A Mind-boggling Tactical Battle

No one can accuse me of overusing an easy idea. It's been ten months since I last featured a video on this weekly engine series -- see Stockfish vs. Leela Explained (February 2020).

Stockfish 12 Wins TCEC Season 19! (17:19) • '[Published on] Nov 3, 2020'

The description of the current video said,

Join NM Sam Copeland as he breaks down this epic matchup between computer chess engines Stockfish 12 NNUE and Leela Chess Zero during the TCEC Season 19 Superfinals!

Sam Copeland? Where have we seen that name before? The first reference was 2018 CJA Awards (August 2018):-

For my favorite category, 'Best Chess Blog', the winner was not a blog, but a single blog post: 'Playing The Quintessential American Tournament: The 2017 World Open' (chess.com) by Sam Copeland.

The most recent reference was earlier this month in Komodo NNUE (November 2020):-

We learned, 'Komodo Releases Powerful New "Dragon" Chess Engine' (chess.com; by Sam Copeland).

The game featured in the video is one of those mind-boggling tactical battles where the winner sacrifices heavy material for an enduring attack. I don't remember if the video mentioned it, but the game was no.18 in the 100 game match that I documented in Stockfish Wins TCEC S19; CCC15 Still Halted (October 2020). To play through the moves, see Stockfish 202009282242_nn-baeb9ef2d183 vs. LCZero v0.26.3-rc1_T60.SV.JH.92-190 - TCEC - Live Computer Chess Broadcast (tcec-chess.com/archive). That is one long title! Good thing I wrote the post about Parsing Engine Names (October 2020).

It's also a good thing that Chess.com is allowing resources to be used for covering the TCEC, a rival to its own Computer Chess Championship (CCC). For more Sam Copeland videos, see youtube.com/c/chess/search?query=copeland.

Queen's Gambit Staying Power

Last month's Yahoo post Queen's Gambit Mania (October 2020) -- where 'Yahoo' is a code word for chess in the mainstream press -- started,

Of the 100 chess stories that appear at the end of every month on Google News, three or four on the same topic will signal strong interest in that topic from the mainstream press. What to say of 15 stories on the same topic?

Another month has passed and the mainstream interest in the blockbuster Netflix series continues unabated. It's possibly the biggest mainstream chess story since Bobby Fischer died in 2008. While working on the 'Mania' post, I captured the Google 'Full Coverage' page shown below at the end of this post.

It goes without saying that the chess press coverage was even more maniacal than the mainstream news coverage. Kudos for the most intense chess press interest go to Chessbase. I counted ten stories, many of them with user comments, to which I could have added a few more stories:-

• 2019-05-09: Netflix miniseries "Queen's Gambit" planned (chessbase.com; ditto for the rest in this list)
• 2020-10-26: A must-watch: The Queen's Gambit
• 2020-10-28: The Queen's Gambit - A review
• 2020-11-11: Ju Wenjun for Newsweek: "I'm the 2020 women's chess world champion"
• 2020-11-18: Judit Polgar and Garry Kasparov talk about "The Queen's Gambit" • with Christiane Amanpour on CNN
• 2020-11-18: Netflix's The Queen's Gambit a hit on mainstream media
• 2020-11-21: The Queen's Gambit in Berlin
• 2020-11-22: Carlsen on The Queen's Gambit: "A little too unrealistic"
• 2020-11-24: Let's talk about chess ... with Allan Scott • 'Eric van Reem talked with Allan Scott, one of the creators of the Netflix series'
• 2020-11-25: Jonathan Rowson on "The Queen's Gambit"

As for mainstream news sources, The Guardian tops the list of stories that I noted during the past month.

• 2020-10-23: The Queen's Gambit review – from an orphanage basement to the top of the chess world (theguardian.com; ditto for the rest)
• 2020-11-12: Check her out: how Netflix hit The Queen’s Gambit thrills with fashion
• 2020-11-13: Igniting girls' interest in chess may be great legacy of The Queen's Gambit
• 2020-11-20: Chess: Beth Harmon and Magnus Carlsen triggers for an unlikely boom • Leonard Barden; 'The Netflix mini-series The Queen’s Gambit could encourage more girls to play, but there are obstacles facing any potential new talent'
• 2020-11-21: Magnus Carlsen: 'Chess has not been very kind to women over the years'
• 2020-11-26: How The Queen's Gambit became Netflix's unlikeliest hit of the year

The Netflix series appeared unexpectedly on my radar at one other time during the past month. Near the beginning of the month, one of my pages zoomed to first on the 'Top 10 Pages' for my domain, eclipsing the perennial leader, Index to the World Chess Championship (m-w.com). The new leader, a page I wrote in 2006, titled Top 10 Myths About Chess (ditto; 'People say the darnedest things about chess'), is frequently in the top-10, but rarely leads it. At first I was baffled, but then I noticed the last myth was:-

10. Women can't play chess as well as men • To date it is true that women have not performed as well as men in chess events. There are many possible reasons for this. One may be that male players are often expert at making female players feel uncomfortable at chess events. The Polgar sisters have gone a long way to convince the chess world that women can play very well. Perhaps one day we will discover that women can even play better than men. No one really knows.

Thanks Beth Harmon, Netflix, and Walter Tevis, for making us all think in new ways about our ancient game.

***

Google News 'Full Coverage', end-October 2020

TCEC FRC2 Underway; CCC 'Currently Uncertain'

Two weeks ago, in Stockfish Wins TCEC Cup 7; CCC GPUs Back, I reported,

TCEC: In TCEC Cup 7, Stockfish confirmed its S19 domination by beating LCZero in the final match. The site is currently running 'Sufi Bonus 3'. • CCC: The GPU problems are apparently over. The site is currently running an event called 'Checkmate in 4' with a GPU engine, Lc0. Before that it ran an event called 'Mystery Engine Debut and Tuning'. Will CCC15 be resumed anytime soon or will it be abandoned?

Last week's post was about the 'Mystery Engine', Komodo NNUE, aka 'Dragon'. What has happened on the two main engine vs. engine sites in the last fortnight?

TCEC: After 'Sufi Bonus 3', the site ran a chess960 event, dubbed 'FRC2'. It started with 16 engines in four 'Leagues' (A to D), followed by eight engines in two 'Semileagues' (1 to 2), followed by four engines in a 'Final League', followed by two engines in a 'Final' match. The 'Final League' is currently underway.

CCC: The site is currently running the 'CCC Blitz Championship 2020' with 16 engines, scheduled to finish in a few days. Stockfish appears to have an insurmountable lead over a group of five engines bunched within a two point range, three of them GPU engines. What's next? According to the site's !Command, '!next = Currently uncertain'. The page Work At Chess.com (chess.com) currently has a listing for:-

Computer Chess Championship Tournament Director • Do you love chess engines? Are you a fan of the Computer Chess Championship? Do you know how to run cutechess and configure engines on servers? If so, send us a message telling us about you and your background to: [email address]

Former TD Greco hasn't been seen on Chess.com since early October.

[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]

Hopelessly Entangled Topics

Another post on the Queen's Gambit Mania (October 2020) would be a great choice for this month's continuation of the series on The Sociology of Chess (November 2016). Since I already used the subject in this month's video selection, Queen's Gambit on the Tomatometer, let's go with a different idea. There's only one problem: it's not exactly a new idea either. The subject has already been seen on this blog several times this year, including a previous sociology post of the month, Political Pundits and Pogchamps (August 2020).

Online chess makes its biggest move (5:09) • '[Published on] Nov 1, 2020'

The video clip is from the CBS Sunday Morning show. Its description says,

The pandemic has hurt most professional sports, but it's done wonders for one game: chess! Players and fans, looking for competitive thrills, are logging into online chess platforms like never before. Correspondent David Pogue talks with a chess grandmaster and an online chess star about the boom in the game.

The chess grandmaster is Maurice Ashley, the focus of last month's sociology post, Wild Rabbit, Meet Black Bear (October 2020). The online chess star is Alexandra Botez, the focus of a previous month's sociology post, The Dilemma of Women's Chess (July 2020).

Which of the two themes -- Netflix 'Queen's Gambit' -or- the online boom -- will turn out to be the biggest chess story of 2020? I vote for Netflix. The online boom still has to prove it won't turn into a bust, like so many previous chess booms.

***

I had a good runner-up video for this post, World's hardest "Chess puzzle" | Fun Puzzles | Chess piece placement puzzle, from Youtube's MathsSmart channel.

Over a hundred years ago, Kempelen's famous chess player could not only beat most players that challenged him, but he could also formulate chess puzzles that stumped the best minds of the day. Here is one of the hardest. You are required to place four Black Queens and a Black Bishop on a chessboard so that they control the entire board. In other words, after the five pieces have been positioned, it will be impossible to place the White King on any vacant square without being in check.

The solution is available from the video page. Math and chess will always be hopelessly entangled.

2020 Candidates - Early World Championship Steps

I ended a post last week, Karjakin/Carlsen's Early World Championship Steps, saying,

While we're waiting for the '2020 Candidates Tournament, Yekaterinburg' to resume, I might take the time to determine how all eight of the current candidates first qualified into a World Championship cycle.

To do that, I took the names of the eight players from my page on the 2020 Candidates Tournament, then looked up each name in the Index of Players to find the first World Championship event for that player. The following table summarizes the results of that exercise:-

Alekseenko K	2019 WCup
Caruana F	2009 WCup
Ding Liren	2011 WCup
Giri A	2013 WCup
Grischuk A	2000 KO
Nepomniachtchi I	2011 WCup
Vachier Lagrave M	2009 WCup
Wang Hao	2005 WCup

The 'KO = Knockout' format was the same as the 'WCup = World Cup'. For each of the KO/WCup events, I looked up the qualifying paths ('QP') in the 'Clippings' section at the bottom of the Index of Zonals. The following overview summarizes the result for each of the six unique events listed in the table above.

2000 KO • Zonal Qualifiers 2000-2001 (C19)

Qualified as Junior
[...]
8. A. GRISCHUK RUS 2601

2005 WCup • Zonal Qualifiers 2004-2005 (C22)

110,8602883,"Wang, Hao",,"CHN",,,"Zone 3.5, 2005",

2009 WCup • Zonal Qualifiers 2008-2009 (C24)

e) 46 players from European Championships 2008 & 2009
34. M. Vachier-Lagrave (FRA) 2008
[]
h) 6 nominees of the FIDE President
122. Caruana, Fabiano (ITA)

2011 WCup • Zonal Qualifiers 2010-2011 (C25)

e) 46 players from European Championships 2010 & 2011
29. I. Nepomniachtchi (RUS) 2010
[]
i) 6 nominees of the FIDE President
122. Ding Liren (CHN)

2013 WCup • Zonal Qualifiers 2012-2013 (C26)

d) From FIDE Rating List, average 3/2012 up to 1/2013
24. A. Giri (NED) 2715,33

2019 WCup • Zonal Qualifiers 2018-2019 (C29)

Alekseenko K [?]

Only for the last event (2019 WCup), did the relevant QP page fail to identify the qualifying path for the player. According to Wikipedia's page on Kirill Alekseenko:-

Although [Alekseenko] failed to qualify for the Chess World Cup 2019 through European Championship placement, he was chosen as a wildcard nominee by the organiser of the tournament.

Indeed, my page 'Zonal Qualifiers 2018-2019' has a number of blanks for the various nominees:-

Nominees of the FIDE President
1. Kovalenko Igor (LAT)
2. Salem A. R. Saleh (UAE)
3. Urkedal Frode Olav Olsen (NOR)
4. Ziska Helgi Dam (FAI)
5.
Nominees of the Organizer
1. Iljiushenok Ilia (RUS)
2. Pridorozhni Aleksei (RUS)
3.
4.

The exercise was useful not only to learn more about the importance of the different qualifying paths, but also to identify some weaknesses in my own pages. • To do: (1) Fill in those three blanks for the nominees to '2019 WCup'. (2) Crosslink (in both directions) the IZ/KO/WCup pages with the corresponding QP page for faster navigation between them.

Komodo NNUE

In last week's post on chess engines, Stockfish Wins TCEC Cup 7; CCC GPUs Back, I mentioned a CCC event called 'Mystery Engine Debut and Tuning'. This led to the question:-

What was the 'Mystery Engine'? We may never know, although some sources are certain it was 'Komodo NNUE'.

When I wrote that, I reckoned that 'We may never know' was likely to be short lived. Indeed, a few days after the post we learned, Komodo Releases Powerful New 'Dragon' Chess Engine (chess.com; by Sam Copeland). It started,

The Komodo team has released Komodo 14.1 and a new chess engine dubbed "Dragon." Dragon adds powerful NNUE (Efficiently Updatable Neural Networks) technology to the successful Komodo engine.

After a short explanation of the NNUE technology...

NNUE engines have proven to be a major advancement in chess engine technology, allowing traditional tactically powerful "brute force" engines to incorporate the deeper positional understanding evinced by neural network engines such as AlphaZero and Leela Chess Zero.

...the article confirmed that Komodo NNUE was the mystery engine:-

In a debut and tuning tournament in the Chess.com Computer Chess Championship, Dragon finished fourth behind Stockfish 12, Leelenstein and Leela Chess Zero.

That sentence was followed by the crosstable for the 'Mystery Engine' tournament. Along with some marketing hype for the Komodo engine -- multiple 'World Champion' (i.e. ICGA) titles -- the article included a link to a previous article by the same author about Stockfish NNUE, Stockfish Absorbs NNUE, Claims 100 Elo Point Improvement (chess.com; August 2020), which I don't think I had seen before.

Chess Movie 1927/1938

Since the year 2020 is the year of the chess movie -- a few months we had Chess Movie 2020 (August 2020; 'Critical Thinking' by John Leguizamo), and more recently Queen's Gambit Mania (October 2020) -- it's easy to forget the old classics. Let's go back more than 80 years to a chess movie of yesteryear.

"Le joueur d’échecs" (1938) © Flickr user manhhai under Creative Commons.

The Flickr description, given first in Vietnamese then in English, is a copy/paste of the introduction to Wikipedia's The Chess Player (1938 film):-

The Chess Player is a 1938 French historical drama film directed by Jean Dréville, released by Compagnie Française Cinématographique in France and Columbia Pictures in the United States and starring Françoise Rosay, Conrad Veidt and Bernard Lancret. It is a remake of the 1927 silent film The Chess Player.

A link in the description leads to Le joueur d’échecs (1938; conradveidt.wordpress.com; 'The Conrad Veidt Website'), with 25 photos from the film, including the poster shown above. For the IMDb writeups on the two versions of the film, see:-

• The Chess Player (1927; imdb.com); • 'In 1776, an inventor conceals a Polish nobleman in his chess-playing automaton, a machine whose fame leads it to the court of the Russian empress.'
  
  
• Chess Player (1938; ditto) • 'A toymaker in Poland specializes in building lifesize mechanical men. He builds a chess-playing "automaton" to hide a pretty young Polish activist who is being hunted by occupying Russian forces.'

The red text in the image above is not on the original poster. It is a watermark that says, 'Scanned by Monique classique'.