S15, it could reasonably have been expected to finish higher. The results for the first eight engines are shown in the following chart.

The TCEC is currently running a 'Rapid Bonus' with 14 engines. Why these engines were chosen and what the result will tell is anybody's guess. The event will finish in about a week and a half, when we should see the start of S16.

CCC: After 'Rapid Romp' (three engines; 1st: Brainfish, 2nd: Leelenstein 3rd: Leela; two points separating first and last), the demo events continued with

• Historical World Championship Replays
• Warmup II

The site is currently running 'CCC9: The Gauntlet Qualification', with 12 engines, including Leela and Stockfish. The rules say,

Qualification: 5 rounds, 12 engines
Quarterfinals: 7 rounds, 10 engines
Semifinals: 20 rounds, 6 engines
Finals: 100 rounds, 2 engines
Time control: 5m + 2s (10m+5s for the finals)

The demo event 'Historical World Championship Replays' was based on the openings from 100 games of World Championship matches, starting with the 1886 Steinitz - Zukertort match, through the 2018 Carlsen - Caruana match. The FIDE Knockout World Championships were not considered. Brainfish finished ahead of Leela +7-3=190, with Black winning as many games as White. What's Brainfish?

!brainfish: Stockfish with an opening book

For more about the Brainfish engine, use the search function to find previous posts on this blog. Like the TCEC's 'Rapid Bonus', it's not clear what the CCC's World Championship openings were supposed to prove, if anything. I imagine that most of the engine games deviated from their grandmaster stem games soon after the mandatory opening ended. The selection might be suitable for an anthology of best WCC games.

[For further information from the various stakeholders in the engine-to-engine events, see the tab 'TCEC/CCC Links' at the top of this page. • NB: Leela = LC0 = LCzero]

The Original Dutch Masters

The image for this month's Featured Flickr was somewhat problematic. The upper third of the painting was dark and nearly featureless, so I cropped it out.

Adrien van der Werff 1659-1722; Chess players 1679; Schwerin Staatliches Museum (cropped) © Flickr user jean louis mazieres under Creative Commons.

The description has two long passages, one in French (titled 'Les Pays Bas: La Peinture Profane et Bourgeoise'), the other in English ('The Netherlands: Profane and Bourgeois Painting'). I couldn't locate any original source for the passages. The English appears to be a translation of the French.

Let's go through the main talking points. From Wikipedia:- Adriaen van der Werff

Adriaen van der Werff was an accomplished Dutch painter of portraits and erotic, devotional and mythological scenes. His brother, Pieter van der Werff (1661–1722), was his principal pupil and assistant.

The painting is one in a series of nearly 200 Flickr images, all attributed to the Staatliches Museum Schwerin (museum-schwerin.de/en), and all on the theme of Dutch profane and bourgeois painting. The closest text to the Flickr description appears to be Wikipedia's Dutch Golden Age painting:-

Dutch Golden Age painting is the painting of the Dutch Golden Age, a period in Dutch history roughly spanning the 17th century, during and after the later part of the Eighty Years' War (1568–1648) for Dutch independence. ("Dutch Masters" redirects here.)

How would a professional art restorer handle the dark area I've cropped out of the painting? For a black and white version, see van der Werff 032.jpg (wikimedia.org).

Mapping the Rabbit Hole

It's time to wrap up the series on early 19th century chess periodicals. It began with:-

• 2019-02-14: Down the Rabbit Hole • Google Books

First I spent some time becoming familiar with the resource:-

• 2019-03-15: Berliner 'Schachzeitung' • DE
• 2019-03-22: Le Palamede • FR
• 2019-03-29: Chess Player’s Chronicle • UK
• 2019-04-05: Chess Player’s Chronicle : Frequency • UK
• 2019-04-12: Other 'Schachzeitungen' • German language
• 2019-04-19: Chess Sources for Google Books • Large collections

Then I spent some time looking at early U.S. periodicals:-

• 2019-04-26: Early American Chess Periodicals • DE => US
• 2019-05-03: Five Volumes of 'Chess Monthly' • US
• 2019-05-10: Paul Morphy, Editor
• 2019-05-17: Paul Morphy, Annotator
• 2019-05-24: D.W.Fiske Bio

I finished the series with a look at other French sources:-

• 2019-05-31: After 'Le Palamede' • FR
• 2019-06-07: 19th Century Chess Culture • 'Bibliographie anecdotique du jeu des échecs' by Jean Gay (1864)

There were a few posts branching from the above, mainly documenting images that I'd encountered along the way. The next step, which shouldn't take much time, will be to catalog the various periodicals by year.

John Wayne Played Chess

In the previous post, More 'Brainwashed', I had four photos from the movie of that name. Once I started looking at the hundreds of photos featuring scenes from movies, I noted many other sub-themes within the movie theme. Here, for example, are four images featuring John Wayne.

Top row: 1944 The Fighting Seabees • 1962 The Longest Day (production sketch)
Bottom row: 1963 McLintock! (John Wayne & son Patrick) • 1963 McLintock!

You might think that publicity photos would be vetted to have everything as perfect as possible, but you would be wrong. In the photo bottom-right, White's Bishops and Knights are switched on their start squares. Since another still from 'McLintock!' already appears on my page Chess in the Movies (p.2), I can ignore this erroneous example.

More 'Brainwashed'

In last month's post, Chess Obsessed, where I featured a photo from the movie 'Brainwashed' (1961), I noted,

Back to that 'Chess in the Movies' page, I created it sometime around 2005. It might be worthwhile to survey images I've collected since then and, if I have enough examples, add another sub-page on the same topic.

While I'm sorting through those other images, here are four more from 'Brainwashed'.

The actor Curt Jurgens, the character in the 'Chess Obsessed' photo, is seen in both photos in the top row. The actor in the bottom row, who is seen in all four photos, is Mario Adorf.

TCEC S15/S16 Bonus; CCC8/-9 Demos

A week ago both world class engine-vs-engine competitions were between their marquee events. I recorded the status in, TCEC S15/S16; CCC8/CCC9. Here's a summary:-

TCEC: The last six games of the S15 superfinal finished with six draws, giving Leela a final score of +14-7=79. The superfinal conclusion was mostly overlooked or ignored by the major chess news sites. Q: What is the TCEC doing now? A: '!bonus: Featuring winners of TCEC Seasons 1 thru 15 = 14 engines (S1 and S2 had same winner). Next: Rapid bonus with engines from Div P and Div 1.' • CCC: The CCC has been running a series of exhibition events. CCC9 is in a testing stage. Perhaps by next week's post, CCC9 will already be underway.

When will TCEC S16 start? CCC9? I wish I knew. In any case, here's the current situation.

TCEC: The 'S15 - Champions Bonus' is still running with about 75% of the games having been played. Leela, the winner of S15 is trailing the four versions of Stockfish that won S11 through S14. The TCEC has released a few details about S16:-

!s16: The Season 16 divisions are 4, 3, 2, 1, and Premier. The Superfinal will probably be played before the Cup. • !div4: New entries: 1. Mystery NN, 2. A 2nd new unique neural net based engine. 3. One new classical (AB) engine.

Last week I mentioned, 'the technological evolution from traditional engines to AI/NN engines, a trend which will probably accelerate into a revolution'. How far will the two new AI/NN engines advance in S16?

CCC: The CCC is still running a series of exhibition events. In the last week, we've seen...

• CCC: Testing Updates II
• Lc0 vs Allie
• CCC Demo: King’s Gambit

...in that order. The current event, dubbed 'Rapid Romp', has three engines and is also about 75% completed. Leela is trailing both Brainfish and Leelenstein, with a minus score against both adversaries.

It's curious that the status for both TCEC and CCC shows Leela, the S15 winner, behind the other engines. A thread on the Leela forum, Leela performance so far in the Champions Bonus, explores some of the reasons for this apparent underperformance.

[For further information from the various stakeholders in the engine-to-engine events, see the tab 'TCEC/CCC Links' at the top of this page. • NB: Leela = LC0 = LCzero]

Armageddon in Norway

The short list for this month's video post was awash in instructional videos featuring Armageddon games. Here's one from Youtube's PowerPlayChess channel, last seen on this blog in Top-10 Games 2018 (January 2019).

Armageddon - The two bishops of the apocalypse - Ding Liren vs So | Norway Chess 2019 (15:25) • 'Published on Jun 5, 2019'

The description says,

Grandmaster Daniel King examines the game Ding Liren vs Wesley So from the Altibox Norway Chess 2019.

A convenient link goes to Altibox Norway Chess - Regulations 2019, where we learn:-

If there’s a draw in the classical game [120 minutes on the clock with an increment of 10 seconds after move 40] then the players will move on to Armageddon after all classical games are over. White pieces will continue with white in Armageddon. With this, there will be a winner in each game due to the fact that the player with the black pieces in the Armageddon game will win if the game ends in a draw.

The time control is unusual for Armageddon games:-

White has 10 minutes and Black has 7 minutes with an increment of 3 seconds per move, starting from move 61.

The scoring is also unusual:-

Players will get following points per round:
* Victory main game: 2 points
* Loss main game: 0 points
* Draw main game & victory Armageddon: 1.5 points
* Draw main game & loss Armageddon: 0.5 points

For more about the Armageddon format, see Leonard Barden 's Chess: Armageddon divides fans while Magnus Carlsen leads again in Norway (theguardian.com). If the Armageddon experiment works, expect to see more of the same in other tournaments. If it doesn't work, future pundits will point to the Norway tournament to explain why not.

19th Century Chess Culture

While looking into what came After 'Le Palamede' ...

The first French periodical doesn't even bring us to the 1851 London tournament. What publications appeared afterwards? [...] I managed to find all of the above on Google Books.

...Google kept suggesting other French chess publications from the same era. Most of the suggestions were primers about how to play chess, but one of them was more interesting: 'Bibliographie anecdotique du jeu des échecs' by Jean Gay (1864). That title translates to something like 'Anecdotal Bibliography of the Game of Chess'.

Left: Title page; Right: Table of contents (1/3)

I started to flip through it and realized that it was a catalog of chess culture in the mid-19th century. The book is organized by country. Germany ('Allemagne') takes up 19 pages, the U.S. ('Amérique') 4 pages, England ('Angleterre', i.e. Great Britain) 24 pages, while France gets a whopping 89 pages. After the countries, there are 20 other topics ('Variétes') that take up almost 70 pages.

The material for individual countries is further divided into topics like historical anecdotes, clubs, periodicals, and celebrities. It would be easy to get lost in this material, so I'll try to limit myself to another post or two out of the 300 pages.

Who was Jean Gay? Collectors exchange (chess-museum.com), says,

Jean Gay was a professional bibliographer and book seller in mid-19th century Brussels -- same as his father Jules -- who edited most of his bibliographies in Paris. In toto, the bibliography of works edited by the Gays lists 82 editions! -- a lot of them are what today would be called erotic or pornographic literature of their days

The copy of the chess book on sale carried a price of $1400. Before discovering that paragraph, I wasn't aware that 'professional bibliographer' was a career choice.

Carving Walrus Ivory

There's a chess story getting attention this week: Lewis chessmen piece bought for £5 in 1964 could sell for £1m (theguardian.com).

A small walrus tusk warrior figure bought for £5 in 1964 -- which, for years, was stored in a household drawer -- has been revealed as a missing piece from one of the true wonders of the medieval world with a possible value of £1m.

I've often wondered whether the Lewis pieces were indeed chess pieces. First, I wanted a good photo of a complete set, but discovered that most of the available photos are replica Lewis chess sets. The British Museum has some excellent photos of the original pieces, e.g. Image gallery: The Lewis Chessmen, but the best image I found was an old illustration.

H.J.R. Murray, 'A History of Chess' (1913/1962, p.760-761)

(Left) Top row: King; Bottom rows: Queens
(Right) Top to bottom: Bishops, Knights, Rooks

Murray introduced the topic with a summary of the pieces' discovery.

The Lewis chessmen were discovered in 1831 in a sand-bank at the head of the Bay of Uig, on the west coast of the island of Lewis, one of the outer Hebrides. There is no circumstantial account of the discovery, but it appears that they were found in a small chamber of dry-built stone, resembling an oven, about 15 feet below the top of the sand-bank.

The chessmen were exhibited by Mr. Roderick Ririe at a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, April 11, 1831, but before the members had raised the money to purchase them Mr. Kirkpatrick Sharpe stepped in and bought 10 of the pieces, while the remaining 67 chessmen, 19 tablemen, and a buckle were bought for the British Museum.

On the dispersion of Mr. Sharpe's collection, the Lewis chessmen, now 11 in number, Mr. Sharpe having obtained another one from Lewis, were purchased by Lord Londesborough, and at the sale of the latter's collection in 1888 they were purchased by the Society of Antiquaries for the Scottish National Museum.

All the game-pieces, as well as the buckle, are carved of walrus-ivory. The 78 chessmen comprise 8 Kings, 8 Queens, 16 Bishops, 15 Knights, 12 Rooks, and 19 Pawns, of which 2 Kings, 3 Queens, 3 Bishops, a Knight, and 2 Rooks are now at Edinburgh.

Not everyone believes that the pieces are chess pieces. Geoff Chandler explains,

At an unknown date, an unknown ship is sheltering from a storm in a bay on the Isle of Lewis. Onboard, an unknown cabin boy seizes his chance to escape from the ship, sneaks into the Captain’s cabin, steals a sack containing 128 carved walrus pieces (four chess sets) and swims ashore. [...]

That excerpt is from Not Even From Lewis, Mate (textualities.net); 'I am totally convinced the "Lewis Chessmen" are not chess pieces'. Chandler calls them 'gaming pieces'. If he's right, would they still sell for £1 million?

June 1969 'On the Cover'

Is chess more for young people or for old people? Considering the cover stories of two American chess magazines 50 years ago, I might be tempted to say 'young people', but I'll stick with 'For All Ages'.

Left: 'Vlastimil Hort, Winner at Venice'
Right: 'Woman Champion'

Chess Life

Anthony Saidy wrote the tournament report corresponding to the cover story, titled 'We Open in Venice'. I already quoted it in April 1969 'On the Cover', so I'll just repeat the first paragraph.

Vlastimil Hort, 25-year-old Czech International Grandmaster, romped undefeated to an easy victory in the 3rd annual International Venice Tournament, March 5-23. The "baby" of the event took the sole lead with four straight wins, had 7 points after 8 rounds and coasted to a final tally of 11.5-3.5.

It's an elementary observation that 25 + 50 = 75. Chessbase did a story at the beginning of the year, Vlastimil Hort turns 75 - an interview (January 2019). The site has also been running a series of 'Hort stories'; see tag=Vlastimil+Hort (chessbase.com).

Chess Review

While Champion Nona Gaprindashvili and Challenger Alla Kushnir (see April issue) are battling for the world title, let's reflect for a moment on the first Wonsan World Champion of Chess (and the first woman to hold a verified master's title). Here on our cover is Miss Vera Menchik at 21 soon after she had won the world title as she appeared at Hastings in 1927. The "Vera Menchik Chess Club," a list of masters who lost to her, became quite lengthy and studded with notables.

Is it sexism that the CR cover doesn't mention Vera Menchik by name? Or was she really so little-known at the time? If so, then chess history has made giant strides since 1969. For a previous post on this blog, see More Menchik (April 2013).

TCEC S15/S16; CCC8/CCC9

Through some sort of statistical fluke, last week's post, Leela Wins TCEC S15; Stockfish Wins CCC8 Finals, was a report on the season finales of the world's top two engine-to-engine competitions. The key points in that post were:-

TCEC: The S15 superfinal is effectively over. Leela leads Stockfish by seven games with six games still to be played; the current score is +14-7=73. • CCC: CCC8 finished in the order predicted last week: Stockfish, Leela, etc. The Chess.com report continued, 'The four finalists will join a field of 18 total chess engines for the next event, CCC9: The Gauntlet.'

Gazing into the blogger's crystal ball, I also made a prediction for this week's post:-

In next week's post I expect we'll have news about TCEC S16 and more details about CCC9. Since we're at a transition point for both competitions, it's a good time to decide whether I want to continue these weekly reports.

Looking first at TCEC S15/S16 and CCC8/9, what has happened during the intervening week?

TCEC: The last six games of the S15 superfinal finished with six draws, giving Leela a final score of +14-7=79. The TCEC organizers marked the occasion by publishing a report on the event that immediately preceded the superfinal, which I reported three weeks ago in Leela Wins TCEC Cup 3; CCC8 S1 99% Finished. Here are the main conclusions of the TCEC report:-

• 2019-05-30: TCEC Cup 3 report (chessdom.com) • 'Leela confirmed that its win in TCEC Cup 2 was no fluke and it retained the title. Neural networks do finally seem to be coming through with genuine advances, at Deep Mind (Hassabis, 2019) and elsewhere, but troublingly it is not obvious why they work and when they go wrong.'

The superfinal conclusion was mostly overlooked or ignored by the major chess news sites. I found only one report:-

• 2019-06-02: A new age in computer chess? Lc0 beats Stockfish! (chess24.com) • 'In the 15th Superfinal of the Top Chess Engine Championship (TCEC) – the unofficial computer chess World Championship – the self-learning Leela Chess Zero beat the previous best engine in the world, Stockfish 10.'

I expect to see a trickle of other reports in the forthcoming weeks. What is the TCEC doing now?

!bonus: TCEC ALL STARS ALLTIME CHAMPIONS BONUS; Featuring winners of TCEC Seasons 1 thru 15 = 14 engines (S1 and S2 had same winner). Next: Rapid bonus with engines from Div P and Div 1.

You might expect the bonus event to show the TCEC winners of recent seasons finishing ahead of the winners from early seasons, and that is exactly what is happening. The only surprise after 16 games for each engine is that Leela is trailing the four versions of Stockfish that won seasons 11 through 14.

CCC: Since the 'CCC8 Bonus' that I mentioned in the previous post, the CCC has been running a series of exhibition events. The results are stored in discordapp.com (see the 'further info' note below) and the data from the events is available via a little drop-down arrow on the 'live' page (ditto), but I have no idea what purpose the events served. CCC9 is in a testing stage. The plans are:-

!ccc9: Engines are 1. Stockfish 2. Lc0 3. Allie 4. Laser 5. Xiphos 6. Andscacs 7. Dark Queen Lc0 8. Rofchade 9. Wasp 10. Rubichess 11. Winter 12. Stoofvlees 13. KMC 14. Ethereal 15. Fire 16. Komodo 17. Houdini 18. Leelenstein • There will be 4 stages, qualification/quarterfinal/semifinal/finals. Opening books for all stages • TC [time control] is 5+2 for all stages except finals which is 10+5

Perhaps by next week's post, CCC9 will already be underway. That brings me to the final topic for today's post: 'it's a good time to decide whether I want to continue these weekly reports'.

Sparked by my interest in using chess engines for analysis, I've been covering the TCEC since TCEC Season 7 (March 2015). My coverage of the next few seasons was limited to the final match, but I found it increasingly difficult to understand an individual season by only looking at it every once in a while. There are many engines involved and they all have a story.

This difficulty was compounded when I added the CCC to the mix in Catching Up with Engine Competitions (October 2018). After spending too much time to catch up at the end of each TCEC/CCC tournament, I hit on the idea of catching up once a week on a regular basis, starting with TCEC S14 Underway (January 2019).

Five months later, the weekly engine post has almost been reduced to a formula. I'm happy to have been recording the technological evolution from traditional engines to AI/NN engines, a trend which will probably accelerate into a revolution. I'm also happy to note that visitor interest in these posts is about the same level as for other posts on the blog. The downside of the weekly survey is that I haven't had time to explore the AI/NN technology in more depth. The quote I used earlier ('it is not obvious why they work') confirms there is much new ground here.

What to do? I'll continue with the weekly post, but try to take an occasional detour to look at the underlying technological trends. The Leela camp is the obvious place to start, but the Stockfish camp is also keeping tabs on the competition in their usual professional way. The future is bright for chess engines.

[For further information from the various stakeholders in the engine-to-engine events, see the tab 'TCEC/CCC Links' at the top of this page. • NB: Leela = LC0 = LCzero]

Cards for Chess Champions

I've seen these cards many times on eBay, but I never thought they were suitable material for Top eBay Chess Items by Price (March 2010). It just proves how little I know about collectibles.

The auction for the card on the left was titled '1888 N162 Goodwin Champions Steinitz CHESS PSA 4 VGEX (PWCC)'. It sold for US $1009 after 14 bids from 10 bidders. The card on the right, '1888 N162 Goodwin Champions Zukertort CHESS PSA 6 EXMT (PWCC)', sold for $1525 after 21 bids from 11 bidders. Both cards had a starting price of $0.99.

The codes 'PSA 4 VGEX' and 'PSA 6 EXMT' in the titles indicate their grades. There is more information about grades on, e.g., 1888 Goodwin Champions (N162) Steinitz Chess (psacard.com). The code 'PWCC' in the title is the name of the auction house.

The backs of both cards list other 'Champions' in the series. There are three chess players : the two shown here plus 'Capt. Mackenzie', George Henry Mackenzie (wikipedia.org).