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Category Archives: Chess Engines

Battle of the Sexes: Men increase lead – Chessbase News

Posted: February 5, 2022 at 5:47 am

The ray of hope for the womens team was a change of momentum during the round as what seemed likely to be a heavy defeat was kept within bounds via some remarkable saves and turnarounds towards the end of the round. They now need to repeat their big wins in rounds one and two victories if they are to snatch victory at the death.

5 out of 8 is now the leading individual score on either team, achieved by Mariya Muzychuk on Team Pia and by no fewer than four members of Team Sabino, comprising the captain himself, Balazs Csonka, Bilel Bellahcene and Ravi Haria, the latter two with streaks of three wins in a row.

Hungarian IM Balazs Csonka has been the star performer for the mens team so far and might have reached 6/8 but for missing a simple finish after a dazzling series of moves to reach a won position against Zhansaya Abdumalik, who now has 4/8. The game began with a Symmetrical English opening and the fireworks started with a thematic Sicilian sacrifice of a knight on d5 to open a path to the black king. The follow-up was far from routine, however, with a remarkable sequence of b6-b7 and Rd1xd6 which had the feel of a boxers combination punch. Black had to surrender her queen for rook and minor piece, but the attack continued. Then, just as most of the hard work seemed to have been done. White missed the simple 36 Bc8, picking off another important central pawn, and instead allowed Black a chance to consolidate.

Mariya Muzychuk overcame Husain Aziz in a rook and pawn ending

Mariya Muzychuk now has a point more than her teammates with 5/8, scoring a confident and smooth victory over Husain Aziz who now has 3 from 8. The game started with a Caro-Kann, Exchange variation, with Black boldly advancing the g-pawn in front of her castled king. The first move which looked fishy was perhaps 19 b3 and before long some pieces were exchanged and a weak c-pawn had been lost. However, when it came down to a rook and pawns ending, it began to look distinctly drawn. But White played inaccurately after the time control and his errors were expertly punished by Black.

His Worship the Mayor of Gibraltar Christian Santos made the first move for Sabino Brunello against rival team captain Pia Cramling

The two team captains faced off in this round. Sabino Brunello moved to 5/8 by inflicting a third successive defeat on Pia Cramling who is on 3/8. The game came down to a tricky minor piece endgame where White started with only a slight edge but it gradually became harder to defend. The decisive moment was when Black opted for 54...g6 where 54...g5 gave good holding chances.

Bilel Bellahcene played another G for Gibraltar early g4 attack against Olga Girya - and it worked brilliantly

Readers may remember Bilel Bellahcenes cheeky but successful g4 move in round four against Irene Sukandars Nimzo-Indian, mirroring something Shakhriyar Mamedyarov did at the Tata Steel tournament, and the talented Algerian player tried g4 again in a Queens Gambit Declined opening against Olga Girya. This was not an innovation as the move has been tried here a few times before. Bilel went on to win an important game for his side, moving to 5/8 and reducing Olga Girya to 4/8. Im wondering if we can start talking about an early g4 as the G for Gibraltar move as its high time that Gibraltar featured in the rich tapestry of chess opening names. If readers have better suggestions, please suggest them on Twitter using our standard #GibChess hashtag so we can find them. Back to the game and Bilel was of the opinion that Olga should have played either h6 or Bxc5 on move 6 as he felt White was better after castling. As played, the queens came off early and Black was soon subjected to a strong positional bind which she was unable to shake off.

Ravi Haria scored his third successive win, defeating fellow English player Jovi Houska

Ravi Haria started the event slowly with five straight draws and had been regretting a number of missed chances, but he now has his scoring boots on and completed a hattrick of wins by defeating Jovi Houska to move to 5/8, leaving his opponent on 2/8. In a sideline of the Advance Caro-Kann, White didnt get anything special from the opening or early middlegame. 26...g6 looks like a positional concession but Black still held firm until some time after the time control when Black suffered a hallucination and blundered with 49...c4+ thinking that she would have the move 51...Rb3 a few moves later when in fact the defence is simply refuted with 52 Rxb3 cxb3 53 Kd3 and White stops Blacks passed pawn. Instead, engines give the position as equal though in real life it might still have been hard to mount a defence in the long term with not much time on the clock.

Marie Sebag now has 4/8 after a solid draw with Zambian IM Gillian Bwalya who is now on 1/8. Gillian has had a very tough time in the event so far, but he did the sensible thing of playing ultra-cautious chess to stop the rot. Hence an Exchange Slav, which is very hard to break down for a player of the black pieces who wants to try and win. This was not an exciting game, but I recommend readers to watch Gillians logical explanation of how he set about digging in and securing a draw against a grandmaster in the post-game interview.

Bobby Cheng advanced to 4/8 after drawing with Irene Sukandar, who is now on 4/8. The opening was a Catalan with Black opting for a sideline where the queen goes to a6. White gave up a pawn to gain space and cramp the black position. Soon White gave up a second pawn and play became a little wild as the black queen sought a safe haven. Engines favoured Black during this sequence but it was too complicated to expect a human to find the most precise moves. Eventually Black was forced to give up her queen but at the very reasonable price of rook, bishop and three pawns. After a draw was agreed the players were eager to consult an engine to see what the verdict was. Stockfish flagged it as about +1.00 in favour of Black but in reality it wasnt obvious how either side would go about trying to win.

Joe Gallagher and Marsel Efroimski both have 4/8 after drawing their eighth-round game. The opening was a Bb5 Sicilian, more precisely the Canal-Sokolsky Attack in which White develops the dark-squared bishop on b2. Black departed from known opening territory with 11...Qa5. White opted to exchange in the centre with 17 fxe5 where 17 f5 looked more aggressive, fixing the d6-pawn weakness. As played, with much material exchanged, Blacks pawns seemed slightly more vulnerable than Whites, but Black played very accurately to steer her way to a draw.

Eric Rosen and Gunay Mammadzada had a game which swung back and forth a number of times before ending in a draw. White opted for the solid London System, much favoured by beginners and sometimes cruelly dubbed old mens chess in UK chess circles, but it can be a potent weapon against the unwary. In the game White allowed Black an exchange on e5 and followed up with an incursion on the light squares which seemed to favour her quite considerably. Black might have taken a pawn on f2 but she hesitated and later blundered with 35...Rf5 which soon cost her a pawn. White steered the game into a standard two passed pawns versus one passed pawn scenario which is usually a win but, on the very edge of converting, played a careless move allowing the passed pawns to be separated and one of them lost. Eric Rosen is now 3/8 while Gunay Mammadzada has at least broken a streak of three defeats to move to 2/8.

Leandro Krysa launched a ferocious attack against Antoaneta Stefanova, but the ex-world champion stayed cool and won

Finally we come to one of the most remarkable games of the day with the return of ex-world champion Antoaneta Stefanova to the fray after six days confined to her hotel room having tested positive for Covid. She has since tested negative twice and is thus allowed out of self-isolation. In the post-game interview she explained that she filled her time profitably, carrying on with her Masters degree studies and following the match online. In round eight she faced the unbeaten Argentinian GM Leandro Krysa with Black. Perhaps hoping to exploit his opponents rustiness, White launched a fierce attack in a Semi-Slav opening, sacrificing two pawns for a big lead in development. Analysis engines found a crushing idea for White (16 Qd2 Qb6 17 Na4!! bxa4 18 Rb1 Qa7 19 Bc7 winning, or if 16...Qe7 17 Qe3!, etc) but these were beyond the scope of a human brain. Even so, White found an imaginative attacking idea involving a knight sacrifice on b5 followed with a rook sacrifice, which might have frightened the life out of most players, but Black countered with the ultra-cool refutation 20...Be7! after which Whites attack had run its course. A few moves later, two pieces down, White found himself beating his head against a brick wall and had to resign. Leandro Krysa now has 4/8 while Antoaneta Stefanova has 1/2. Today Im nominating this and Mariya Muzychuks win as shared games of the day. Both of them managed to keep a cool head in a crisis, befitting their status as womens world champions and keeping Tia Pia in with a chance of winning the match.

Round nine is on Wednesday 2 February at 15.00 CET. The tenth and last round is on Thursday 3 February starting at the earlier time of 11.00 CET with possible tie-breaks to follow.

Games of round eight

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Battle of the Sexes: Men increase lead - Chessbase News

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Chairman of the board | Boris Starling – The Critic

Posted: at 5:47 am

This article is taken from the February 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now were offering five issue for just 10.

Is chess a sport? If the recent world championship between Magnus Carlsen and Ian Nepomniachtchi is anything to go by, most definitely. It had drama, skill, endurance, determination and disintegration. It even borrowed from footballs oldest clich, the game of two halves. The first five games ended in draws, with neither player able to secure more than a fleeting advantage on the board.

Game six changed everything. It was the longest game in world championship history: 136 moves lasting 7 hours 47 minutes. Spending that long at peak concentration tests body and mind like little else, and Carlsen does it better than any player ever. He establishes a microscopic edge and works away at it, slowly ratcheting up the pressure, widening the fissure.

British grandmaster Nigel Short once described sitting across the board from Garry Kasparov and feeling battered by the waves of aggression pulsing from deep within the nuclear reactor of Kasparovs life force. Carlsen doesnt have that presence, but he does have the obduracy of a granite cliff and an almost frightening need to win. Hes the Terminator; he cant be reasoned with, he doesnt feel pity or remorse or fear, and he absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.

Deep into the game, the computer engines were still calling it a draw. But engines dont get tired, dont get flustered, dont make mistakes. Humans do. Wherever Nepomniachtchi turned, Carlsen was there first. With the time controls now in increments, Carlsen varied the tempo, almost running down the clock on some moves and then making several at lightning speed. Chess is a dance, and its always better to lead.

Finally, past midnight in Dubai, they were down to their last pieces: a rook, a knight and two pawns for Carlsen, and a queen for Nepomniachtchi. Carlsens pieces suddenly seemed to coalesce into an ouroboros, each defending another in a perfect circle of impregnability. Up the board they marched.

There are no such things as unforced errors when youre playing a multiple world champion

Nepomniachtchis queen, so mobile and rangy earlier, now appeared frantic and skittish. Nepomniachtchi stared, grimaced, stared again. Carlsens face was impassive, but his eyes betrayed his exhaustion and what hed had to give to get to this place. Nepomniachtchi reached out a hand, and it was done. First blood to Carlsen.

Games like these take a toll deep in players souls. Ideally, of course, [Nepomniachtchi] would like to strike back immediately, tweeted Short, but perhaps a bigger challenge will be not to break. Dams can collapse very abruptly. Rarely can a tweet have been more prescient.

Nepomniachtchi lost three of the next five games, all with pawn blunders which would have shamed a decent club player, and the match was over. Some commentators called these blunders unforced errors but of course there are no such things, not when youre playing a multiple world champion for the greatest prize in your sport and certainly not when youve thrown the kitchen sink at him to no avail.

Great champions of yore such as Bobby Fischer and Paul Morphy went mad with the strain of the game. George Orwell described sport as war minus the shooting, and chess fulfils this in spades, not just because the pieces and pawns are ostensibly militaristic but because as Fischer said, I savour the moment when I break a man.

Nepomniachtchi was certainly broken, but he won many friends with his grace in defeat and his patience with some frankly insulting questions in the post-match press conferences. Besides, it was no disgrace to lose to the man many rank as the greatest ever and few would place outside the top three.

The match also did wonders for the image of classical chess. Cricket fans will see clear parallels with the tripartite division of the sport: for Test, one-day and T20, read classical (generous time controls), rapid (15 minutes plus 10 seconds per move) and blitz (five minutes) respectively.

In the game of kings, Carlsen is emperor supreme

In our age of gnat-like attention spans the faster formats are beloved of marketeers and broadcasters (and Carlsen has, uniquely, held all three titles simultaneously), but for the purists the long form is king, with all its undercurrents, its striving for tiny advantages, its play and counterplay.

Carlsens two previous world championship matches (he has now won five in all) had been decided on rapid tie-breaks after all the classical games had been drawn. Rapid games are exciting, but their drama can too often be the rather ersatz one of a penalty shoot-out. Far more satisfying to win and lose within the bounds of the usual format.

Where Carlsen goes from here is anybodys guess. He spoke frankly after the championship about his waning motivation to keep defending a title he has held since 2013.

He has indicated that he may not even do so two years hence unless the 18-year-old prodigy Alireza Firouzja wins through to challenge him. That would be a match for the ages, giving Carlsen the chance either to put the French-Iranian whippersnapper in his place or, in defeat, to pass on the torch to the next generation. Whatever he chooses, he has already done so much for the sport. In the game of kings, he is emperor supreme.

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Using AI in Recruiting – Onrec

Posted: at 5:47 am

Is it not a curious amusement to catch a vintage illustration or film depicting the future? Portraying how the technology of the day would evolve to serve the same social customs and contemporary jobs contrasts glaringly with what has become reality.

Illustration by Jean-Marc Ct sourced from commons.wikimedia.org

While quaint and sweet, the one element predicted that does stand the test of time is that mankind will find ways to improve productivity. The seeds of new perspectives, techniques, technology, and approaches might arrive to great fanfare, but more often evolution is gradual. Sometimes we need to consciously recall the way a process was done a decade earlier to realize a change has transpired.

IT has been delivering productivity gains for generations. Applied like its physical counterparts such as hoes, hammers, or tractors, IT has helped by processing mountains of data quickly. For all sorts of tasks, end-users have been using tools to sort, filter out, find items, and the like in mountains of data.

Society has evolved to interact with the tools mankind develops blacksmiths into car mechanics, book-keepers into data entry operators. The relationship between all of this technological advancement has been that the end-user in this relationship has been taking the information and deciding what to do with it.

But, an ages-old fantasy of mankind has been to go further: to develop technologies that can produce and then analyze those results. This might have been a machine to play chess (von Kempelen, who supposedly actually relied on a hidden midget), or Arthur C. Clarke who proposed the computer HAL that, given conflicting orders, could suffer from a psychotic breakdown.

Illustration by Johann Wolfgang von Kempelen sourced from commons.wikimedia.org

While chess playing is now a reality and does not require a hidden operator, AI is emerging in other areas: handling menial tasks, allowing us to bypass keying in our questions to search engines, catching fraud, predicting behavior, and so much more. It offers a means to teach a system through examples of acceptable and unacceptable outcomes, feed it stimuli from a variety of sensors, and recommend a course of action. Using an AI is proving adept at dealing with data coming from a complex systems landscape.

The influx of AI is pervading most industries. And just as AI can process thousands of elements to navigate piloting a car on a road, it can also be used to steer companies when selecting candidates. And AI is becoming common place as consumers turn to Siri, Alexa, and other programs to offset tasks, plan days, recommend movies, or suggest the shortest route from A to B.

This trend has led to a shortage of software developers in the short term, as jobs of the future will require AI software engineers. And this trend has only accelerated because of Covid and the complexion of how we work has been transformed to being more digital.

This is not just happening in highly technical departments and businesses. No, AI is affecting HR as well. LinkedIn has begun to use AI to recommend positions and candidates based upon the data it holds and the jobs being posted. It is not simply filtering keywords, but looking to match similar registrants with roles that have been filled.

SelectSoftwareReview.com posted over a dozen different AI products that can help recruiters. Some of the systems can trawl through resums, looking for keywords, experience, and so forth. These can quickly scan millions of profiles and feed a pipeline with qualified candidates. Some tools that can optimize for which terms one searches, and look at the context in which those terms are used to better screen the candidates selected. Such can be useful when trying to estimate whether a candidate might fit the culture of a company.

While not yet able to automate the process of interviewing, there are AI tools now that assist with the recording and analysis of interviews thereafter. Focusing on the menial, repetitive elements of this aspect of recruiting saves time. And it allows professionals to focus on the more involved, human-centric work necessary to measure up potential candidates.

AI though can also help interpret the way candidates might react. A machine can more easily pose scenarios, mimic outcomes, and then review the participants responses. As opposed to doing such hypothetically in an interview, an AI routine can add many more details to the simulation, and by simulating the outcome, see how the candidates follow up.

These can be run offline in the sense that they do not require staff to administer such. And, as more people, in general, have some experience with gaming, are more easily delivered to participants as opposed to sitting a Myers-Briggs evaluation.

Atop the processing speed and volume that an AI can handle, theres something another promise we might hope to find in AI: the absence of bias. Ingrained in all of us is some form of modeling and prejudice. Theoretically, knowing the training of an AI system should counter such. As AI systems are not designed to survive, theoretically, they are not secretly thinking, how can the AI take advantage of the situation thereby clouding its judgment.

Image attributed to Tom Cowap sourced from commons.wikimedia.org

While the fear of AI running amok is ever among us, the doomsday scenario is unlikely anything we can imagine. More likely, AI is making our entire world more complex. And without embracing the technology, we will find ourselves unable to compete with those who are not intimidated. Being only human, we are limited on how much we can process. As AI gains ground there will be more calls on us to teach AI which outcomes are desired and leverage the value AI brings to the party.

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Arena Download – Complete GUI for chess engines that will …

Posted: January 24, 2022 at 10:33 am

Offers assistance in analyzing a chess game, the way the chess pawns have been moved, the tactics and also you can play a game of chess. Besides it also provides testing solutions for chess engines. It is compatible with Winboard protocol I, II and UCI protocol I, II.

Arena is a complete GUI for chess engines. The program already comes with an engine that enables you to play against the computer, but it also supports almost all popular engines. The program is vastly customizable and easy to use, so you create exactly the kind of game you want. Thanks to the adjustable strength, you can select the difficulty level and increase it as you get more acquainted with game and more skillful.

What is great is that the program provides detailed information about moves and thinking process of the computer. This can help you learn from the engine to defeat your enemies faster. You can even play online with other people or create tournaments between two engines to learn from them too. Other useful features of the program include printing capabilities, support of the DGT Chessboard, EPD and PGN support, user interface available in multiple languages, to name but a few. In short, Arena is a wonderful program that includes everything chess players need to become professional players.

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A hundred years of exactitude: Jos Ral Capablanca – TheArticle

Posted: at 10:33 am

In the summer of 1922, a century ago, London played host to a galaxy of international chess stars, including Alexander Alekhine , Akiba Rubinstein and Efim Bogoljubov. But the most incandescent amongst this stellar congregation was the Cuban genius, Jos Ral Capablanca. The previous year Capa, as he was widely known, had crushed the incumbent world champion, Emanuel Lasker, by the score of four wins to zero, with ten draws. This was one of the very few world title clashes in which the winner lost no games at all. Indeed, Capa established a reputation for invincibility and accuracy which remains undiminished to this day.

Full cross table of London 1922

Jos Ral Capablanca y Graupera (1888-1942) was world chess champion from 1921-1927. Apart from accuracy and invincibility, Capa was widely renowned for his exceptional strategic vision, endgame skill and speed of play.

Capablanca s victory over the dominant American champion, Frank Marshall in a 1909 match earned him an invitation to the 1911 San Sebastian tournament, which, against all initial odds, he won ahead of players such as Akiba Rubinstein, Aron Nimzowitsch and Siegbert Tarrasch. Capa only received his invitation at Marshalls generous insistence and over the objections of established Grandmasters, Aron Nimzowitsch and OssipBernstein. This grandmasterly duo complained about the inclusion of a relative neophyte, but in an almost inevitable stroke of poetic justice, Capa trounced both of them in their individual encounters.

Capablanca finally won the world chess championship title from Emanuel Lasker in 1921 , thus contributing to an extraordinary record in that Capa was undefeated from 10 February 1916 until 21 March 1924, a period that included the world championship match against Lasker. To go for eight years without loss, including several international standard tournaments, a world championship match and the cosmic gathering in London a century ago, is a record which is likely to stand until chess as we know it is no longer played.

Capablanca lost the title in 1927 to Alexander Alekhine, who, astonishingly, had never beaten Capablanca before this match. Following unsuccessful attempts to arrange a rematch over subsequent years, relations between the two colossi became embittered. Capablanca continued his excellent tournament results, including first prizes in Moscow and Nottingham, but he also suffered from symptoms of high blood pressure. He died in 1942 of a brain haemorrhage.

Capablanca excelled in simplified positions and endgames; Bobby Fischer, employing his easy going transatlantic vernacular, described him as possessing a real light touch. He could play tactical chess when necessary, although he rarely invited complications, and possessed iron defensive technique. He wrote several chess books, of which Chess Fundamentals was regarded somewhat controversially, I might add by Mikhail Botvinnik as the best chess book ever written.

Despite his books, Capablanca preferred not to engage in detailed analysis but focused on critical moments in a game. His style of chess influenced the play of future world champions such as Vassily Smyslov, Tigran Petrosian, Bobby Fischer and Anatoly Karpov. A major difference, though, was Capa s reluctance to research and innovate in the openings and his reliance on his own instinct, talent and genius to support him in any situation or predicament.

Five years after his triumph in London, Capa undertook his most strenuous challenge since his struggle with Lasker for the world sceptre. The New York chess tournament, held between 19 February and 23 March 1927, involved six of the worlds strongest masters playing a quadruple round-robin, with the others being Alexander Alekhine, Rudolf Spielmann, Milan Vidmar, Aron Nimzowitsch and Frank Marshall.

Before the tournament, Capablanca wrote that he had more experience but less power than in 1911, that he had peaked around 1919 and that some of his competitors had gained in strength in the intervening years. In spite of such pessimistic forebodings, Capablanca enjoyed overwhelming success, finishing undefeated with 14/20, winning the micro-matches with each of his rivals, 2 points ahead of second-placed Alekhine, and won a special prize for a victory over Spielmann.

Since Capablanca had won the New York 1927 chess tournament overwhelmingly and had never lost a game to Alekhine, most pundits regarded the Cuban as the clear favourite in their World Chess Championship 1927 match. But Alekhine won the match, played from September to November 1927 at Buenos Aires, by 6 wins, 3 losses, and 25 draws the longest World Championship match ever, until the aborted contest in 198485 between Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov.

Alekhines victory surprised almost the entire chess world. After Capablancas passing, Alekhine himself expressed surprise at his own victory, since in 1927 he had not truly believed that he was superior to Capablanca, and he suggested that Capablanca had been overconfident. Capablanca entered the fray with no technical or physical preparation, while Alekhine trained himself into good physical condition and had closely studied Capablancas play, in the course of which thorough investigation he convinced himself that he had found some promising chinks in the champions armour.

In his last major appearance, Capablanca played for Cuba in the 8th Chess Olympiad, held in Buenos Aires in 1939, and won the gold medal for the best performance on the top board. According to the extensive essay on Capa to be found on Wikipedia, for which I am grateful for many of the facts in this column, while Capablanca and Alekhine (France) were both representing their countries in Buenos Aires, Capablanca made a final attempt to arrange a World Championship match. Alekhine declined, saying he was obliged to help defend his adopted homeland, since World War II had just broken out. This was a strange decision, since Alekhine was then in his late forties and an unlikely candidate for strenuous or indeed any military service. As fate would have it, Alekhine would have done better to stay in Buenos Aires and contest a match against Capablanca on the spot.

Alekhine wrote in a 1942 tribute to Capablanca: Capablanca was snatched from the chess world much too soon. With his death, we have lost a very great chess genius whose like we shall never see again. Lasker once said: I have known many chess players, but only one chess genius: Capablanca.

Capa has been an inspiration for chess in Cuba ever since, culminating in the 1966 Havana Olympiad, where I, as a member of the England team, was even invited to dinner with Fidel Castro. An annual Capablanca Memorial tournament has also been held in Cuba, most often in Havana, since 1962. In 1974 I had the honour of being invited and winning the Capablanca Masters.

Astonishingly, Capablanca lost only 34 serious tournament and match games during his adult career. Again, according to Wiki statistics, he was undefeated from 10 February 1916, when he lost to Oscar Chajes in the New York 1916 tournament, to 21 March 1924, when he succumbed to the revolutionary Hypermodern complexities of Richard Rti in the New York International tournament. During this unbeaten streak, which included his 1921 World Championship match against Lasker, Capablanca racked up 63 tournament or match games, winning 40 and drawing 23.

In fact, only Frank Marshall, Emanuel Lasker, Alexander Alekhine and Rudolf Spielmann were able to win two or more formal games from the mature Capablanca, though in most cases their overall lifetime scores were minus (Capablanca beat Marshall +202=28, Lasker +62=16, Alekhine +97=33). Only Spielmann was level (+22=8). Of top players, Paul Keres alone had a narrow plus score against Capa (+10=5). Keress sole win came at the AVRO tournament of 1938 in Holland. This event was staged on the peripatetic principle of holding different rounds each day in separate towns. During this tournament Capablanca turned 50, while Keres was 22. It was overall Capas worst performance and it can certainly be explained, partly by age disparity, poor health and constant travel favouring younger players, but also by Capas infelicitous choice of the French Defence, which did not suit his fluid style.

Statistical ranking systems place Capablanca high among the greatest of all time. Nathan Divinsky and I, in our book Warriors of the Mind (1989) ranked him fifth, behind Garry Kasparov, Anatoly Karpov, Bobby Fischer and Mikhail Botvinnik but immediately ahead of Emanuel Lasker. In his 1978 book The Rating of Chessplayers, Past and Present, Arpad Elo allotted retrospective ratings to players based on their performance over the best five-year span of their career. He concluded that Capablanca was the strongest of those surveyed, with Lasker and Botvinnik sharing second place.

Most importantly for my theme, a 2006 engine-based study found that Capablanca was the most accurate of all the World Champions, when compared with computer analysis of World Championship match games. This was confirmed by a 2011 computer analysis from the duo of Bratko and Guido, using the strong engines Rybka 2 and Rybka 3. In other words, Capa had, up to that moment, been the most exact champion of all time, certainly of the champions who trained without computers in the pre-Carlsen era.

Boris Spassky, World Champion from 1969 to 1972, considered Capablanca the best player of all time. As we have seen, Bobby Fischer, who held the title from 1972 to 1975, admired Capablancas light touch and ability to see the right move instantly. Fischer reported that in the 1950s, veteran members of the Manhattan Chess Club recalled Capablancas blitz chess exploits with absolute awe.

Capablanca excelled in simplified positions and endgames, and his strategic judgment was outstanding, to such an extent that attempts to attack him directly almost always foundered on his impervious defence. Nevertheless, Capa could also play stirring tactical chess when necessary most famously in the 1918 Manhattan Chess Club Championship tournament, whenFrank Marshall sprang a deeply analysed prepared variation on him,which he refuted while playing under the constraints of a time limit. He was also capable of aggressive tactical play to exploit a positional advantage, provided he considered it the most secure and efficient way to win for example against Spielmann in the 1927 New York tournament.

In summary, Capa was a phenomenon, a sportsman without nerves, blessed with astoundingly rapid sight of the board and a nearly infallible instinct for the right move in any situation. If, as I believe, mathematics, music and chess in some way manifest the harmony of the universe, then Capablanca represents chess in the way that Pythagoras stands for mathematics and Mozart exemplifies music.

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Intel Core i5-12400 vs AMD Ryzen 5 5600X Face-Off: The Gaming Value Showdown – Tom’s Hardware

Posted: at 10:33 am

The $199 Intel Core i5-12400 vs $299 Ryzen 5 5600X contest is a pitched battlethat finds AMD's most popular CPU facing off against an Intel competitor that costs roughly $100 less at retail. That may seem odd, but AMD abandoned the sub-$200 market when it launched itsRyzen 5000processors, leaving its older processors to hold the line as Intel opens a new front in the AMD vs Intel price wars.

Based on pricing alone, the aging Zen 2-powered Ryzen 5 3600X and 3600 will remain the go-to competitors for the 12400 even though they debuted nearly two and a half years ago.As you'll see, those old Zen 2 chips aren't competitive, and AMD's $259 Ryzen 5 5600G APU targets a different market. That means AMD's least expensive Zen 3 model, the Ryzen 5 5600X, is the 12400's only true competitor in our benchmarks.

Intel'sAlder Lakechips are surprisingly powerful, already earning key upsets against higher-priced Ryzen chips on our list of Best CPUs for gamingand CPU Benchmark hierarchy. As seen in our previous faceoffs, Intel's hybrid x86 Alder Lake design, which mixes fast performance cores (P-cores) with small efficiency cores (E-Cores), represents the company's most disruptive architectural shift in a decade. As a result, Intel upsets AMD's highest-end mainstream chips, particularly in price-to-performance metrics.

However, the Core i5-12400 doesn't have a hybrid architecture. Instead, it comes with a more traditional design and only has six P-Cores active, so it doesn't use Gracemont-based cores for background tasks. That means this six-core 12-thread processor doesn't need Intel's new Windows 11-exclusiveThread Directortechnology to place workloads on the correct cores. As a result, unlike Intel's hybrid models, the 12400 is just as potent in Windows 10 as it is in Windows 11.

Below we've put the Core i5-12400 vs Ryzen 5 5600X through a six-round faceoff to see which chip takes the crown in our gaming and application benchmarks, along with other key criteria like power consumption and pricing. We have the final score and summary at the end of the article. Let's start with the tale of the tape.

The Core i5-12400 has six P-cores and 12 threads that operate at a 2.5 GHz base and 4.4 GHz boost clock. The chip comes armed with 18MB of L3 cache and has 65W PBP (base) and 117W MTP (peak) power ratings. The chip also comes with a bundled Laminar RM1 cooler with a semi-transparent plastic shroud and a blue ring lining the fin stack.

The Core i5-12400 is a locked chip, meaning it isn't overclockable. However, Intel supports memory overclocking on Z690, B660, and H670 motherboards (Z690 doesn't make sense for this class of chip, though). As you'll soon see, manipulating the power limits can eke out some additional performance in some types of gaming and threaded work.

The chip has the UHD Graphics 730 engine with 24 EUs running at a 300/1450 MHz base/boost frequency. If you're looking to save some coin, the graphics-less Core i5-12400F comes with a $25 price reduction and has the same specs as the 12400, which is incredibly attractive if you plan on using a discrete graphics card. Notably, you will lose Quick Sync capabilities and the iGPU fallback that you can use for troubleshooting in the event of an issue with a discrete GPU. However, there also isn't an option for graphics on AMD's Ryzen 5 5600X or the Ryzen 5 3600X and 3600, though all three of those competing chips also come with a bundled cooler.

Unlike the standard Ryzen 5000 models, the Ryzen 5 5600G APU does come with integrated graphics. This Cezanne APU pairs six Zen 3 execution cores with the Radeon Vega graphics engine for iGPU-powered gaming rigs. As a result, this APU is the best value on the market if you're looking to game at lower resolutions without a discrete GPU. But aside from gaming on the iGPU, it can't compete with the Core i5-12400 and comes at a higher price point.

The 12400 goes toe-to-toe with the 6-core, 12-thread Ryzen 5 5600X that has long been the favorite for enthusiasts because of its incredible blend of pricing and performance. This chip comes with a 65W TDP rating, 32MB of L3 cache, and has only high-performance cores. It also supports DDR4-3200 memory and the PCIe 4.0 interface.

All Alder Lake chips support DDR4-3200 orup toDDR5-4800 memory (odd DDR5 population rules apply). Unfortunately, these new technologies add cost to the 600-series motherboards that house the chips, and DDR5 memory is largely unavailable. However, plenty of DDR4-powered motherboard options are available, especially with the value-centric B- and H-series chipsets that make the most sense for this class of chips. AMD also has a robust ecosystem of affordable AM4 motherboards on offer.

Winner: Intel

Intel's chip pricing is an advantage, and the 600-series platform also has a clear connectivity advantage: With DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 on the menu, AMD's AM4 platform finds itself looking a bit long in the tooth, but Intel's new features do make for more expensive motherboards. DDR5 pricing is terrible, and we expect that to continue for some time. Fortunately, the 12400 is just as fast with DDR4 in the majority of tasks, and you can pick from plenty of cost-saving DDR4 motherboards.

The Core i5-12400 comes with integrated graphics by default, though you can sacrifice those and save $25 with the Core i5-12400F. Meanwhile, you'll have to look to AMD's Ryzen 5 5600G APU if you want integrated graphics from Team Red in this price range, but that chip isn't really directly comparable to the 12400 in our performance benchmarks.

This article is an overview of our much more in-depth testing in our Intel Core i5-12400 review. We're focusing on our Windows 11 test results in this article, but you should experience similar results in Windows 10. We also include tests with the Core i5-12400 with the power limits lifted and overclocked memory (again, head to the review for details).

Below you can see the geometric mean of our gaming tests with the Core i5-12400 vs the Ryzen 5 5600X and Ryzen 5 5600G at 1080p and 1440p, with each resolution split into its own chart. Notably, these results aren't too important for the 5600G the 5600G is designed to use its integrated graphics, not a discrete GPU, and easily beats the 12400 in every iGPU contest (You can see an example of that here). As per usual, we're testing with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 to reduce GPU-imposed bottlenecks as much as possible, and differences between test subjects will shrink with lesser cards or higher resolutions.

Paired with affordable DDR4 memory at the 1080p resolution, the previous-gen flagship $584 Core i9-11900K is a scant 2.5% faster than the $199 Core i5-12400, but tuning the Core i5's memory to DDR4-3800 gives it a 1.9% lead over the stock 11900K in our cumulative performance measurement.Even though the 11900K would take the lead after overclocking, that's an incredible gen-on-gen improvement in performance.

At 1080p, the Core i5-12400 at stock settings is 1.9% faster than AMD's venerable ~$299 Ryzen 5 5600X. After tuning, the Core i5-12400 ties the overclocked 5600X, an impressive showing for a chip that costs $100 less.

It's a bit unfair to compare the $259 Ryzen 5 5600G to the Core i5-12400; AMD's APU isn't designed as a direct competitor and is more expensive than the 12400. However, aside from the Ryzen 5 3600X and 3600, the $259 5600G is the only AMD processor close to this price class. Regardless, with a discrete GPU, the Core i5-12400 is 16.8% faster than the 5600G and 14% faster after tuning both chips. However, if you're looking for the best performance without a discrete GPU, the Ryzen 5 5600G outclasses the 12400.

The Ryzen 5 3600X and 3600 also feel like odd comparisons to the 12400 both are several years old and have the previous-gen Zen 2 architecture. But, again, these are the only suitable comparables from the AMD camp. The Core i5-12400 is 22.7% and 26% faster than the Ryzen 5 3600X and 3600, respectively. As you can imagine, overclocking the Ryzen chips doesn't do much to close that chasm.

Naturally, moving over to 1440p pushes the bottleneck to the GPU, so the difference between the chips shrinks tremendously. Gamers with lower-resolution panels with high refresh rates will benefit more from Alder Lake's faster frame rates. Flipping through the 99th percentile charts shows larger deltas between the chips, but Windows 11 seems to suffer from more framerate variability than Windows 10.

The AMD vs Intel gaming competition is closer now, with some games favoring one architecture over the other. As such, it's best to make an informed decision based on the types of games that you play frequently. Be sure to check out the individual tests in the above album. It's noteworthy that the synthetic benchmarks (Futuremark suite and chess benchmarks) don't tend to translate well to real-world gaming, but they do show us the raw amount of compute power exposed to game engines.

Winner: Intel

The Core i5-12400 leads convincingly over all of the chips in its price class and also punches up to beat the Ryzen 5 5600X and the 5600G at stock settings. It even stands toe-to-toe with the $100 more expensive 5600X after tuning. The Ryzen 5 3600X and 3600 shouldn't be asked to face the 12400, they aren't in the same performance class, but AMD's decision to abandon the low-end market makes this an unfortunate reality.

Overall it's clear that the Core i5-12400 is now the value gaming champion, offering a superior level of performance at its price point with no clear price/performance competitors.

We can boil down productivity application performance into two broad categories: single- and multi-threaded. The first slide above shows the geometric mean of performance in several of our most important tests in the single-threaded category, but be sure to look at the expanded results below.

The Core i5-12400 is 13.5% faster than the Ryzen 5 5600G in single-threaded work (10% faster after tuning the 5600G), and a whopping 24% and 27% faster than the Ryzen 5 3600X and 3600, respectively. You'll have to look to other Alder Lake chips to find faster performance in single-threaded work: As you can see in ourCPU Benchmarkhierarchy, even the beastly$799 Ryzen 9 5950Xcan't match the Core i5-12400 in single-threaded tasks.

As expected, we don't see a significant difference between the 12400's different power/memory settings, which has more impact on threaded work and gaming, but the 12400 doesn't need much help. The chip is 2.3% faster than the Core i9-11900K, 6% faster than the 11700K, and an incredible 15.7% faster than the 11400.

This superior performance in lightly-threaded apps will equate to a snappier, faster experience in all manner of light day-to-day tasks. The 12400's snappy performance will be most noticeable in gaming, web browsers, and application start-up tasks.

The 12400 is incredibly competitive against the Ryzen 5 models in threaded workloads, even beating the potent Ryzen 5 5600X by 2.3% at standard settings and 6.7% after tuning both chips. That's impressive given the 12400's much more forgiving price tag, but as you'll see in the benchmarks above, the Ryzen 5 5600X does carve out wins in more than a few of those applications.

We see larger gains over the Ryzen 5 5600G, 3600X, and 3600, with the stock 12400 taking leads of 15.8%, 22.4%, and 23.6%, respectively. Frankly, AMD really doesn't have any worthy competing chips at this price point for this type of work.

Removing the power restrictions gives the Core i5-12400 a 7% boost in our cumulative measure of threaded performance, allowing it to beat the overclocked Ryzen 5 5600X, not to mention the rest of the competing Ryzen chips.

Winner: Intel

Given its price point, the Core i5-12400 offers an incredible blend of performance in both single- and multi-threaded apps that simply can't be beaten. You'll have to look to Intel's own Alder Lake family for faster single-threaded performance, and the 12400 often beats the price-comparable Ryzen models (and even the $100 more expensive Ryzen 5 5600X) in threaded applications by convincing margins.If you need more threaded horsepower, Intel's Core i5-12600K offers a 21% boost over the 12400 due to its additional E-cores and is officially overclockable, but you'll have to fork out some extra cash for the privilege.

Intel's Core i5-12400 isn't an overclockable part, so you shouldn't be able to manipulate core clocks, though you can remove power limits and overclock the memory. However, enterprising motherboard manufacturers have found a way to sidestep Intel's restrictions and allow BCLK overclocking, which in turn has led to spectacular overclocking results with "locked" processors.

As you would expect, Intel has said this is an unsupported practice. As we've seen in the past with other similar workarounds, we expect that Intel will alter its microcode to prevent such efforts soon by locking out BCLK overclocking. Therefore you won't be able to update your BIOS to newer versions if you want to continue to leverage BCLK overclocking. Additionally, Intel theoretically could push microcode updates via Windows Update, which could provide another avenue to disable BCLK overclocking. Since we expect the feature to be disabled soon, we won't take BCLK overclockability into account for scoring in this round.

Intel has long kept overclocking as a feature of its pricey K-series chips and Z-series motherboards, while AMD freely allows overclocking with all SKUs on almost any platform (except A320). Intel has made strides with its overclocking, though. For example, the Core i5-12400 is a locked chip, but you can overclock the memory on Z-, B- and some H-series motherboards. You can also lift the power limits, which serves as a sort of quasi-overclock (definitely not as effective) that will boost performance in some threaded applications and gaming, all while technically remaining within the definition of stock settings (and thus warrantied).

Memory overclocking allows tuners to extract more performance from the chips, particularly in gaming, via easy-to-use XMP profiles or manual tuning. Naturally, the rules around Intel's Gear 1 and Gear 2 modes apply here, and you'll want to stick with the low-latency Gear 1 for most practical use-cases (especially gaming). For the Core i5-12400, the effective limit of Gear 1 operation is around DDR4-3800. That means you can buy a reasonably-priced XMP-equipped memory kit and reap pretty substantial benefits.

AMD's Ryzen chips are all fully overclockable. However, these chips come with innovative boost technology that largely consumes most of the available frequency headroom, so there is precious little room for bleeding-edge clock rates. In fact, all-core overclocking with AMD's chips is lackluster; you're often better off using its auto-overclocking Precision Boost Overdrive 2 (PBO2) feature that boosts multi-threaded performance. AMD also has plenty of Curve Optimization features that leverage undervolting to increase boost activity.

However, it's always important to remember that chip quality can vary for both vendors, so the silicon lottery always comes into play. That will apply to any unsupported BCLK overclocking for the Core i5-12400, along with the standard memory supported memory overclocking capabilities integrated memory controller (IMC) quality has a big impact on how well the Core i5-12400 can support overclocked memory in the Gear 1 configuration.

Winner: AMD

Intel has long locked all overclocking features to K-series chips on Z-series motherboards, but the company has made strides by allowing memory overclocking for non-K processors on almost all chipsets that support Alder Lake (except some H-series boards).

However, this is still a far cry from AMD's practice of allowing full core and memory overclocking with all of its chips and nearly all chipsets (except A320). That gives AMD the win in the overclocking category, but bear in mind that some of the AMD chips in this face-off can't beat the Core i5-12400 in gaming and application benchmarks, even after overclocking.

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software – Why dont chess engines use Node.js? – Chess …

Posted: December 29, 2021 at 10:05 am

This is more of a question for Stack Overflow if you ask me... But since I've come here from there and I'm a software engineer and avid chess player, I'll try to explain.

This basically boils down to two factors, history and speed of execution. I'll handle them separately.

History

Javascript (the language Node uses) is a relatively young language. It was developed in 1996. Node, is even younger, being released in 2009. In comparison, C came out in 1972 and C++ in 1985.

The first major breakthrough in chess engines occurred when Deep Blue (written in C++) became the first chess engine to beat a grandmaster in 1997. At that point, it had been in active development for a few years and Javascript (then JScript) was a fledgling language that could do just the most basic web-based things.

As a result of this, it seems like a natural progression that future chess engines would build on the existing work and continue with C based languages. Not to mention the fact that the number of software engineers that could program in C/++ also vastly exceeded the number of JS engineers until well into the new millenium.

Speed

Chess is a hard problem computationally. It has a game-tree complexity score of 123 (exactly what this means is beyond the scope of this answer, but Noughts and Crosses has a score of 5, for comparison). As such, unless you want to be hanging around for a really long time while the computer works out its next move, your engine needs to run fast.

Javascript (and by extension Node) is an interpreted language. That means at runtime, it needs to be parsed and compiled before it can be executed. It also means that there's no opportunity for compile time optimisations to take place.

In direct juxtaposition to this, C based languages are precompiled. This means that they can execute directly at runtime with no intermediary steps and little overhead. There is also a plethora of compile-time optimisations that take place.

The end result of this is that for any given program, C/++ will perform approximately an order of magnitude faster on average. Admittedly, this has improved in the last few years somewhat, but they are still incomparable in terms of raw speed.

It must be noted, however, that speed and efficiency were far more important in previous decades. With today's computing power, even the most inefficient chess engine will run in a reasonable manner (unless it's just a dumb, extensive brute force - that will just never finish). Hence, why there are now Javascript based chess engines.

Conclusion

When you consider the history of the two languages along with the amount of computational power (and therefore the importance of efficiency) required to run a chess engine, it becomes clear why most of them are written in C based languages.

I will also add some personal opinion. C and C++, as strongly typed, procedural languages are simply far more suited to writing code for something like a chess engine. Sure, it can be done in Javascript but that was designed primarily for sending requests to a server and displaying results on a website, it's not designed for complex algorithms and the structures it uses show that.

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Stockfish – Chess Engines – Chess.com

Posted: December 27, 2021 at 4:14 pm

The most powerful chess engines of all time are all well-known to most chess players. If you are wondering which available engine is the strongest, then look no furtherStockfish is the king of chess engines.

Let's learn more about this mighty engine. Here is what you need to know about Stockfish:

Stockfish is the strongest chess engine available to the public and has been for a considerable amount of time. It is a free open-source engine that is currently developed by an entire community. Stockfish was based on a chess engine created by Tord Romstad in 2004 that was developed further by Marco Costalba in 2008. Joona Kiiski and Gary Linscott are also considered founders.

Stockfish is not only the most powerful available chess engine but is also extremely accessible. It is readily available on many platforms, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, iOS, and Android.

Stockfish's accomplishments are more impressive than those of any other chess engine. It has won eight Top Chess Engine Championships (TCEC) through 2020. Stockfish has also dominated Chess.com's Computer Chess Championship since 2018, winning the first six events and more.

Stockfish had firmly established itself as the strongest chess engine in the world before 2017, which is why the chess world was shaken to its core when it lost a one-sided match to a neural network computer program called AlphaZero. This loss to AlphaZero led to the development of other neural network projects (most notably Leela Chess Zero,Leelenstein, and Alliestein).

Although Stockfish has kept its spot atop the chess engine list, the neural network engines had been getting closer and closer to Stockfish's strength. In September 2020, Stockfish 12 was released, and it was announced that Stockfish had absorbed the Stockfish+NNUE project (NNUE stands for Efficiently Updatable Neural Network). What does this move mean? Well, now the raw power of the traditional brute-force Stockfish has been improved by the evaluation abilities of a neural network enginea mind-boggling combination!

As of October 2020, Stockfish is the highest-rated engine according to the computer chess rating list (CCRL) with a rating of 3514it is the only engine with a rating above 3500. According to the July 2020 Swedish Chess Computer Association (SSDF) rating list, Stockfish 9 is ranked #3, Stockfish 10 is ranked #2, and Stockfish 11 is ranked #1 with a rating of 3558. Taking the top three spots with three different versions is quite impressive.

According to this great video on the strongest chess engines of all time (based on the SSDF rating lists), Stockfish is the strongest engine of all timea sentiment that is widely shared in the chess community.

As mentioned, Stockfish has dominated the TCEC since it started participating. It has won eight TCEC championships and also has six second-place finishesit has placed first or second in every season it has participated since 2013 with only one exception. From 2018-2020 it won seven out of nine TCEC seasons ahead of Komodo, Leela Chess Zero, Shredder, Houdini, and other top-level engines.

Stockfish also won the 2014 TCEC Fischer Random tournament, the TCEC season 10 Rapid tournament, and three TCEC cups (in 2018, 2019, and 2020 respectively).

Chess.com's Computer Chess Championship has also been a common winning ground for Stockfish. It has won eight of the 13 events through 2020 and placed second in four others. Stockfish continues to defeat the neural network engines in most competitions.

The first game example is from the 2018 Stockfish-AlphaZero match. Stockfish wins quickly and easilycan you ask for more than defeating the strongest chess entity that the world has ever seen in a mere 22 moves?Stockfish sacrifices a pawn early in the opening and gains a large advantage after 13. Rd3. After 18. Rh4, all of Stockfish's pieces are active and developed, while all of AlphaZero's pieces are on the back rank (except for the queen):

The sacrifices with 19. Bc4! and 20. Nce4! are powerful and finish the game quickly.

In this second game example, we see Stockfish dispatch another famous chess engine that stood atop the chess engine world for years: Rybka. Stockfish gains a nice advantage out of the opening that it keeps throughout the game. The fireworks start with Stockfish's 28. Bxh6+!

Stockfish keeps up the pressure with an exchange sacrifice on move 31 and dominates the rest of the game after Rybka's 33...Kh7:

In this fantastic video by Chess.com's NM Sam Copeland, Stockfish+NNUE dismantles the neural network engine Stoofvlees:

Stockfish is the engine for analysis on Chess.com. It is very easy to use on this site in several ways. One is to go to Chess.com/analysis and load your PGN or FEN:

Another easy-to-use method of analyzing your games on Chess.com with Stockfish is to select "Analyze" after you complete a game in Live Chess.

Yet another way to analyze your games with Stockfish on Chess.com is with Chess.com's analysis board. Simply go to Live Chess and select the drop-down menu below the Tournaments tab:

After you select this menu, simply press "Analysis Board." Then you can analyze with Stockfish!

The Analysis Board is very easy to use and can help you with any phase of the game. This article explains how to use it.

In this video, Chess.com's IM Danny Rensch explains some of the Stockfish analysis features available on Chess.com:

You now know what Stockfish is, why it is important, how to analyze with Stockfish on Chess.com, and more. Head over to Chess.com/CCC to watch Stockfish and other top engines battling at any time on any day!

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Top 10 Strongest Chess Engines In 2021 – Hercules Chess

Posted: December 23, 2021 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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