Minutes of the 90th FIDE Congress

Remember the series of posts ending with FIDE's Ethics Commission 2019? In that post I wrote,

This is the fifth (and last) commission in the series that started with Spectating the 90th FIDE Congress? (February 2020).

FIDE recently published the minutes of the two most important meetings held during that Congress:-

• 2020-03-26: 2020 Executive Board Minutes (fide.com) • 'FIDE publishes the Minutes of 2020 Executive Board meeting which was held in Abu Dhabi, UAE on February 29th.'
  
  
• 2020-04-03: 2020 Extraordinary General Assembly Minutes (ditto) • 'FIDE publishes the Minutes of 2020 FIDE Extraordinary General Assembly which was held in Abu Dhabi, UAE on February 28th.'

The following chart extracts the table of contents (TOC) from the two documents.

That chart will serve as a reference for a couple of posts on my other chess-related blogs. Maybe I'll even discover material for another post on this blog.

Smerdon - Komodo Odds Match

Everyone knows that people have no chance in a balanced game against a chess engine. Years ago, even Pawn odds given by the engines proved insufficient for an interesting game. Earlier this month, as an experiment in man-machine play, Chess.com held a match Man vs. Machine: Smerdon vs. Komodo (chess.com; Peter Doggers):-

This week Chess.com is hosting a match between Australian grandmaster David Smerdon and Komodo. The chess engine will be playing with Knight odds. The match, held in conjunction with a special anniversary issue of the "ICGA Journal" (International Computer Games Association), will consist of six games with a time control of 15 minutes and a 10-second increment per move. Smerdon plays black in every game; Komodo will be missing a Knight in the starting positions, alternating from removing it from b1 an g1.

Although some observers predicted that the machine would nevertheless prevail, the results showed that GMs know how to convert a substantial material advantage -- trade down to an endgame and convert -- Smerdon Beats Komodo 5-1 With Knight Odds (ditto):-

GM David Smerdon defeated chess engine Komodo, playing with knight odds, 5-1. The Man vs. Machine rapid match was played on Chess.com on April 10 and 11 and provided more insight into the effect of material imbalance in human vs engine play.

For more about the match from the human point of view, see Man vs Machine in the Time of COVID: Komodo vs Smerdon (davidsmerdon.com). For more about the match from the engine point of view, see Komodo vs GM Smerdon knight odds match (talkchess.comforum); started by Komodo's GM Larry Kaufman in mid-March, the discussion of the match starts realtime on page six.

At what rating level for the human would the machine start to compete with an equal chance of winning? Under-2200? Under-2000? Lower?

At the Cosmonaut Hotel

The best known of the chess playing astronauts was undoubtedly Greg Chamitoff, in large part because of First Earth vs. Space Chess Match Ends – Earth Wins (nasa.gov; December 2009). That story announced,

The first Earth vs. Space chess match, begun during astronaut Greg Chamitoff’s Expedition 17 stay aboard the International Space Station, is over -- and the Earth won.

Here's a more recent example.

Expedition 63 crewmembers play a game of chess © Flickr user NASA Johnson under Creative Commons.

The description of the photo said,

(April 1, 2020) - At the Cosmonaut Hotel crew quarters in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, Expedition 63 crewmembers Chris Cassidy of NASA (left) and Ivan Vagner (center) and Anatoly Ivanishin (right) of Roscosmos play a game of chess April 1. They are preparing to launch April 9 on the Soyuz MS-16 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for a six-and-a-half month mission on the International Space Station. Credit: Andrey Shelepin/Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center.

For more on the subject from Flickr, see Astronaut Chris Cassidy (flickr.com), and Expedition 63 (ditto). Will Expedition 64 feature a tournament?

TCEC S17 & CCC13 Finals : Leela vs Stockfish

I last looked at the two world class engine-vs-engine competitions a fortnight ago, in TCEC S17 DivP & CCC13 Heptagonal Underway (March 2020). Both competitions were getting close to the selection of the two top engines for the final stage. Here's a summary of that post:-

TCEC: In Premier Division (aka DivP), the six-engine 'CPU only' section finished with Stockfish leading. The four GPU engines entered the division, which will run for another week. The top two engines promote to the final match. • CCC: Stockfish is currently leading the seven-engine Heptagonal, slightly ahead of Lc0 and Leelenstein. The fourth spot in the Semifinal is still up for grabs.

When those events finished, the same pair of engines had qualified into both final matches, which are now well underway. Let's have an overview of the current status.

TCEC: The diagram shows the results for the first five engines in the Premier Division. LCZero finished 0.5 points ahead of Stockfish, which finished 2.0 points ahead of third place Alliestein.

LCZero is currently leading +8-6=25 in the 100-game final match, aka TCEC Superfinal. This extrapolates to a four or five point win for the full match.

CCC: In the Heptagonal, the fourth spot for the Semifinal went to Komodo. In the Semifinal, Lc0 finished 4.0 points ahead of Stockfish, which was just 0.5 points ahead of third place Leelenstein. Komodo was the only engine to finish with a minus score. In the 200-game final match, Lc0 has a 10.0 point lead over Stockfish with 40 games left to be played.

Both the TCEC and the CCC final matches will have finished by the time of my next post. Leela is on course to win both.

[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]

GM Anand on the Lockdown

As I prepared the short list for this month's video feature, I found two themes repeated again and again. By coincidence, they echoed the two words in the title of last month's news highlights: Coronavirus Candidates (March 2020). I'll look at the 'Coronavirus' side in this post, then look at the 'Candidates' side on my World Championship blog.

Another theme that cropped up repeatedly was 'streaming'. People confined to home; what are they going to do; they're going to stream.

Grandmaster Vishwanathan Anand Plays Online Chess Amid Coronavirus Lockdown (5:56) • '[Published on] Apr 12, 2020'

The description said,

Chess Grandmaster Vishwanathan Anand is trying to keep himself busy during the ongoing lockdown by playing the game of Chess online. He also asked people to be patient and trust each other and the government as mistakes are imperative to happen considering the novelty of the crisis. He also urged everyone to maintain physical distance and follow government advisories.

At the time of the video, GM Anand was hunkered down in Germany. He explained why that country has had more success than most countries fighting Covid-19.

Nico

He fought a long, tough battle against a pair of dangerous illnesses, but the coronavirus was one adversary too many.

'On a des mots pour dire une peine légère, mais les grandes douleurs ne savent que se taire.' - Sénèque
•
'Light pains are repressed; great pains are mute.' - Seneca

***

Nicolas Paques (May 2019)

Deep Horizons

A couple of weeks ago, I had a post about Tablebases and Fortresses (March 2020), two types of positions that create problems for chess engines. These were collected on the Fishcooking forum.

Another, smaller set of positions can be found on the Talkchess forum, in a thread titled Hard-Talkchess-2020 set, final release (talkchess.com). These are difficult ('Hard') positions where the choice of best variation lies beyond the current computational limits of the best engines.

1B1K1k2/4N2p/3pP1pP/6p1/p7/3N2b1/2r2p2/8 w

This Lichess diagram shows the first position in the set. The key move is 1.Nc6. Although I didn't analyze it with an engine, it looks like the Black King is destined to be chased around the board after e6-e7-e8Q.

For more about the EPD format of the 'Talkchess 2020 set', see Extended Position Description (chessprogramming.org). For those of us currently under coronavirus confinement, the positions in this and the previous 'TBs & Fortresses' post might help to pass the time.