Daily Archives: December 23, 2021

In Africa, rescuing the languages that Western tech ignores – ABC News

Posted: December 23, 2021 at 10:52 pm

LAGOS, Nigeria -- Computers have become amazingly precise at translating spoken words to text messages and scouring huge troves of information for answers to complex questions. At least, that is, so long as you speak English or another of the worlds dominant languages.

But try talking to your phone in Yoruba, Igbo or any number of widely spoken African languages and youll find glitches that can hinder access to information, trade, personal communications, customer service and other benefits of the global tech economy.

We are getting to the point where if a machine doesnt understand your language it will be like it never existed, said Vukosi Marivate, chief of data science at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, in a call to action before a December virtual gathering of the world's artificial intelligence researchers.

American tech giants dont have a great track record of making their language technology work well outside the wealthiest markets, a problem thats also made it harder for them to detect dangerous misinformation on their platforms.

Marivate is part of a coalition of African researchers who have been trying to change that. Among their projects is one that found machine translation tools failed to properly translate online COVID-19 surveys from English into several African languages.

Most people want to be able to interact with the rest of the information highway in their local language, Marivate said in an interview. He's a founding member of Masakhane, a pan-African research project to improve how dozens of languages are represented in the branch of AI known as natural language processing. Its the biggest of a number of grassroots language technology projects that have popped up from the Andes to Sri Lanka.

Tech giants offer their products in numerous languages, but they don't always pay attention to the nuances necessary for those apps work in the real world. Part of the problem is that theres just not enough online data in those languages including scientific and medical terms for the AI systems to effectively learn how to get better at understanding them.

Google, for instance, offended members of the Yoruba community several years ago when its language app mistranslated Esu, a benevolent trickster god, as the devil. Facebook's language misunderstandings have been tied to political strife around the world and its inability to tamp down harmful misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines. More mundane translation glitches have been turned into joking online memes.

Omolewa Adedipe has grown frustrated trying to share her thoughts on Twitter in the Yoruba language because her automatically translated tweets usually end up with different meanings.

One time, the 25-year-old content designer tweeted, Tl b dn, Tl b tr. yin lm b e , which means, If the land (or country, in this context) is not peaceful, or merry, youre responsible for it. Twitter, however, managed to end up with the translation: If you are not happy, if you are not happy.

For complex Nigerian languages like Yoruba, those accent marks -- often associated with tones -- make all the difference in communication. Ogun, for instance, is a Yoruba word that means war, but it can also mean a state in Nigeria (gn), god of iron (gn), stab (gn), twenty or property (Ogn).

Some of the bias is deliberate given our history," said Marivate, who has devoted some of his AI research to the southern African languages of Xitsonga and Setswana spoken by his family members, as well as to the common conversational practice of code-switching between languages.

The history of the African continent and in general in colonized countries, is that when language had to be translated, it was translated in a very narrow way, he said. "You were not allowed to write a general text in any language because the colonizing country might be worried that people communicate and write books about insurrections or revolutions. But they would allow religious texts.

Google and Microsoft are among the companies that say they are trying to improve technology for so-called low-resource languages that AI systems don't have enough data for. Computer scientists at Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, announced in November a breakthrough on the path to a universal translator" that could translate multiple languages at once and work better with lower-resourced languages such as Icelandic or Hausa.

That's an important step, but at the moment, only large tech companies and big AI labs in developed countries can build these models, said David Ifeoluwa Adelani. He's a researcher at Saarland University in Germany and another member of Masakhane, which has a mission to strengthen and spur African-led research to address technology that does not understand our names, our cultures, our places, our history.

Improving the systems requires not just more data but careful human review from native speakers who are underrepresented in the global tech workforce. It also requires a level of computing power that can be hard for independent researchers to access.

Writer and linguist Kola Tubosun created a multimedia dictionary for the Yoruba language and also created a text-to-speech machine for the language. He is now working on similar speech recognition technologies for Nigerias two other major languages, Hausa and Igbo, to help people who want to write short sentences and passages.

We are funding ourselves," he said. "The aim is to show these things can be profitable.

Tubosun led the team that created Googles Nigerian English voice and accent used in tools like maps. But he said it remains difficult to raise the money needed to build technology that might allow a farmer to use a voice-based tool to follow market or weather trends.

In Rwanda, software engineer Remy Muhire is helping to build a new open-source speech dataset for the Kinyarwanda language that involves a lot of volunteers recording themselves reading Kinyarwanda newspaper articles and other texts.

They are native speakers. They understand the language, said Muhire, a fellow at Mozilla, maker of the Firefox internet browser. Part of the project involves a collaboration with a government-supported smartphone app that answers questions about COVID-19. To improve the AI systems in various African languages, Masakhane researchers are also tapping into news sources across the continent, including Voice of Americas Hausa service and the BBC broadcast in Igbo.

Increasingly, people are banding together to develop their own language approaches instead of waiting for elite institutions to solve problems, said Damin Blasi, who researches linguistic diversity at the Harvard Data Science Initiative.

Blasi co-authored a recent study that analyzed the uneven development of language technology across the world's more than 6,000 languages. For instance, it found that while Dutch and Swahili both have tens of millions of speakers, there are hundreds of scientific reports on natural language processing in the Western European language and only about 20 in the East African one.

O'Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.

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Samsung plant may bring the infobahn literally to Texas – The Real Deal

Posted: at 10:52 pm

(iStock/Illustration by Kevin Rebong for The Real Deal)

The infobahn is coming to central Texas or at least to one 17-mile stretch of highway.

The section of US Highway 79 near the small town of Taylor, where Samsung plans to build a $17 billion semiconductor factory, may be poised to be a destination for more tech facilities, according to the Austin Business Journal. That would draw residential subdivisions, mixed-use properties and commercial projects aimed at serving the communities around them.

While the highway running west from Taylor largely cuts through farmland and the occasional car dealership, the areas economic boom is more visible on the outskirts of Hutto. Thats where two major projects are in the works: a shovel-ready, 1,486-acre megasite and the 750-acre RCR Taylor Logistics Park, a future industrial park with rail access to the east.

The corridor, about 30 miles northeast of Austin, has plenty of underdeveloped land as well as access to Interstate 35, the states Highway 130 and a parallel Union Pacific rail line. Nearby Austin metro area developments include the $550 million Kalahari Resort and Convention Center, the $300 million, 110-acre Mihaus mixed-use project in Round Rock, a new Apple campus in northwest Austin and the Tesla Giga Texas factory in East Austin.

All but the Tesla factory are located in business-friendly, often incentive-wielding Williamson County, where County Judge Bill Gravell told the outlet that he envisions the evolution of the technology superhighway of the world.

Samsungs new plant could be a new center of gravity for the types of industries that rely upon chips today John Boyd Jr, principal at Boca Raton, Florida-based site selection firm the Boyd Company, told ABJ. He noted that Texas Instruments plans to build a semiconductor fabrication facility in Sherman, about an hour north of Dallas, where the company is based.

Texas is really a destination point, in terms of its leading the nation within the semiconductor industry, Boyd told the outlet. This industry is really in the global spotlight today given the supply chain crisis.

[ABJ] Cindy Winder

Contact Cindy Widner

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Apple among tech companies quickly losing talent to lucrative crypto startups – 9to5Mac

Posted: at 10:52 pm

Many of the tech giants are taking their time considering whether or not to support cryptocurrencies amid a huge wave of investment and interest in the space. Now a new report from the New York Times looks at how executives and engineers are leaving companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, and Meta for crypto startups.

Last month, we heard Tim Cook share in an interview that he personally owns bitcoin and/or Ethereum while reiterating that Apple is looking at it but that the company does not have immediate plans to implement support for cryptocurrencies.

But while companies like Apple, Amazon, and more take time deliberating if or how to jump in, fast-moving startups in the crypto space are attracting executives and engineers from the tech giants.

When Sandy Carter left her job as a vice president of Amazons cloud computing unit this month, she announced in a LinkedIn post that she was joining a crypto technology company. She included a link for open positions at the start-up.

Within two days, she said, more than 350 people many from the biggest internet companies had clicked the link to apply for jobs at the firm, Unstoppable Domains. The start-up sells website addresses that sit on the blockchain, the distributed ledger system that underpins cryptocurrencies.

The NYT report highlights that over $28 billion has been invested into crypto and blockchain startups around the world this year, which is 4x what was seen in 2020.

Carter also noted that beyond the potential for being very lucrative, people are interested to join crypto startups to move toward the goal of decentralization.

Ms. Carter, the former Amazon vice president, said people were interested in working at crypto firms for more than just money. Some were drawn to the ethos of web3, which strives to decentralize power and decision making. Its an alternative to how Google and Facebook came to dominate the internet by sucking up personal data from users to sell targeted ads.

Former Google executive Sridhar Ramaswamy compared where crypto is at now to the 1990s and the birth of the internet:

There is a giant sucking sound coming from crypto, said Sridhar Ramaswamy, chief executive of search engine start-up Neeva and a former Google executive, who competes with crypto companies for talent. It feels a bit like the 1990s and the birth of the internet all over again. Its that early, that chaotic and that much full of opportunity.

The full NYT piece is an interesting read, check it out here.

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Snapchat knows you want to see what youd look like in the metaverse – TechCrunch

Posted: at 10:52 pm

Snapchat released an Avatar lens AR filter today, which makes you look like a Sims character. Or, in more modern parlance, it makes you look like what youd look like in the metaverse. To use the lens, open your camera in the Snapchat app to scan the QR code on Snapchats website, then look at how scarily smooth your skin is in the metaverse, where freckles and acne evidently do not exist.

A new Snapchat lens isnt inherently notable, especially as the company goes all-in on augmented reality but this is a continuation of a years-long, on-and-off viral trend. And if the past is any indication, itll probably go viral and crop up on TikTok soon.

In August 2020, Snapchat released the Cartoon Face lens, which users realized could be used to Disneyfy their pets the tag#disneydog jumped over to TikTok to get 40.9 million views. Then, Snapchat struck viral gold again that December when it released the Cartoon lens, which rendered more even realistic results for human faces than the previous iteration.

But the app keeps manufacturing slightly improved versions of this trend, which end up going viral as well. Humans are so predictable.

In June of this year, the Disney-like trend struck again with the Cartoon Style 3D lens, which earned 2.8 billion impressions in its first week after release. And now, weve arrived at the Avatar lens, which also makes your clothing look cartoonish, not just your face. Whats next, a lens that also makes our surroundings look like something that someone built on Horizon Worlds? Probably.

Earlier this month, Snapchat hosted Lens Fest, a celebration of the apps AR technology. The company announced at the event that there are over 250,000 lens creators from more than 200 countries. Combined, they have made 2.5 million lenses that have been viewed more than 3.5 trillion times. Meanwhile, on Snapchats TikTok clone Spotlight, the app awarded 12,000 creators a total of $250 million for their posts. The company says that over 65% of Spotlight submissions use one of Snapchats creative tools or lenses.

Companies like Niantic and Snapchat think that augmented reality is better suited to build the metaverse than virtual reality. But even for headset-loving tech giants like Meta, AR can help make us actually look like ourselves in the metaverse. The Snapchat Avatar filter makes me look like an unrealistic, Barbie-esque version of myself, yet it still feels a bit more personalized than my Meta Horizon avatar, which just looks like any random white woman with brown hair and glasses.

Still, theres something disorienting about seeing ourselves like this my avatar in the Snapchat lens looks like me, but my eyebrows become perfectly manicured, like I just got them tediously threaded by a beautician. My lips become fuller, like Im wearing a plumping lip gloss, but I didnt put on any makeup today.

In the VR metaverse, we need some sort of avatar to represent us, because otherwise, were just an invisible blob. Startups like Ready Player Me, Spatial and Geniesare cropping up to help us craft our virtual personas. But in augmented reality, the premise is to alter the real world in a way that helps us engage more deeply in it. Snapchats AR filters are fun, but we dont really need avatars in the AR metaverse, and maybe thats a good thing we already know how dangerous it can be when we only present the best versions of ourselves online.

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Unicorns, SPACs and acquisitions: Here are the top DC tech moments of 2021 – Technical.ly DC

Posted: at 10:52 pm

Look, were not here to discredit the impact of Amazon HQ2national tech giants in the DMV over the past year, but we think the local growth companies deserve some well-earned credit, too.

All on their own, theyve been hard at workputting the DC tech scene on the map (well, more than it already was) in 2021. With overnight IPOs and a whole herd of new unicorns not to mention the oodles of VC funding we compiled earlier this week the tech giants, old pros and newer stars brought all kinds of eyes to the area this year. And if its any indication of 2022, theres plenty of room for even more to follow in the footsteps.

To wrap up the year, weve rounded up the top public offerings, M&As and new unicorns from 2021. Take a bow, guys.

The DMV had more than a few companies make their debut in the public markets this year, largely thanks to a number of SPAC mergers. In total, seven companies went public, with one other announcing 2022 intentions.

Xometry premiered on the Nasdaq in June 2021 (photo via @Nasdaq on Twitter).

Chip Paucek, 2U CEO (right), and Anant Argawal, 2U chief open learning officer (courtesy photo).

This year featured a number of noteworthy acquisitions from companies in and out of the region pulling DMV firms under their umbrella, but we narrowed it down to the six biggest.

ID.mes headquarters in McLean, Virginia (courtesy photo).

The mythical creature isnt so much of a fantasy in the area anymore. The District and surrounding region is now home to a number of once-startups now valued at over $1 billion.

P.S. We also published a roundup of the regions top megarounds in 2021, if youve got the growth company bug.

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TikTok Just Ended Google’s 15 Year Rein as the World’s Most Popular Web Domain – Inc.

Posted: at 10:52 pm

For most of the last decade and a half, Google has been the most visited web domain in the world, and it's not even close. The last time another site posed a real challenge for the top spotwas Yahoo, and that was a decade ago.

When you consider the number of people who use Google's services every day for everything from school assignments, collaborating on documents, finding directions, sharing photos, and well, searching for just about everything, it's not all that surprising.Google is the most popular search engine in the world, and it's where the vast majority of people start when they want to find something online.

Somewhere close to half of all internet traffic originates with a Google search. That dominance has made Google the world's largest advertising platform--not to mention the most profitable.

This year, that has been changing. According to a report released on Monday by Cloudflare, one of the major internet content delivery networks, TikTok.com overtook Google as the most visited domain in the world in 2021.

On the one hand, considering how relatively new TikTok is in our collective consciousness, that's surprising. On the other hand, when you rememberTikTok is the fastest-growing social network ever, it shouldn't be. It was even the most-downloaded app in 2020 and now has more than 1 billion users.

TikTok's rise to the top clearly says something about howtechnology is changing, but more importantly, it says something about the change in the way we find and consume information about the world around us. For more than a decade, the way we use the internet has mainly been dominated by Google, Facebook, YouTube (which is owned by Google), and Amazon. If you happened to find yourself somewhere else online, there's a good chance you started at one of those sites.

However, that's becoming less the case, especially with younger users. TikTok is more popular among teenagers than Instagram or Snapchat. Despite that, TikTok isn't just videos of memes or teenagers dancing. Some of the most popular content are beauty tips, recipes, and how-to videos. That's squarely in the lane occupied by Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.

It also means that people aren't just using TikTok for entertainment, but for information. That'sa massive shift, and it has real implications for every other platform.

TikTok is quickly becoming a real threat to the established tech giants in a way almost no one expected. It makes sense that a new social media platform could take away attention from Facebook, or Twitter,or Instagram, but Google? Theplace we go for information about, well, everything? That's a shift that most people wouldn't have predicted because it doesn't fit our understanding of how people use technology.

Let's set aside privacy or security concerns about TikTok, which is owned by a Chinese company,Bytedance. We'll also ignore the absurdity of the previous administration trying to force a sale first to Microsoft, then to Oracle. That only distracts from the reality that TikTok has become a far more integral way to access information that most people understood or expected.

Of course, it isn't without problems. Any platform that relies on user-generated content faces the same challenge of what to do with that content when it crosses a line. TikTok has its share of misinformation, as well as racist and incendiary content. And it isn't clear it has had any better luck moderating its platform--but, as it continues to grow, that becomes more of a concern.

TikTok is still small compared to its competition in almost every other measurement. Its Chinese parent company is private, so it's impossible to know exactly how much revenue it brings in. Still, analysts think TikTok had around $2 billion in revenue in 2020, a number that is a rounding error compared to Google ($181 billion) or even Facebook ($86 billion). That, however, means it has enormous room to grow.

There's a certain amount of irony that while the established tech giants have attracted intense scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators on both sides of the Atlantic, they're already in the process of being disrupted by an app that most of them didn't take seriously. The real lesson here is that established businesses and institutions are notoriously slow at recognizing the thing that will replace them.

They assume that their main competition is what they can see in front of them. Sometimes, however, it's something no one took seriously until suddenly it's not just a shiny new thing that everyone assumes will fade with time, but a real threat. By then, it's probably too late.

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

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7 Tech Recruiters to Know, From Startups to AWS and Meta – Business Insider

Posted: at 10:52 pm

Chelsey Opare-Addo Dre Moore On the Shot

Background: Chelsey Opare-Addo landed her "dream job" as an Amazon recruiter this past year, she said. She also runs her own rsum-coaching business, Not Your Mother's Resume, which she said was inspired by her large family (who always solicited her help applying to jobs).

She says her range of experiences has shown her what companies of all sizes are looking for during the hiring process.

Advice: Tech recruiters don't always come from technical backgrounds, so Opare-Addo appreciates specificity, she said. For example, rather than saying that you know five coding languages, spell out what these languages are, she said.

"You really have three audiences when you're writing your rsum," she said. "The first one is the applicant-tracking system, the software that picks up your rsum and sometimes scans for keywords. The second audience is the recruiter. And the third is the hiring manager."

The name of Opare-Addo's rsum-coaching business, Not Your Mother's Resume, is inspired by how she thinks about rsums, she said.

"The name comes from a lot of rsums that I see play it really safe, and they try to show the most professional facade, almost a shadow of themselves," she said. "You don't have to do that. You don't have to be boring. Recruiters aren't boring we're some of the spiciest people I've ever met."

Preferred contact method: LinkedIn is the best way to contact Opare-Addo, she said. She primarily works with software engineers with at least three years of experience but offers insight for any role.

"When you're reaching out to any recruiter, the best thing to do is look on their profile and make sure they actually recruit for the roles you're interested in," she said. "If you can find a role that they're recruiting for and you have the job ID, include that in the message."

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Top 10 Strongest Chess Engines In 2021 – Hercules Chess

Posted: at 10:51 pm

According to studies, chess has a total of 10120 possible moves. These are so many moves for the human mind to comprehend. Chess has been around for over 1400 years and continues to improve with the growth of technology and the passage of time.

Today, chess engines are used to analyze the millions of possible outcomes in a bid to come up with the most efficient moves. Chess engines have been around for several decades and they continue to get better with the growth of technology.

The engines are now more selective and have better understanding of different chess positions. In this article, we analyze the top 10 strongest chess engines in 2021.

Before diving into the top 10 list of the strongest chess engines in 2021, it is important to know how these engines are rated. Very many chess engines rating lists are available.

The rating lists are based on the number of moves they can make per minute and their margins of error.

The most famous rating lists include Computer Chess Rating Lists (CCRL) and Chess Engines Grand Tournament (CEGT). We use these rating lists to present to you the best chess engines that have surpassed and dominated humanity.

Xiphose has a CCRL rating of 3324 and CEGT rating of 3193. Distributed under General Public License (GNU), Xiphos is an open-source chess engine written in C. Under the watchful eye of PEXT bitboards or magic bitboards, this chess engine can run on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux operating systems.

Developed in 1993, Shredder is a chess engine with a CCRL rating of 3324 and a CEGT rating of 3153. It has been able to withstand the test of time through its constant success and the ability to get the job done.

Since its inception, this search engine has won over 20 titles which include the World Microcomputer Chess Championship held in 1996 and 200. Shredder has also won double World Computer Chess Championships, a World Chess Software Championship and 5 times World Computer Speed Championships.

Shredder is supported by Mac OS, Windows and Linux operating systems. Its graphical interface is top-notch, which comes as a little surprise considering that it was developed by the legendary Millennium Chess System.

With CCRL rating of 3326 and CEGT rating of 3234, Boot chess engine is one of the strongest in the universe. Written in Delphi 6, this chess engine figures sliding piece attacks with rotated bitboards.

It comes with a lazy SMP and its evaluation function is fully redesigned. To rank amongst the best, this chess engine solves problems such as decreasing late moves, deepening internal iterative and prunes null moves.

It has multiple processors that can support computers with both 32 and 64 bit processors.

Chess Master Vasik Rajlich is responsible for designing this chess engine. From 2007 to 2012, Rybka was a force to reckon. It has single-handedly won many computer chess tournaments and continues to do so up to today.

In the period between 2007 and 2010, this search engine won four consecutive World Computer Chess Championships even though the titles were later stripped for plagiarism.

However, the International Computer Games Association (ICGA) ordered Rajlich to merge with ChessBases late in 2015.

Stockfish has a CCRL rating of 3390. It is an open source UCI chess engine and it is available for free for chess gamers. The software works perfectly for both mobile devices and desktops.

The chess engine has been dominant since 2014 and has won several world computer chess championships between then and now.

Even though it was developed in 2014, this chess engine quickly grew into a force to reckon. Its main stronghold is the ability to speed up the attack calculations and come up with perfect results. It uses the principal variation search with the aid of a transposition table inside an iterative framework.

To make Andscacs more powerful, chess researchers came up with 200 evaluation features that encompassed 750,000 positions.

With a CCRL rating of 3430 and CEGT rating of 3319, Fire is one of the best chess engines currently in the market. At first, Fire was an open source chess engine. However, that quickly changed into a closed Windows and is only available for brand new Intel processors.

When it was first developed, this chess engine was known as Firebird but was later changed to Fire because there was a conflict in the trademark name. Even with all these internal changes, Fire continues to scale new heights and it is definitely one of the best chess engines in 2021.

Developed by Don Dailey and Mark Lefler, Komodo is a chess engine with CCRL rating of 3508 and CEGT rating of 3424. Today, Komodo is a commercial chess engine but its older versions are available for free. Komodo ranks amongst the best because of its ability to find moves in situations where other chess engines struggle. Chess players claim that it sets them up to win.

Houdini has a CCRL rating of 3529 and CEGT rating of 3444. It is famous for its positional style and the ability to build strong defenses. To date, Houdini has won the Top Chess Engine Championship 3 times and continues to scale new heights.

Leela Chess Zero chess engine has a CCRL rating of 3463 and CEGT rating of 3467. It ranks amongst the best because of its ability to rely on self-taught neural networks to make superb chess moves. The chess engine learns from itself by playing against itself as many times as possible.

Coming up with a list of the top 10 strongest chess engines is not easy considering that they continue to evolve with the growth of technology. However, we have managed to come up with the above list after researching and analyzing the chess engines best features as it stands.

Chess engines are beneficial because they can analyze the many possible moves that chess presents and come up with the best options.

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The 10 Greatest Blitz Chess Games Of All Time – Chess.com

Posted: at 10:51 pm

The 2021 FIDE World Rapid & Blitz Championship is coming up quickly. We covered the greatest rapid games ever several weeks ago. What about blitz?

How to watch the 2021 FIDE World Rapid & Blitz Championship live

A great blitz game is often more than a matter of accuracy, but of stunning and unpredictable moves that keep the commentators and viewersand, for the players, their opponentson their toes. But the very best players can also win at blitz with high levels of accurate play. Both types of games, the dramatic and the accurate, can make for historically great blitz games.

From the invention of chess until at least the 1960s and up to even a few years ago, however, "historically great blitz" would have been considered an oxymoron. Now, almost in 2022, blitz chess has grown to be treated as an equally legitimate form of the game as the classical hours-long variety. It certainly has a reputation as friendlier to modern audiences, with our short attention spans and... What was I talking about again?

So, what are the best blitz games ever? There's almost too many to choose from, with literally billions having been played by now. But we tried to pick out 10 fascinating thrill rides.

When Chess.com held our Immortal Games contest in April 2021, this game came out on top, and for good reason. In just 18 moves, Brazil's GM Luis Paulo Supi defeated GM Magnus Carlsen (yes, that Magnus Carlsen) with a stunning sacrifice. It's one of those rare moves that speaks for itself.

Particularly amazing is that what looks like a slow buildup, Supi sacrificing a piece to double on the open a-file, becomes forced checkmate in what feels like an instant.

Don't discount the possibility that Supi had seen this pattern before. If you read our piece above on the best rapid games ever, you saw Kramnik-Anand 2008, which featured a mirror image of the same mating idea.

But if Supi had seen the idea, Carlsen may not have. He was caught totally by surprisejust see his expression in this thumbnail:

Blitz chess was a thing before 1970, but only casually. The Herceg Novi blitz tournament was the first major event of its kind, and would be the only one for nearly two decades. GM Bobby Fischer was at the height of his powers in 1970, and he proved it at Herceg Novi with an absurd 19/22 score,winning the tournament by 4.5 points.

There are several Fischer games from this event to choose from, but his game with Black against GM Viktor Korchnoi was perhaps his best of the event.

Fischer's notes say more than enough about the game. About his tournament performance, Chess Life & Review wrote in July 1970: "The Soviet blitz specialists... all expected that Bobby would absorb some good lessons [but] instead of taking lessons he gave them to his peerless opponents."

A big part of the drama in blitz isn't the moves themselves, but the time available in which to make them. Time is of the absolute essence, but in 1994, GM Viswanathan Anand showed that patience can pay off as well. With five minutes to play an armegeddon game, Anand spent 1:43 on move four.

Try not to tense up as commentators GM Daniel King and GM Maurice Ashley lose patience with Anand's forever-taking in the opening (uploaded here by an account unaffiliated with us).

As the announcers noted, Smirin's move order was unusual. Anand was trying to remember all the intricacies of this move order before committing. Here's the full game:

No one could have known in advance, but the time Vishy took ultimately paid off as he won the game. In his 2019 bookMind Master he reached this conclusion from the game: "It's a lesson that almost runs as a leitmotif through my career: It's not the worst idea to take a two-minute pause and get some clarity."

Once Smirin missed 18...Be4, as he must have when playing 17.Qxb7, and Anand saw it to keep his piece, the game was over. Even without a ton of time, Anand never lost the advantage afterwards, another display of his amazing speed as a younger player in the 90seven if he did take 103 seconds on one move early in the game.

If Magnus ever did play a world championship against GM Ding Lirena significant "if" at this pointhe could not necessarily get away with drawing every classical game, with Ding having already proven he can take Magnus in speed chess even when the stakes are high.

The 2019 Sinquefield Cup went to tiebreaks after and Ding and Carlsen both scored 6.5/11, which Magnus achieved by winning his last two games after nine draws. (In fact, in the main event, 54 of the 66 games were draws, and 10 of the 11 players played three decisive games or fewer. The only exception: GM Ian Nepomniachtchi with six, which he split 3-3.)

Entering the tiebreaker round, Carlsen had won all of his last 10 tiebreaks, going back 12 years. Not only did Ding end that streak, but he did it in style. Chess.com named the second blitz tiebreak game as the eighth-best game of 2019, and that's at any time control.

Titled Tuesday is played 52 times a year, by hundreds of titled players each week, and for 11 rounds every tournament. Naturally, it has produced many great games, but this one played on August 24, 2021 may take the cake for pure wildness. It's one of those games that gets far too complicated for even masters to play perfectly in three minutes. That's why a great blitz game is sometimes about more than accuracy.

Let's let NM James Canty III take it away in our modestly-titled video about the contestThe Craziest Blitz Game Ever Played:

Perhaps the earliest famous examples of GM Hikaru Nakamura's online brilliance were these troll jobs on older engines, played without increment at the Internet Chess Club.

Well, the endings were troll-like, but the opening and middlegames weren't. NM Sam Copeland explains the Rybka game here, so the game for our list is the one vs. Crafty. It was played earlier, in 2007. And, although it's a matter of taste, underpromoting to a bunch of knights and checkmating is probably more amusing than doing the same thing with bishops.

ChessGames.com had the perfect pun for this contest"Horsing Around":

It was also a purer effort than the one against Rybka; no exchange sac trickery this time. Just the closed-position destruction still possible for a top human against a mid-aughts engine. Now, of course, even the best humans would need to get odds to compete with a computer. And in three minutes without increment, it would take some pretty heavy odds.

From a four-player tournament in St. Louis starring the top three U.S. players and GM Garry Kasparov. Nakamura won the overall event, and by 2016 Kasparov was still capable of doing better than 2.5/18 in a high-level blitz tournament, but GM Wesley So's win over Kasparov was the game of the tournament. He didn't need any time to warm up, either, pulling it off in the first round of the tournament.

If you like pins and sacrifices, you won't want to miss it:

It was an instant classic, receiving raves from nearly every publication that covered the event.

Supi won the immortal game contest, so a different game was needed for the best queen sac. GM Shakhriyar Mamedyarov earned it with this effort.

Watch Mamyedyarov pull it off here:

The computer prefers 11.Qe4, but the sac is a legitimate option, obviously scores the most style points, and Black has to give the queen back with 12...Qxc7 to stay competitive. Falling into a mate-in-one at the end isn't necessary either, but the only good move, 17...Kf6, sure doesn't feel like a good move, especially in blitz.

This game features the lowest-rated competitors on the list, but you'll see why it makes it by move 17. It was runner-up to Supi-Carlsen in the Immortal Games contest.

Yes, this game actually happened and is not a puzzle. Somehow Black's 16...a6 traps his entire queenside after White's 17.a5 response. The knight on b8 now has zero squares, with a6, c6, and d7 all occupied and blockaded. Because of that, the rook on a8 can't go anywhere besides a7 and back. And the same pawns blocking the knight also shut in the light-squared bishop. Now that's a bad bishop!

After trading everything else off, White begins trolling his pieces away. Amusingly, this actually blows the advantage, but White is never losing the game despite being down two pieces, and the computer actually needs a few seconds to decide that the position is equal, not losing, for White after 25.Re8+ (a move Smerdon admitted to as being a bit "cheeky"). It's always nice to trick a computer these days, even briefly.

When the dust settles, White's free bishop and rampant kingside pawns checkmate Black just as Black is finally trying to break back out. A silly ending fitting for a silly game.

Uncovered when we wrote and recorded about Nakamura's best moves on Chess.com was this dandy.

Nakamura played GM Hans Niemann 20 times on this date, won all but one, and was above 90% accuracy in nearly every game. Some of us have a hard enough time getting 90% once in 20 times, but you don't need me to tell you that's why Hikaru's Hikaru.

If you want all 10 of our games in a single PGN, here you go:

Not a single game from the World Rapid & Blitz made our list, nor did any Carlsen game. But there's a first time for everything, and maybe the next great blitz game is coming right up.

What other games would you have put on this list? Let us know in the comments!

The rest is here:

The 10 Greatest Blitz Chess Games Of All Time - Chess.com

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Cherokee Casino welcomes 2022 with New Year’s balloon drop and more – Cherokee Phoenix

Posted: at 10:50 pm

WEST SILOAM SPRINGS Cherokee Casino West Siloam Springs is pulling out the stops and ringing in the New Year with a weekend full of cash drawings, live music and more Dec. 29 through Jan. 1.

After hosting a $20,000 Money Machine from 7 10 p.m. on Dec. 29, the casino resort will kick off the holiday weekend festivities on Thursday, Dec. 30 with Oklahoma native Tennessee Jet taking the stage at SEVEN Bar at 8 p.m. for a free show.

On Friday, Dec. 31, New Years Eve starts early with hourly drawings from noon to 11 p.m. where winners can take home a share of $345,000.Registration begins at 10 a.m.

The Tulsa-based 80s tribute band Dead Metal Society will take the stage in SEVEN Bar at 9 p.m. and play through to the balloon drop inside the venue at midnight. Guests will enjoy complimentary hats and horns located throughout the resort.

On New Years Day, Cherokee Casino keeps the party going with hourly cash drawings from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. for a share of $160,000. Registration begins at 3 p.m. Travis Kidd will take over the SEVEN Bar stage for a free show starting at 9 p.m.

Flint Creek Steakhouse will also feature a holiday meal of stuffed beef tenderloin with mushroom duxelles topped withbarnaise sauce, grilled asparagus, and potato gratin from Dec. 1730.

For more information on drawing eligibility, visit Player Services or go tohttps://bit.ly/32cGdYw. Cherokee Casino West Siloam Springs is committed to welcoming all guests in a safe environment with the Responsible Hospitality program thats focused on enhanced cleaning practices, social interactions and workplace protocols.

Locatedoff U.S. Highway 412 and State Highway 59 at the Arkansas-Oklahoma state line, Cherokee Casino and Hotel West Siloam Springs is the regions leading casino entertainment destination, serving Northwest Arkansas and the surrounding area.For more information, visitwww.cherokeecasino.comand click on the West Siloam Springs tab, or call 800-754-4111.

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Cherokee Casino welcomes 2022 with New Year's balloon drop and more - Cherokee Phoenix

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