April Yahoos -- Much Ado About Nothing?

After last month's March Yahoos -- A Viral Story, I'm once again reduced to pecking at crumbs just like in previous months. The only chess reference I spotted while browsing mainstream news headlines is shown in the following screen capture.

2019-04-14

What does '5 Top Dividend Kings to Buy and Hold Forever' have to do with chess? The photo's mouseover explained, 'A king chess piece on a piece of paper displaying a chart line and data points.' On the other hand, why not a chess King? Chess can sell stock market advice as well as it can sell anything. Is there a better way to illustrate the idea of a King than with a chess King? Last month I also had a Stock Post about stock photos. Stock post, stock photo, stock market -- stock advice?

I should end the post here, but there was one mainstream chess story in April that deserves a mention:-

• 2019-04-19: Mueller investigated whether Russians used chess to build a bridge to Trump (abcnews.go.com) • 'Of all the topics special counsel Robert Mueller put before President Donald Trump during his sweeping 22-month investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, chess was perhaps the most surprising.'
  
  
• 2019-04-21: Mueller investigated whether Trump attended a 2016 chess championship alongside Russians (nbcnews.com) • '"I do not remember having been asked to attend the World Chess Championship gala, and I did not attend the event," Trump wrote in response to Mueller.'

Add this to the Yahoo subcategory 'Weird Chess News', last seen in February Amazon Yahoos. Then again, for many people any story about chess is weird.

TCEC S15 Final: SF vs. Leela; CCC8 S1 at 3/4 Mark

Another Monday post on this blog means another update on two important, ongoing engine-to-engine competitions. I'll summarize last Monday's report, TCEC S15 DivP Nears Finish; CCC8 [S1] Half-Way, with a short paragraph:-

TCEC: The season 15 premier division is in the final round of play with Stockfish holding first place, Leela second, and the other engines trailing by a considerable margin. • CCC: CCC8 uses an escalation format [...] As of this writing, a little more than half of the engines have started play, and the final result is anyone's guess. The official schedule projects 1104 games total.

I'll come back to that last sentence when I give the current status of the CCC.

TCEC: The premier division finished with the same relative positions given last week, as shown in a small version of the final crosstable below. Stockfish finished two points ahead of Leela (aka LC0, LCzero), although Leela won their individual match by the score +1-0=5.

In the last event for S15, Stockfish and Leela will play a season-ending final match (aka superfinal, sufi) for the second time to determine the best engine on the planet. See Stockfish Wins TCEC S14; CCC6 S2 Underway (February 2019) for this blog's report on the first final match, which was as close as a decisive match can be.

TCEC S15 Premier Division

Among the also-rans, the result of AI/NN engine AllieStein was the most remarkable. Starting the season in division 4, the lowest of the five divisions, it consistently finished in the top-2 for each successive division, eventually qualifying into the premier division. There it tied for 4th/5th with Houdini. It has been less than a year-and-a half since Houdini won TCEC S10, around the same time that DeepMind's AlphaZero burst into the chess world's collective consciousness. I reported on both of those events in Houdini, Komodo, Stockfish, and AlphaZero (December 2017). AlphaZero was the first AI/NN engine to compete at the level of the traditional engines; Leela was the second; and AllieStein is the third.

Before the final match, the TCEC will be holding another cup event, as announced in TCEC Cup 3 - pairings and information (chessdom.com):-

The cup holder Lc0 is going to defend its title in a race with the top 32 engines of the ongoing season. [...] The main challenger of of Lc0 will be Stockfish. It starts at the other end of the brackets and the two can meet only at the final

Before cup play starts, the TCEC is holding a couple of filler (aka bonus) events. I couldn't find much about these events and what I could find wasn't helpful, so I'll say no more.

CCC: Getting back to the summary of last week, I called it the 'Half-Way' point for the preliminary stage of CCC8. In fact, the CCC escalation format makes it difficult to pinpoint the progress of an event. The first two engines meet in a mini-match. Then a third engine enters the competition and plays the first two, then a fourth engine plays the first three, and so on. This procedure introduces all sorts of complications for the spectators. Given that 24 engines are competing, we can calculate that 276 mini-matches are played during the event. Since each match consists of four games, we get the total of 1104 games foreseen for the entire event.

As of this writing, 18 engines have started play in CCC8; the most recent was Leelenstein. Nearly 590 games have been played. That means 75% of the engines have started play, but somewhat more than half of the games have been played. Houdini and Antifish are at no.1 and no.2, unfortunately a meaningless observation. Next week's Monday post also won't provide much insight into the eventual final standing, which will qualify the top four engines into a multi-stage round robin.

[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.]

Every Story Has a Beginning

What could be more natural for a series on The Sociology of Chess (November 2016) than a followup to last month's March Yahoos -- A Viral Story:-

A great story, which was picked up by most major news services, appeared twice in the same Yahoo news feed. The first appearance was a featured story at the top of the feed, captioned, 'Homeless refugee chess champion goes viral'.

This video is from Youtube's 'NBC News - Today' channel.

8-Year-Old Chess Champ And Homeless Refugee Gets Fairytale Ending | TODAY (7:11) • 'Published on Mar 19, 2019'

The description said,

At just 8-years-old, Tani [Tanitoluwa] Adewumi is a chess prodigy – and that’s just part of his remarkable story. The third-grader, who has been living in a homeless shelter with his family, plans to move to an apartment thanks to an incredible crowdfunding effort.

Also appearing in the video are 'Coach Russell' (Russell Makofsky) and 'Coach Shawn' (Shawn Martinez). Tani and his coaches are all wearing blue 'PS 116 NYC' T-shirts. For another inspirational video, see 2019 U.S. Chess Championships: Tanitoluwa "Tani" Adewumi Interview, from the Youtube channel for the Saint Louis Chess Club:-

Grandmaster Maurice Ashley interviews Tani Adewumi, the New York 3rd Grade champion, during Round 10 of the U.S. Championships. Tani has an inspirational story, from a Nigerian refugee to a 1500 rating at eight years old.

The Tani story is reminiscent of the Phiona Mutesi story, last seen on this blog in Queen of Katwe Meets Queen of IMF (April 2017). I'm confident that we haven't seen the last of either story.

Early American Chess Periodicals

Take a 19th-century foreign language chess periodical, extract the text using an OCR service, convert the text to English -- what have you got? I've already tried a small experiment with a poem in 'On Anderssen' (February 2019); how about trying something more important.

Shown below is the start of an article from the August 1861 (vol.16) edition of Schachzeitung, edited by M. Lange, B. Suhle, and P. Hirschfeld. See the recent post Other 'Schachzeitungen' for more about the family of publications.

OCR plus translation yielded the following (with a few corrections marked with '[ ]'):-

The chess author, who wants to write in the future a literature of his game, must be much more cumbersome periodicals let in as his predecessors did. As successor Anton Schmid's, he will be the latter, in the more than 400-page works on the literature of chess, quoted five journals, which regularly devote a part of their columns to noble games, have to multiply by a significant number.

Still, it is not too long ago that the chess charts with their crowns, horseheads and themes, with their explanatory letters and [numbers]. that seemed so strange to an earlier generation, into the columns of journals began to appear. We believe that the first sachcolumne was built in 1823 in the London Lancet and although this new, unprecedented column at that time excited by no means so much attention, as one might have previously suspected should.

The second chesscolumn appeared in 1828 in the Berlin Stafette, and this was followed in 1834 by the well-known column of Bell's Life in London, which still exists under the direction of her founder, the eccentric George Walker.

Further hints about the presently existing chess columns can be found scattered here and there in the chess newspaper, partly in a fitting, if not completely exhaustive, collection some parts of chess sketch Paul Morphy [NB: 'Paul Morphy: A Sketch from the Chess World']. From the latter see we too, that the transatlantic time sheets of our noble games much more voluminous and extensive than the widely illustrated journals of the old world.

Recently, the American [Chess Monthly] has an equally thorough, as detailed compilation of all the leaves of their land brought the chess more or less have reciprocated extensively and permanently.

We see that in all, 87 newspapers play our games, if only temporarily, were interested. Present are of course, it was only about eleven, which continued [to bring] a column over the chess; they are the following: [...]

Given the many possibilities for introducing errors...

• in the original publication
• by the scanning process
• by OCR
• by the translation
• by the person putting everything together (that's me)

...it's surprising that the final result makes any sense at all. But it does make sense and even gives me a few leads for further posts.

Fischer's Viking Chess?

Just like the other photos in my recent post, Fischer Center, Selfoss, Iceland, this photo had no information attached to it other than its location : Bobby Fischer Center.

Bobby Fischer Center in Selfoss © Flickr user John Seb Barber under Creative Commons.

What kind of a chess set is that? The bottom right of the board is stamped 'VIKINGA SKAK'. I found a description of the game at Viking-Chess (viking-chess.blogspot.com; August 2012). The blog post starts,

Viking chess is played on an unusual chessboard consisting of hexagons instead of squares, arranged in three different colours.

The pieces are the same as in traditional chess except the big one in the middle of the back rank(s), called the 'Viking'. The files are labelled 'A' through 'I' starting from White's right and the ranks are labelled '1' through '10' starting from Black's side.

Was the game something Fischer actually played? If not, what is it doing in a museum bearing his name?

Fischer Center, Selfoss, Iceland

The Flickr short list that resulted in a recent post, Getting Lost, had a strong second candidate. I couldn't decide which photo to use, so I created a composite image, shown below.

Upper left corner: Bobby Fischer center in Selfoss © Flickr user John Seb Barber under Creative Commons.

To see all of the photos, follow the link in the caption, then use left/right navigation. I've already mentioned the Fischer center in a post on my chess960 blog, More on the Fischer Random Cup (March 2018):-

Fischer Memorial Tour I, 'a trip to the Fischer Center in Selfoss and Fischer’s Grave nearby', included a map of Selfoss

The post included a copy of the map and a link to the center's web presence. And, yes, the 11th World Champion is buried at Selfoss. I once featured another Flickr photo in Fischer's Final Resting Place (April 2015).

TCEC S15 DivP Nears Finish; CCC8 Half-Way

Let's summarize last week's post, TCEC S15 DivP Underway; Leela Wins CCC7 Final, about the status of two important, ongoing engine-vs-engine competitions:-

TCEC: Stockfish is currently leading the premier division, followed by Leela (aka LCZero, Lc0), KomodoMCTS (Monte Carlo version), and Houdini. • CCC: Leela was the surprise winner of CCC7, finishing ahead of Stockfish by a convincing margin. CCC8, nicknamed 'Deep Dive' by the organizers, is already underway.

The engines have continued slugging it out for the past week, a long time in engine play, so let's check on their current ststus.

TCEC: The season 15 premier division is in the final round of play with Stockfish holding first place, Leela second, and the other engines trailing by a considerable margin. Since the rules specify, 'The top 2 engines promote to the Superfinal', we can anticipate the same two finalists as in season 14. I reported on that match in Stockfish Wins TCEC S14; CCC6 S2 Underway (February 2019):-

The final score [was] +10-9=81 (50.5-49.5) in Stockfish's favor. That's as narrow a match win as exists in chess, much to the delight of Stockfish fans and the chagrin of Leela fans.

Will Leela fans get their revenge in S15? If past schedules are an indication of future performance, we might see TCEC Cup 3 before the Superfinal (aka final) starts. Leela won TCEC Cup 2.

As an aside, what happened to Chessdom.com? The site hasn't issued a report on TCEC since 12 March and hasn't issued a report on any other news since end-January. The subdomain tcec.chessdom.com ('TCEC - Live Chess Broadcast') is alive and ccrl.chessdom.com shows normal activity, but the rest is dead as a doornail.

CCC: Chess.com issued a report on CCC7, Lc0 Wins Computer Chess Championship, Makes History:-

The machine-learning chess engine Lc0 won the Chess.com Computer Chess Championship last weekend, making history as the first neural-network project to take the title. Lc0, which taught itself how to play chess, is now at the game's pinnacle as the champion computer engine.

The report also introduced the next competition:-

Can Lc0 defend its title in a longer time control? CCC 8: Deep Dive is live now, featuring 24 of the world's top chess engines playing at a rapid time control of 15 minutes plus a five-second increment per move.

CCC8 uses an escalation format, meaning that the engines enter the competition in reverse order of strength -- last ranked starts first, first ranked last -- and play full mini-matches against each of the engines that have already started play. As of this writing, a little more than half of the engines have started play, and the final result is anyone's guess. The official schedule projects 1104 games total.

[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.]