5/1/2011 – Remember Andriy Slyusarchuk? The chess amateur who read three thousand books about the game and then went on to beat Rybka blindfold? The Ukrainian professor performs other mental feats, like memorizing 80 chess boards in 4½ minutes and then identifying changes made to them. GM Georgy Timoshenko took part in the act and wrote a wonderfully entertaining expose.
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Believe it or not – part II
We recently received word, from Chinese media and other sources, that on Andriy
Slyusarchuk, a Ukrainian chess amateur, but apparently a man with an immensely
advanced brain (or super-natural powers, as one starry-eyed student told a TV
news channel), had read three thousand books about the game and then gone on
to beat Rybka 4.0 in a two-game blindfold match. The 39-year-old doctor, who
says he can recite 20,000 books by heart and has memorized 30 million digits
of Pi (the official
world record: 67,890 digits), went on to perform other prodigious feats
of chess – we provided you with video links in our
previous report.
The reaction of our readers was predictably plentiful and vigorous. Joeri Piet
from Amersfoort assumed that it had to be a belated April Fool's prank, Philip
Roe of Ann Arbor, USA, speculated that Slyusarchuk may have pulled "the
old one of playing Rybka White versus Rybka Black?" K Yunus Camsari of
West Lafayette wrote: "Since when are you paying attention to worthless
news items like this? I want five minutes of my life back. I think we are past
1st of April so why are you directing traffic to pay attention to such nonsense?"
– Because we, dear reader, are simply shocked to see how gullible spectators
and the media can be. That became clear in a Ukrainian
TV report we showed you, where "he demonstrated his abilities to scientists
and students" in Kiev.
Mateo Arcos of Montevideo, Uruguay, wrote: "It is a big disappointment
that so many people believe this man. Thank heavens you were not one of them."
In one of the videos we showed you Andriy Slyusarchuk is confronted with eighty
chess boards with random positions set up on them. He walks through the rows
of tables, stopping just a few seconds at some of the boards, and then leaves
the room, having spent a total of 4½ minutes studying the positions.
Watch the video:
The chess part starts at around seven minutes and ten seconds into the report
After that a helper changes the position of four pieces on random boards. The
professor returns and starts to examine the positions. Note that at around 11
min 30 sec he appears to have problems and asks for a break. It is not clear
whether he leaves the room. When he restarts things are much better:
Slyusarchuk gets the first two boards and changes right, then has problems
with the third: he knows something has happened on board fifty, but he can't
figure out what it is.
Take a look at the chess board that is causing him grief: the position is relatively
nonsensical, but what is of relevance is that the board coordinates are the
wrong way around. This plays a role in the article that follows.
Slyusarchuk knows that a piece has been moved, but it (what exactly?) doesn't
make sense to him. You can see him throw a tantrum, starting from around 12
minutes 30 seconds, scenes that must be watched if you want to enjoy what follows.
We were in the process of providing an explanation of how Slyusarchuk most
likely performed his chess memory feat when we received word from GM Georgy
Timoshenko, who had actually experienced a session with the professor in a TV
studio. Georgy described his adventure in an article on the web site detiarbata.livejournal.com.
His report was translated for us by Steve Giddins. It is one of the most entertaining
chess pieces we have read in years.
I first became acquainted with Professor Slusarchuk about 18 months ago. This
meeting was the occasion for a funny story and jokes that I told my friends.
However, recent events make me feel I should tell a wider audience about what
happened.
GM Georgy Timoshenko of Ukraine
I got a call from the studio of the popular science programme on Channel 1
+1 (a popular Ukrainian television station) and was asked to speak as an expert
in an unusual event, concerning the exceptional capabilities of a human being.
Intrigued, I agreed. The action took place in Kiev Lyceum No. 100. The participants
were the crew of Channel 1+1, a little less than a hundred students with chess
sets, and Professor Slyusarchuk and his friend, with a video camera. As explained
by Slyusarchuk himself, a parallel live film of the event would provide a fuller
record.
Slyusarchuk announced that he could remember the location of the pieces on
all of the boards and, moreover, to restore the position of the four boards,
where changes would be made. The children were asked to place the pieces on
the boards in arbitrary positions. Slyusarchuk walked along all of the boards,
spending about three seconds on each, and then left the room. I said to myself
that had I tried such a task, three seconds per board would have been insufficient.
But the fact is, he was a genius!
I was asked to choose four boards and to make a move on each, call out the
number of the boards (all boards were numbered) and the move played, using long
algebraic notation. At two boards, I decided to complicate the task and made
the most difficult reproducible move, from my point of view, namely a subtle
pawn move. On one board I made a knight move, and on the last I thought I made
the easiest move to see, long castling. After some time, Professor Slyusarchuk
returned to the room and asked all the children to leave. Then he went round
the tables. He quite confidently found the number of the boards where the position
had been changed. First he reproduced the move b7-b5 easily. The move Ng8-f6
caused difficulties on the second board, and Slyusarchuk decided to return to
this board later.
The real comedy began when he went to the third board. The fact was that that
the arrangement of pieces contradicted the coordinates given around the edges
of the board (the board had been set up with the white pieces at the a8-h8 end
of the board). When Slyusarchuk started looking at the top left corner of the
board for the move h2-h3 that I had made, it all became clear. However, after
long confusion he finally managed to cope with this task and reproduced the
move correctly.
The most interesting thing came on the fourth board. The genius obviously had
difficulty with the identification of the queen and king. He asked me which
was the queen, and which the king. I wondered why he needed to know this, since
he remembers a picture of the board, and not the names of the pieces. However,
I pointed out to him where the king was. And then it became clear that Slyusarchuk
knew that my move was long castling, but he did not know how this move is done!
After prolonged unsuccessful attempts to return to the original position, he
eventually decided, and simply swapped the king and rook, which were on d1 and
c1.
Then we returned to the position on the second board. Somehow, returning the
knight from f6 to g8 was for him an impossible task, perhaps because he did
not know that a knight could jump over a pawn. We stood before this board for
several minutes. That was quite enough to remember the position, and I decided
to conduct another experiment. I removed all the pieces off the board, and said
I could restore the position and invited Mr. Slyusarchuk to do the same. He
did not even bother trying.
In my commentary for the film crew, I said that I could be 99.9% certain that
the entire show was a scam. Mr. Slyusarchuk clearly had contact with his assistant
in the room (remember his friendly camera operator?), and had received the board
numbers and the moves I had made. But because of his poor knowledge of the rules
of chess, he could not always show these moves on the board.
A few days later I received a call from a girl at the TV company, and was told
that the film would not be shown, as Slyusarchuk had threatened legal action.
Georgy Timoshenko
Our reaction to this piece: if you are doing spectacular and incredible
feats of chess you should at least learn how the pieces move. And secondly:
someone who does not know the rules cannot, we are bold enough to venture, in
a few monthis read three thousand books on the the game and then go on to beat
Rybka 4.0 blindfold.
Addendum – the match against Rybka
Andriy Slyusarchuk played Rybka on April 27, 2011, at 10:00 a.m. It was organised
in the President Hotel in Kiev, under the patronage of the Ministry of Education,
Youth and Sports in Ukraine. The machine used had a IntelCore i7-2600K processor
running at 3.40GHz. The opponent was "Fritz 11 Deep Rybka 4 x64".
Here are the games:
Amateur beats Rybka blindfold – while hell freezes
over 29.04.2011 – Chinese media and other sources
tell us that Ukrainian chess amateur Andrew Slyusarchuk beat Rybka 4.0
in a two-game blindfold match after reading three thousand books on
the subject. The reports also says the 39-year-old doctor can recite
20,000 books by heart and has memorized 30 million digits of Pi. There
are lots of video demonstrations, but as
Robert Ripley used to say...
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