Turin 2006: A Chess Culture Olympiad
By Roberto Rivello
The most important aspect in a Chess Olympiad is, of course, the competition:
games, teams, emotions day after day, and, in the end, the determination of
the winners.
In Turin there will be a really great fight: with a record of participants:
140 nations will be represented and, among them, some new entries in the Olympiad,
such as Taipei, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, South
Korea, Sudan and Syria. Also the best players in the world will be represented
(Topalov, Anand, Kramnik, Morozevich, …), as well as all the strongest
young grandmasters (Radjabov, Karjakin, Carlsen, Vachier Lagrave and many others).
Every single game played by every team will be transmitted online: so you will
be able to enjoy this spectacle even if you are not in Turin.
Coverage on Playchess
The games of the 37th Chess Olympiad will be broadcast on the official
web site. But a large number of selected games will also be shown on Playchess.com,
in a special Chess Olympiad broadcast zone:
Apart from the games transmissions, which are free, there will be special live
commentary and interviews with GM Yasser Seirawan, who will be present in Turin
for the entire duration of the Olympiade.
GM Yasser Seirawan in his "Playchess Studio"
In order to watch the live commentary and interviews broadcast by Yasser Seirawan
you will need to have "ducats", the currency that is used on the Playchess
server.
You may already have ducats
on your account, e.g. if you have purchased them or won some in games and tournaments.
Check your account using "Edit – Payments – View Account".
The price for viewing all the Seirawan broadcasts for a full round is ten ducats,
which translates to €1 or $1.30. If you have 192 ducats on your account,
as displayed in the picture above, you are fine and set to go. If not you should
order some quickly. It usually takes a day or two for the transaction to be
completed.
You
can buy ducats in the ChessBase Shop
Note that ducats can be used to purchase all kinds of services on the Playchess
server, and also to buy products in the ChessBase
Shop. So stock up on them now, they will not go to waste...
Cultural programme
But from the 20th of May till the 4th of June there will be much more to see
in the hosting city: for 15 days Turin will become the capital of chess culture,
from every point of view. In a programme which we have named “Smart Moves”,
we will try to explore the very different aspects of genius and discipline in
the art of chess, presenting a great deal of entertainments, exhibitions and
conferences.
Chess and Music
The Olympic anthem was composed by Ennio Morricone, a very famous Italian
musician (I suppose you remember the musical themes of films such as Mission,
A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and many others).
Ennio Morricone is even a keen chess player and has taken part in some regular
tournaments organised in Italy. It is thanks to his great passion that he agreed
to grant the request of the Organising Committee to compose the anthem. This
composition, called “Torino-Scacchi 2006”, has been conceived for
orchestra and chorus and will be played in the opening ceremony at the Lingotto
Auditorium on the 20th of May.
The Chess Olympiad anthem was performed for the first time the 17th of April,
during the Suzuki Talent Centres World Convention (thousands of young music
students converged on Turin for this Convention dedicated to the learning method
introduced by the Japanese violinist Suzuki).
Besides, the Suzuki Talent Centre orchestra of Turin, made up of about 35
very young musicians, will take part to the opening ceremony, proposing a programme
in which music weds Olympiad and chess, including, for instance, the performance
of pieces by Vivaldi from his opera “the Olympiad” as well as the
anthem of the International Chess Federation composed by Count Giancarlo Dal
Verme.
The some day the musician Magic Malik, born in Guadalupe and now living in
Paris, will be proposing a different and very original theme about the relationship
between jazz and chess.
Chess and Theatre
The 19th of May, in the “Teatro Carignano”, one of the historical
theatres of Turin, built in the 1711, the company “Teatro della Tosse”,
well known in Italy, will present the play “Alice nella casa dello specchio”,
from the book Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll.
It is the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, although it
makes no reference to its events. While the first book has the deck of cards
as a theme, this book is loosely based on a game of chess, for which the author
provides a list of moves (although the game cannot be carried out legally due
to a move where White doesn't move out of check, much as it might happen if
a young child were playing).
Even the sequence of moves (white and red) is not always followed, which goes
along with the book's mirror image reversal theme as noted by the mathematician
Martin Gardner. In any case the Lewis Carroll’s intention was to conceive
a problem with the Excelsior
theme, a poetic form for a walk in the footsteps of Sam Loyd.
Chess and Cinema
In Turin there is a very important Cinema Museum, where cinema is narrated
in 9,000 documents, paintings and prints, 130,000 photos, 200,000 posters, 7,000
films and 20,000 volumes, with an annual 500,000 visitors. There are interesting
collections of posters dedicated to silent film, especially milestones like
"Il Fuoco", "Il Guanto”, and "Cabiria", Italy’s
first silent film, made in Turin in 1914 by Giovanni Pastrone, based on a story
by Gabriele D’Annunzio. Italian Neorealism is dealt with in detail –
from “Bicycle Thieves” to “Rome – Open City” –
and there are films from Hollywood’s golden era: "Sunset Boulevard",
"Citizen Cane", "The Lady from Shanghai", "Stagecoach",
"Gilda" and "Singing in the Rain". The Museum’s layout
is also extremely striking, thanks to François Confino’s architecture.
During the Chess Olympiad in the Cinema Museum halls a selection of the most
important movies in which chess plays an important role will be projected: works
by film directors such as Chaplin, Bergman, Varda, Gorris, Jayanti and many
others.
Chess and Technology
From the 25th of May till the 1st of June the 14th World Computer Chess Championship
will be held in Turin. The World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC), organised
by the International Computer Games Association (ICGA), had its first edition
in 1974 and has since then it has much contributed to the improvement of computers
and of software playing chess. The best chess software in the world will participate
to this competition.
In the same days there will be a Computer Olympiad, again organised by the
ICGA. Every year games subjected to testing change in relation to the current
interest of the scientific community. In Turin, programs can be submitted for
28 different games, including Chinese Chess, Go, Shogi, Clobber, Dots and Boxes,
Computational Pool, and, for the first time, Kriegsspiel! It has a strongly
scientific imprint and attracts leading researchers in the field of software
for games of strategy other than chess. The development of programs for such
games is recognised as an extremely fertile field for Artificial Intelligence
research.
The technology lovers will also appreciate the biannual Computer and Games
Conference: it is the leading international forum for research and development
on all aspects of artificial intelligence as it relates to computer games software.
After previous conferences in Japan, North America and Israel, the sixth edition
will be hosted in Turin, during the Chess Olympiad. On the occasion the local
academic world in the form of the Department of Information Technology of Turin
University will be hosting the Conference.
Finally, a series of conferences will be held during the Olympiad, regarding
the most sensitive and recent themes; questions such as the state of the art
of games software, theoretical developments and relations with advances in research;
in addition to new techniques of Artificial Intelligence as applied to games
and social and cognitive aspects of computer chess. Leading national and international
experts will participate to the congresses: among them
- Paolo Ciancarini, Professor of Information Technology at the University
of Bologna, expert in chess playing machines;
- David Levy, President of the International Computer Game Association and
International chess Master;
- Giuseppe Longo, Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Trieste, author
of texts on cybernetics and artificial intelligence;
- Jonathan Schaeffer, Professor of Information Technology at the University
of Alberta and author of the Chinook program, world checkers champion;
- Piergiorgio Odifreddi, Professor of Logic at the University of Turin and
author of various books and TV programmes on the history of science and mathematics.
The proceedings of the conference-symposium will be published by Springer,
while a second volume will be issued as a part of the collection “Lecture
Notes in Artificial Intelligence”.
Chess and Photography
The photography competition "ScattoMatto" aimed at experienced photographers
as well as amateurs who will be invited to celebrate key moments of the Olympiad
and whatever related to chess.
What else? Chess and education: with a conference in the Aula Magna of the
University of Turin, about the importance of chess as an education tool; Chess
and books, Chess and ethic and many other topics. It is enough for coming to
Turin? We do hope you can really enjoy all this.
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