A Cheating Yahoo

Last month's chess story discovered by the mainstream press was A Political Yahoo (June 2019). This month we have a story on every cheater's nightmare -- getting caught.

Summer doldrums? Hardly. Chess was the top Yahoo story after 'Coast Guard nabs drug-smuggling sub' and attention-getters like 'Fox News contributor sent vulgar texts to co-host'.

2019-07-12: Chess grandmaster accused of cheating after using phone on toilet during tournament (yahoo.com; The Telegraph).

The world of elite chess has been engulfed in a cheating scandal after a picture emerged of a top grandmaster sat on a toilet allegedly using a mobile phone to cheat. Police are investigating after Igors Rausis, who has represented Latvia, Bangladesh and the Czech Republic, was caught "red-handed", the game's governing body Fide said today. Mr Rausis, aged 58, stunned the chess world by reaching the game's top echelon at an age most players decline in strength. The former Latvian champion was hailed as an inspiration to older players as he climbed from a Fide rating of around 2500 - the level of an average grandmaster - to the verge of 2700 in six years.

That report was by Leon Watson (also of Chessable?), but the same story appeared on other news sources. The next report looks to be a rewrite of The Telegraph version.

2019-07-14: A star chess player admitted to cheating with his phone on the toilet at a tournament (yahoo.com; insider.com, related to businessinsider.com?).

The chess grandmaster admitted that though they are typically banned, a phone found in a toilet at a tournament in France belonged to him.

The Telegraph version of the story attracted nearly 500 comments.

TCEC S16 Leagues; CCC9/CCC10

Let's see. Where were we in last week's coverage of the world class engine tournaments? To summarize that post, TCEC S16 Qualification; CCC9 Bonuses:-

TCEC: The first stage of S16, the Qualification League, is well underway. • CCC: The 'Gauntlet Bonus III' is just getting started. • Both events might be finished in time for next week's post.

That last sentence was half right. The TCEC event finished, but the CCC event is still running.

TCEC: The chart shows the top half of the Qualification League. According to the current TCEC rules, the top six engines qualify for the next stage, now called 'League 2'. It should start soon.

CCC: Some of the details for CCC10 are available from planning documents. Called 'Neverending Story' (how true!), it will have the following rounds: Qualification (13 engines), Quarterfinal (12), Semifinal (6), and Final (2).

[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]

The World Was Watching

Some day, in the distant future, sociologists (*) will find this video and ask themselves, 'What was this activity that gripped an entire world so many times?' The video starts,

Chess used to be a worldwide phenomenon, with millions of fans spanning the globe. People knew the names of grandmasters. They were rock stars.

'Rock stars', I tell you! From Youtube's 'World Chess' channel...

World Chess Championship in London (1:53) • 'Published on Jun 19, 2019'

...The best chess player in the world was called 'the world chess grandmaster'.

But in 1997, Garry Kasparov, the world chess grandmaster at the time, was beaten by a computer, IBM's Deep Blue. After this unforeseen defeat of human intelligence, chess faded away [a woman is shown crying].

Garry insisted that IBM cheated. He still holds a grudge, but let's get back to the main story.

After twenty years of absence, the design of London's World Chess Championship of 2018 had to make chess attractive again. The tournament was portrayed as a meaningful exchange of skills between two intelligent, real-life individuals in the era of new technology. We presented chess as the art of playing, as an intimate act, something which re-established the contact between people, re-humanized chess, and made it accessible and understandable again.

Oh, so that's what that logo was all about.

We didn't expect the bomb to go off as it did. [shows text: 'Kama Sutra logo critisized'; yup, that's what it says] There were thousands of tweets [text: 'The WCC is making chess sexy again'], dozens of news stories [text: 'No, it is not a joke'], and a viral video from the world number one chess platform.

That was Eric and Jay's video. Thanks, guys!

Beyond the championship's branding, the campaign idea was supported by the industry as well as the chess community itself. In 2018, the World Chess Championship landed on the front pages. [text: '21.000 publications worldwide; 12 million visitors on worldchess.com, 1.9 billion media reach'] The campaign received 1.9 billion impressions, brought coolness to a young audience, and fostered a sense of intimacy for everyone involved. [closing text: 'The World Is Watching'].

What industry are we talking about here -- advertising? Have we already forgotten that the match 'landed on the front pages' because every game was a draw? Bottom line: we live in a multiverse of parallel worlds where every person creates a private reality.

(*) See also The Sociology of Chess (November 2016).

AlphaZero's Zeros

Earlier this year, in Kindle Best Seller (February 2019), I mentioned a Google Books preview version of Sadler & Regan's book 'Game Changer':-

I noticed a section in the book on engine evaluations of '0.00'. I think it was at the end of chapter 2, titled 'ZeroZeroZero'. [...] Now the preview has disappeared and the page is marked 'No preview'. I've been looking into the topic of engine evaluations '0.00' for some time, but I'm not prepared to write a full post on it. I had hoped to use the half-dozen (or so) 'Game Changer' pages to launch a discussion, but that will have to wait for another day.

Last week, while working on the post Interpreting AlphaZero, I discovered another preview copy of the book, which gives me the chance to continue that 'Best Seller' discussion. Chapter 2 of the book, titled 'ZeroZeroZero', starts,

The end of 2017 saw the release of 10 games from a match between the strongest superhuman-strength chess engine -- Stockfish -- and DeepMind’s AlphaZero. The match result was a comprehensive victory for AlphaZero.

A few pages later, the discussion of 0.00 kicks in with a section titled '0.00'. I assume it was written by GM Sadler:-

A couple of months ago, I was reviewing an excellent middlegame book of extremely complicated positions analysed by a world-class grandmaster. The author mentioned a few times when the crisis in a particular position was at its highest that his engines were assessing the position as 0.00. Judging from his comments, he wasn’t completely sure what to make of such an assessment which didn’t always tally with his intuitive or practical feeling about the position.

Any chess player who has analysed complicated positions seriously with an engine running in the background will recognise this scenario. You summon your inner genius, think up a brilliant doublepawn sacrifice to set the board on fire… and your engine responds with an evaluation of 0.00 and a best line ending in you forcing a bizarre repetition of moves. And it’s not just one engine: they all want you to force a repetition (though the ways to do so often vary). It’s perhaps the most irritating and obstructive thing that these otherwise fantastic engines do during analysis.

The discussion goes to the heart of engine analysis and I'll continue it in another post. As an aside, who is the 'world-class grandmaster' mentioned in the first paragraph of the previous excerpt?

Cool as Cucumbers

If climate scientists are right -- and there is no good reason to doubt them -- the heat waves we're experiencing in Europe are going to become more frequent. Last year I used a heat wave as an excuse for two consecutive posts : A Chess Board Is a Stage (July 2018; '♫ We're having a heat wave, a tropical heat wave ♫'), and Chess Greetings. This year I hope to use it only once.

How do you combine chess with the idea of hot? A web search returns many pages on the idea of 'hot girls' who play chess. Since that sort of sexism isn't appropriate to a blog 'For All Ages', what other ideas are there? The following photo does it for me.

Chess in the African Desert

The original eBay auction pegged the photo to 'WWII', but eBay sellers are not always knowledgeable historians. The fellow smoking the pipe has some sort of insignia on his helmet that probably dates the photo, but I have no idea what it means. More importantly, how do these guys stay so cool? Is it just a state of mind?

A Quotable Quote

Pictured here is a search snippet that appeared on a recent search. The search had nothing to do with the content of the snippet and when I tried the same search a few days later, there was no snippet at all.

I don't know why I clicked to expand the question, 'Is chess really that hard?' After all, it's just someone's opinion. Some people will say, 'yes'; others will say, 'no'. Nobody's right and nobody's wrong. The question expanded to this paragraph:-

Chess may not be the easiest game to learn, but it is far from the most difficult. You have to learn the moves of the six pieces, where the piece with the least value, the Pawn, has the most complicated moves. ... One aspect of this myth is true -- it is hard, very hard, to learn to play chess well.

My first reaction was to think, 'That's interesting'. I wasn't sure I agreed with the sentiment, but it sounded like the writer knew something about chess. Then I noticed the reference for the quote (I added speckles to the image to make it hard to read and add a little suspense):-

Top 10 Myths About Chess - Mark Weeks
https://www.mark-weeks.com/aboutcom/aa06f17.htm

The quote was from one of my pages! I wrote those words so many years ago -- June 2006 according to the URL -- that I'd completely forgotten about them. So Google thinks I'm an expert on something. Thanks for the vote of confidence! • For more about Google's 'search snippets' and 'knowledge graphs', see Celebrity Chess Players (March 2019).

TCEC S16 Qualification; CCC9 Bonuses

Although last week's post on the two major, ongoing engine-vs-engine tournaments, TCEC S16 Starts; CCC9 Finishes, summarized three weeks of play, the action at the time of the post was relatively low-key:-

TCEC: S16 is just getting started. • CCC: The 'Gauntlet Bonus II', a 200 game match between Leela and Stockfish, is currently underway and is too close to call.

What happened during the intervening week?

TCEC: The first stage of S16, the Qualification League, is well underway. Two neural network (NN) engine newcomers, ScorpioNN and Stoofvlees, are currently leading, while a third NN, ChessFighterNN, is fighting to stay out of last place. A Leela clone running on CPUs instead of GPUS, is in third place. TCEC chat commands point to resources describing the three NNs:-

• Scorpio (chessprogramming.org)
• Stoofvlees (ditto; the name is Dutch for 'beef stew' - why was it chosen?)
• Chess Fighter Neural Net (talkchess.com)

CCC: The 'Gauntlet Bonus II' finished with Leela beating Stockfish by a narrow, but convincing +29-25=146. The 'Gauntlet Bonus III' with five engines bashing each other over 15 double rounds (300 games total) is just getting started. Why all the bonus events? A chat command,'!whyb', explains,

We also sometimes run bonuses while we are working on new features and bug fixes that we want to have done before the next "official" tournament.

Both the TCEC Qualification League and the CCC Gauntlet Bonus III have another week to run. They might be finished in time for next week's post.

[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]