A Goat Says, 'It's Chess Not Checkers'

The best items featured on Top eBay Chess Items by Price (March 2010) are those that lead to other avenues of inquiry: 'What is this?' and 'What is that?' The item pictured below was titled 'Piggybanx Tom Brady Refractor 1/1 Chess Not Checkers Patriots'. It sold 'Pre-Owned' for $600.00 or 'Best Offer'.

The description of the item added only,

Piggybanx Tom Brady 1/1 Refractor. It is missing one screw for the box; it came that way. Otherwise a very nice card.

'Tom Brady' is easy enough, especially if you follow American football. In Tom Brady (wikipedia.org), Wikipedia informs,

Thomas Edward Patrick Brady Jr. (born August 3, 1977) is a former American football quarterback who played in the National Football League (NFL) for 23 seasons. He spent his first 20 seasons with the New England Patriots and was a central contributor to the franchise's dynasty from 2001 to 2019. In his final three seasons, he was a member of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Brady is widely regarded as the greatest quarterback of all time

'Piggybanx' leads to piggybanx (@piggy_banx; instagram.com). The cards on display there mostly use the same style header as on the Tom Brady card. The page explains itself as:-

Pop Culture Inspired Concept Art • Medium: Cards • Rarest in the World. No Commissions. No Customs.

As for '1/1 Refractor', Wikipedia comes to the rescue again. In Refractor card (wikipedia.org), we learn,

A Refractor Card is a trading card that has a reflective coating and displays a rainbow when held at a specific angle. They are parallels of base set issues and were introduced with the release of the 1993 Topps "Baseball's Finest" set.

Later on the same page, we find,

The rarest refractor variant is called the "SuperFractor". It is a card that has a production run of just 1 and is serial numbered 1/1.

The phrase that ties the eBay item to this blog is 'Chess Not Checkers'. The page Tom Brady Doubles Down on NFL Criticism: 'Way More Checkers Now Than It Is Chess' (bleacherreport.com), quotes something that Brady said in November 2023:-

I think the pro game is reflecting more of what the college game is, as opposed to the college game reflecting what the pro game is. We're asking pro players to play college football, and that's the biggest difference I see. This is way more checkers now than it is chess.

If you look carefully at the card, you'll see that the White pieces are checker, not chess, pieces. On top of that, there's a goat hanging from Brady's neck. As we all know by now, GOAT stands for 'Greatest Of All Time', which echoes Wikipedia's 'greatest quarterback of all time'.

Breaking the 3700 Barrier

The post from earlier this week, The AI Generator (January 2024), was no.3700 on this blog, which means it's time for another 'Breaking the Barrier' post. In the previous post for the series, Breaking the 3600 Barrier (April 2023), I wrote,

Getting back to the 'CCRL Blitz Rating List' there are currently 17 engines rated over 3600. Based on that same list, it looks like we're already good for a 'Breaking 3700' post seven months (or so) from now, which should have at least two engines.

Make that nine months -- because I'm slowing down -- and let's have a look at the latest CCRL rating list.

CCRL Blitz Rating List (Feb 2024)
(computerchess.org.uk/ccrl)

Now we have one engine over 3800 (Stockfish 16), 15 engines over 3700, and (not shown) 11 engines over 3600. It looks statistically strange to have more engines rated 3700 than 3600, but that's what the numbers say. See you a year from now for the '3800 Barrier' -- unless my slowdown grinds to a halt.

RIP Yahoos

The series of posts centered on the Yahoo family began inauspiciously with Chess and Peanuts (April 2008; Yahoo article 'Writing for Peanuts'). They continued irregularly whenever a Yahoo.com news feed highlighted a story that had something to do with chess.

Starting with October Yahoos (October 2017), the Yahoos appeared monthly through A Yahoo Backstory (December 2020). Those were wonderful days for the Yahoos -- Covid and Netflix ensured a steady stream of mainstream chess stories.

As was inevitable, the stories inspired by Covid and Netflix dried up. The Yahoos morphed into A Database of Yahoos (January 2021), based on common criteria:-

Yahoos (mainstream news stories about chess) are derived from Google News top-100 (or so) stories from the past month.

After three years the Google Yahoos also ran out of steam: Yahoos Set a New Low (December 2023; 'So many problems, so little time.'). It's time to let them sleep in peace.

The AI Generator

In the previous installment of our weekly comic series, The Wizard as Professor (January 2024), we learned that the Wizard has more interests than just playing chess. I noted,

The village wizard [...] holds a patent on an important technique used to generate life-like forms in plasma.

This is the fourth installment.

The Wizard can use his patented AI techniques to generate the personae of chess players from the past. Since this practice is frowned upon by the general public and even outlawed in certain jurisdictions, he confines his experiments to generating animals, mainly foxes, who play chess.

(*) Images: AI Comic Factory (aicomicfactory.com)

***

For more chess playing foxes, see Foxy Christmas Chess (December 2023).

The Wizard as Professor

In the first installment of this weekly comic series we introduced a chess village and its villagers. Then we introduced The Village Wizard (January 2024), where I observed,

Some say that the villagers' interest in chess stems from the presence of an unusual man who arrived in the village at some time in the recent past.

This is the third installment.

The village wizard is a retired professor of computer science who taught AI at a top-notch engineering college. He holds a patent on an important technique used to generate life-like forms in plasma. The patent has made him a wealthy man.

(*) Images: AI Comic Factory (aicomicfactory.com)

Consider the Message, Not the Chess

For this month's Flickr favorite, my short list had eight photos. Four of the eight were AI generated images and two were from the annual Tata tournament in Wijk aan Zee. Given my weakness for AI images, guess what I chose for this post?

Top: Strategische Finanzplanung: Schachspiel mit goldenen Bullen und bronzenen Bärenfiguren
Bottom: Human vs AI playing Chess
Both: © Flickr user Kostenlose Bilder mit KI under Creative Commons.

The title of the top photo translates to

Strategic financial planning: Chess game with golden bulls and bronze bear figures

Bulls and bears, got it! The Flickr user name translated to 'Free images with AI'. How did we get from KI to AI? My German - English dictionary translates 'artificial' as 'künstlich'. The word 'künstlich' translates as 'artificial' or 'synthetic'. KI/AI, got it!

I've also been dabbling with AI chess images, last seen in The Village Wizard (January 2024). In looking at hundreds of images, I can't remember seeing a realistic chess set. In the top image, the board looks like it's 7x6. In the bottom image, it looks like 10x8, with two White Queens on the left and two Black Kings on the right. And what is that piece lying on its side in the foreground of the bottom image? Better concentrate on the overall messages of the two images and not on their chess details.

Players under the FIDE Flag

In a recent post, FIDE Rating List - January 2024 (January 2024), I wondered where to go next with the data. I decided,

One idea is to look at the doubling of players under the FIDE flag ('FID'). To get started, here are counts of 'FID' players for the past five years:-

2020 : 252
2021 : 254
2022 : 263
2023 : 527
2024 : 798

Those numbers total 2094 players, of which 507 were rated 2000 or above. Of course, some of those players were listed as 'FID' for all five years, but I'll come back to that a bit later.

The key to detecting federation transfers is the FIDE ID, a unique code given to all chess players tracked by FIDE. A few years ago, I documented these codes on a page titled FIDE Country and Federation Codes - 'unofficial' (m-w.com; 'Last updated 2015-03-02'). The FIDE ID is shown in the last column of the table on that page. At the bottom of the page are references to blog posts that documented the creation of the page.

Each federation assigns codes to new players using the federation's FIDE ID as the first two or three digits of the player's unique FIDE ID, which is typically seven or eight digits. That means the player's last five digits are assigned autonomously by the federation, perhaps disconnected from any central FIDE database.

When I worked out the codes for the various federations in 2015, there were no FIDE IDs longer than eight digits. Now there are many codes with nine digits. It appears that FIDE assigns those codes when a new player -- previously unknown to FIDE and having no federation -- starts playing on the FIDE Online Arena (FOA). I eliminated 'FID' players with nine digit codes from the total of 2094 'FID' players counted earlier and arrived at new counts for the five years:-

2020 : 164
2021 : 166
2022 : 166
2023 : 394
2024 : 636

That totals 1526 players. I then counted the number of times each player appeared on the lists over the five years. I counted exactly 700 players distributed as follows:-

5 : 144
4 : 11
3 : 9
2 : 199
1 : 337

In other words, there were 144 players who were on the lists for each of the five years and there were 337 players who were on a list for only one year. Of those 337 players, 291 were on the 2024 list (released in January 2024, covering activity in 2023) and 82 were titled players (GM, IM, etc.).

Next stop: Which federations were responsible for those 82 titled players before they became 'FID' players? When I tackle this question, I'll have to keep in mind the European privacy laws that also apply to any chess player who changed federations.