TCEC Season 9 Superfinal Underway

Let's put Korchnoi's Events aside for a few months and look at the two World Championship matches currently being held. For the more important of the two matches, the human version, I'll refer to my World Championship Blog, where the most recent post was World Championship Bullying, and where I'll be tracking the event on at least a weekly basis.

For the stronger of the two matches, the engine version, I'll mention my previous post Carlsen, TCEC, Karjakin, Korchnoi (October 2016), where the TCEC acronym is the bit I'm interested in now. By coincidence, the human and engine matches both started at the same time, and the next day Chessdom.com (the official site for the engine match) reported Carlsen – Karjakin game 1 draw:-

Stockfish 8 and Houdini 5 also draw in game 1 • Together with the highest individual event in the chess calendar -- the World Championship -- started also the highest event for computer chess, the Top Chess Engine Championship (TCEC). In the Superfinal of Season 9 Stockfish and Houdini started their 100 game match with a draw.

In the nearly three days since the event started, the engines have played 12 complete games non-stop with Stockfish leading Houdini by +3-0=9. How does one engine with a rating slightly over 3200 Elo beat an engine with a rating slightly under 3200? Like this...

tcec.chessdom.com/live -> Archive -> Season 9 Superfinal game 5

...The graph in the top left ('Depth') shows that Stockfish (playing White) consistently searches variations to a greater depth than does Houdini. This means that Stockfish finds any winning path first ('Evaluation', top right), partly because it goes into endgame lookups faster than its opponent ('Tablebase hits', bottom right). As for the graph in the bottom left ('Speed'), Houdini appears to be faster, but that doesn't matter (whatever it means).

The two other games that Stockfish has won -- games 7 and 9 -- show similar patterns. The bottom line is that a deeper search translates into an advantage. Does Houdini have a chance to win the match? The available evidence indicates that, no, it doesn't. We're looking at something like a +25-0=75 final score, where isolated wins for Houdini will be the exception.

Focused on the Game?

After doing this series on Top eBay Chess Items by Price for so long, I have to admit that I have least favorite categories of item and most favorite categories. An example of a least favorite category would be the previous post in the series, Another Dollhouse Chess Table, and a most favorite would be a painting, like the one shown below.

This particular painting was titled 'Fine Large 19th Century English Ladies Game of Chess Antique Oil Painting Signed' and subtitled 'Circa 1850 - signed indistinctly'. It sold for GBP 577.67 ('approximately US $727.11') after 26 bids from 13 bidders.

The description expanded on the title:-

A Game of Chess, circa 1850. Large English School work - signed indistinctly R*** James and Edmund W***. Fine large 19th Century scene of a game of chess, oil on canvas, signed.

Beautiful work of a game of chess between two ladies and a gentleman. Beautifully painted and interesting scene with one lady focused on the game at hand and the other more interested in the gentleman.

Some surface issues and marks as seen. Antique frame. Measurements: 37" x 31" framed.

The chess set in the painting looks like the one in A Barleycorn Chess Set (October 2011). As for the two ladies -- one focused on the game and the other on the gentleman -- it's not clear where the gentleman is focused.

License to Checkmate

'The name is Bondarevsky, Igor Bondarevsky.' • Seen on the streets of Virginia, a state 'for lovers'.

Checkmate © Flickr user Eli Christman under Creative Commons.

The round sticker next to the license plate says, ChampionshipChess.net, where the motto is, 'We "teach children" while others "teach chess".'

***

While we're on the subject of 007, do you remember this scene?

James Bond On Chess (2:26) • 'From Russia With Love (1963)'

'My congratulations, sir. A brilliant coup!'

A Chess Allegory

My previous post, Election Special ('May the best woman win!'), turned out to be more special than I could ever have imagined. No one can predict the outcome of an election and the world will have to live with U.S. President Donald J. Trump. Eliminating Hillary from the election special gives us the following.

Google Image search on 'chess donald trump'

Again we have strange images associated with strange stories and again the '4D Chess' metaphor dominates the others. Another strange story involving chess and Donald J. Trump is Dumping on Bronx kids, Donald style by David MacEnulty (medium.com). That's the same MacEnulty of Knights of the South Bronx (wikipedia.org) fame:-

'Knights of the South Bronx' is a 2005 television film about a teacher who helps students at a tough inner-city school to succeed by teaching them to play chess. The movie is based on the true story of David MacEnulty who taught schoolchildren of the Bronx Community Elementary School 70 to play at competition level, eventually winning New York City and the New York State Chess Championships.

The same story found in 'Dumping, Donald style' is an anecdote related in Trump boasts about his philanthropy, but his giving falls short of his words (washingtonpost.com):-

At times, Trump seemed to make light of others' expectations about his generosity. In 1997, for instance, he was "principal for a day" at a public school in an impoverished area of the Bronx. The chess team was holding a bake sale, Hot & Crusty danishes and croissants. They were $5,000 short of what they needed to travel to a tournament.

Trump had brought something to wow them. "He handed them a fake million-dollar bill," said David MacEnulty, a teacher and the chess team's coach. The team's parent volunteers were thrilled. Then disappointment. Trump then gave them $200 in real money and drove away in a limousine. Why just $200? "I have no idea," MacEnulty said. "He was about the most clueless person I’ve ever seen in that regard."

The happy ending, he said, was that a woman read about Trump’s gift in the New York Times, called the school and donated the $5,000. "I am ashamed to be the same species as this man," MacEnulty recalled her saying.

Will this story serve as an allegory for the Donald J. Trump presidency? We'll know long before his four-year term is over.

Election Special

With the USA voting today, it seems that everywhere I look someone is running an 'election special'. Why shouldn't I?

Google Image search on 'chess hillary trump'

The strangest of the many strange pages linked from that search -- many of which have little to do with chess -- is probably Trump Is Playing 4D Chess (knowyourmeme.com), i.e.

He’s playing 4D chess on a 3D chessboard against people playing 2D chess.

It doesn't make any sense, but neither do many of the election sights and sounds we've seen and heard over the last year and a half. May the best woman win!

Korchnoi's Events 2008-15

Continuing with Korchnoi's Events 2006-07 (and TCEC 2016), I added the last eight years of Korchnoi's career to my page on Viktor Korchnoi's Tournament, Match, and Exhibition Record (TMER; 1946-2015). There are no games from 2013 and only a handful of exhibition games from 2014-2015, meaning that Korchnoi's career effectively ended in September 2012 with a couple of games played for the Swiss team championship.

The chart on the left shows the number of games I collected from TWIC files starting at the beginning of 1998. For the record, it totals 1206 games from around 150 events.

The TWIC files provide the data for the fourth major section of the Korchnoi TMER. The first games in the TWIC section are from the 1998 Anibal Open, Linares, in TWIC 168, i.e.

THE WEEK IN CHESS 168 - 26th January 1998 by Mark Crowther

Crowther's writeup said,

3) Linares Open Tournament • A strong international open took place in Linares Spain. Sergei Tiviakov took clear first with 8/9 ahead of Tony Miles, Stanislav Savchenko, Karen Movsziszian, Georgy Timoshenko, Karen Asrian, Rustam Kasimdzhanov and Gennady Kuzmin on 7.5. The field also included Viktor Korchnoi, Vladimir Epishin and Valeri Filippov in the 186 participants.

Korchnoi finished the event, [although] at one stage it looked as though he might withdraw after a most distressing loss in round four where it [looked] as if Korchnoi became distracted at his opponents unwillingness to resign and [he] contrived to lose.

Notwithstanding the many 'Crowtherisms' that pepper his written work -- [I've tried to fix a few] -- Mark Crowther provides a first class service. Thanks, Mark!

***

And what about the TCEC 2016 (Thoresen Chess Engines Competition) half of the previous post? The TCEC Facebook page now says,

The Superfinal preparations need a few more days and the games are expected to start after 9 November.

The 2016 Carlsen - Karjakin World Championship starts 11 November, so there will be plenty of quality chess material for the next month or so.

The Sociology of Chess

Before embarking on a series about Chess and Social Trends, I should know something about sociology, a subject I've managed to avoid for most of my life. Wikipedia's page on Sociology says,

Sociology is the study of social behaviour or society, including its origins, development, organization, networks, and institutions. It is a social science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about social order, disorder, and change.

How about some imagery to go along with that? I searched my file of chess images and came up with a set of related words -- associated, association, social, socialize, society -- of which the most frequent images were similar to the one shown below.

'The Irish Chess Association at Belfast'

This particular image was a half-page engraving from an 1886 issue of the weekly newspaper 'The Illustrated London News'. It shows Burn and Blackburne at a chess table in front of other members of the association. For the next few posts in the series, I'll present other images as I take the time to explore the subject.