ChessBase prank on April 1st 2016
Pal Benko sent us his helpmate and stalemate problems
explicitly as April 1st entertainment. The were all correct and very satisfying
to solve (as helpmates usually are). But how many of you noticed that for
the last two you had to reverse the board – as the coordinates quite
clearly show. So, for those who didn't notice and found the solutions trivially
easy, here's a chance to solve the problems with White moving down the board.
The solutions will be published next week.
Black to play – help-stalemate in five
moves (White moves downwards!)
Sergey Karjakin, the winner of the 2016 Candidates tournament
in Moscow, did
indeed receive a real BMW i8 sports car. It is his to drive around
for a full month, as clearly stated. The little model i8 was just a symbolic
gift at the closing ceremony.
The picture we used showed Sergey Karjakin holding a model BMW i8 –
our intention was to have as many readers as possible think: oh, April Fool,
all he got was a toy BMW. We transcribed the speech of Development Director
of the BMW Group in Russia, Hans de Visser, at the closing ceremony, but
expediently left out the bit where it became clear that Sergey would be
driving away with a real BMW parked in front of the venue. The omitted passage
is given in italics.
Chess is one of the most intellectual games in the world, and our brand,
BMW, is known all around the world for our intellectual engineering and
our innovations. So for us it is a perfect match. On behalf of BMW Russia
I am happy to congratulate Sergey for winning the tournament. For us it
was not difficult to find the right award for this great achievement.
We thought about driving our most progressive sports car in the world:
the BMW i8. Most of you have seen the real car in front of the door,
but now you know who is driving away tonight with this car. It's Sergey.
Here a small handover of a miniature. So, Sergey, a car that drives
up to 250 kilometers an hour, from zero to one hundred in four seconds,
carbon fibre body and a fuel consumption of only 2.1 liters for 100 kilometers
[translates to 112 miles per gallon]. I think perfec figures. What do
you think? [Sergey: "That's my dream"]
So Sergey can actually drive around in his i8, and we suggested he race
it against Magnus Carlsen's Tesla. Here's what a drag
race from stop would look like, and here a race
from roll. Hope the World Championship match in New York is closer.
Addendum: watch
a Tesla Model S drag race a Boeing 737
The real April Fool's joke was buried in the Hillary seeks Irina Krush
story: the Donald Trump mate-in-four and the narrative around it was cooked
up by two ChessBase editors who will remain unnamed – what if Trump
sues? The story was surely silly enough, and most of our readers recognizes
the satire it contained.
Donald Trump, Chess Life 1968
White to play and mate in four moves – a valuable
allumwandlung
The future of our April Fool's tradition
We are close to abandoning our April Fool's pranks in the future. Over
the years – over close to two decades, actually – it has become
progressively more difficult for us to construct stories that do what they
are supposed to do: fool as many people as possible and
be entertaining. Of course it is trivially easy to fulfil the first criterion:
"ChessBase to manufacture bottled drinks" is something nobody can easily
check. But it is not funny.
We believe we have succeeded in the second criterion fairly well in the
past: we produced a gaudy,
blinking news page (for a full day) in 2011, and told of the discovery
that Matt
Damon was the second cousin of Magnus Carlsen in the year before that.
However, the task of actually fooling people has become progressively more
difficult. On April 1st armed insurgents, equipped with advanced Google
searches and massive forum discussions, attack our news page and post forum
messages telling everybody what the April joke was and how easily they had
recognised it.
So we started hiding the prank behind fake jokes, i.e. publishing reports
that sounded fairly outrageous but were perfectly true. Take for instance
April 1st 2010: we started with an article telling about how grandmasters
were worried about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland/France.
Later in the day we reported that authorities in Reykjavik had decided to
exhume
Fischer body to extract DNA in a paternity suit. Both reports were perfectly
true. Then finally the Carlsen-Damon report mentioned above. It was interesting
for us to see the successive tsunamis of letters strike our mail box after
each report appeared on the news page.
But things kept getting progressively more difficult, as the Internet detectives
arm themselves with ever more powerful tools. So we had to increase our
efforts to hide the pranks. In 2012, for instance, we published three fake
April Fool reports before publishing the real joke – which was about
Rybka author Vasik
Rajlich busting the King's Gambit in a project that involved 3000 processor
cores, running for over four months, exhaustively analysing all lines that
follow after 1.e4 e5 2.f4 exf4. This appeared on April 2nd, which many readers
called unfair. But we claimed that was not the case: it was posted just
before midnight April 1st – in Pago Pago, and was intended to fool
the vast number of Pago Pagoians who visit our news page.
However, the report on the busting of the King's Gambit got us in a bit
of trouble: a few hours after it had appeared we got a call from a journalist
working for the New York Times who wanted to do a story on Rajlich's remarkable
achievement. When we told him it was an April Fool's joke he said: "Oh
shoot! I got up at five this morning to come to the NYT office to write
the report." Our
confession that it had been a joke appeared a few hours later.
Fischer's retractor
Another prank that got us into a bit of trouble was one published on April
1st 2002. This was essentially the gist:
Bobby Fischer has already introduced two important innovations that have
received a larger or smaller degree of acceptance by the chess community.
First came the "Fischer clock", which adds a small time increment
after every move, thereby alleviating the brutal time trouble some players
tend to get into. Then came "Fischer Random Chess", which scrambles
the position of the pieces at the beginning of the game. This is designed
to eliminate the very extensive openings preparation that is encountered
in top-level chess today.
Now Fischer has turned his sights on what he believes is an unbearable
preponderance of tactics in chess. His declared intention is to return
the game to its origins and not allow the strategic spirit to be destroyed
by "cheapo shots constantly fired by younger players." To this
end he has submitted a rule modification, which FIDE is currently considering
and will present to the delegates at its next general council meeting
during the Dubai Grand Prix.
Fischer's proposal adds one rule to section 4.1-4.7 ("The act
of moving the pieces") in FIDE's "Laws
of Chess". The new article 4.8 states that: "After a player
has registered a move by his opponent he may, as part of his next move,
either execute a move in the form stipulated by the rules 4.1-4.7 given
above; or instead he may execute the opponent's and his own previous
moves in reverse order, replacing any captured pieces onto their original
squares, and then execute an alternative move, in accordance with the
rules 4.1-4.7 given above."
The new "Fischer move" (which is also referred to as a "retractor")
does not change the original flavour of the game – in fact many
believe it actually reflects it more completely than the rules practised
in tournaments today. The new rule has been extensively tested in informal
play, where the advantages of the system are immediately obvious. Games
are no longer decided by simple tactical strokes, the outcome depends
much more on a painstaking exploratory strategy of "trial and error".
The only disadvantage is that games may sometimes last a little longer,
especially when a number of Fischer moves are executed.
The new Fischer move rule also provides an interesting solution to the
problem of chess playing computers, which are the sharpest tactical entities
on the planet. Our own experiments have shown that players who were scoring
zero points against the 2750-rated Fritz program were actually winning
some of their games when allowed to make extensive use of retractor moves.
FIDE has stressed that a decision in Dubai to adopt the Fischer move
rule would not mean that it would be immediately implemented in all tournaments
organised or sanctioned by the world chess organisation. "We anticipate
that it will take a number of years before the new rule is universally
accepted," said a ranking FIDE official. "Until then both forms
of chess can coexist."
Many players are very enthusiastic about Fischer move games. "Retractor
games remove the unnecessary tension of ruining your game with stupid
blunders," said one leading grandmaster. "I can be much more
daring in my choice of moves." But Judit Polgar, the world's strongest
female player, disagrees. "I have my doubts about this new rule,
maybe because I am not very good at it. I lost an retractor game in an
important tournament once."
All very cute and funny. But unfortunately we soon got a press release
from an Asian chess federation (which will remain unnamed) that said they
had formed a special committee to protest Fischer's proposal and urge FIDE
not to consider it.
In the following year a number of April 1st articles brought protest and
animosity, or backfired the way this year's Google April Fool's prank did
(the search giant realized: it's
not okay to prank 900 million people). And it has become too easy to
detect the joke on our news page (damn you, Google!). For this reason we
will probably abandon the tradition in the future – really, not as
we announced in this
April 1st story.
Links
- YouTube: How It's Unmade –
Oreo Cookies
One of our all-time favourites, which shows an assembly line as it processes
bags of Oreo-style cookies into raw materials. How long does it take for
you to work out how the video was made?
