4/4/2024 – Alpha Zero has revolutionised chess programming. The programme taught itself chess by playing against itself and storing its training knowledge in a neural network. All programmes have followed suit with this technique. Roger Lorenz uses a simple example to show how neural networks work and how they can be trained.

12/24/2023 – From a very young age, Rita Atkins has been active in the chess community, achieving notable success in various chess tournaments, reaching the title of Women's International Master (WIM) and winning the Hungarian Women's Chess Championship in 1992. She has also been involved in teaching chess and mathematics to school children and youth. In a lengthy interview with Uvencio Blanco, she remarked: "Give it another hundred years, and there will be just as many good female players as male ones".

12/14/2023 – Nowadays you can easily download chess engines that play better than Carlsen, Caruana, Keymer or Nakamura. But if you feel like it, you can also try to program them yourself. Roger Lorenz has tried it. In one weekend - and with the help of ChatGPT. | Photo: Coding robot (image created with Automatic1111 and Stable Diffusion)

4/24/2023 – An international Go tournament, the Chunlan Cup, with a $200,000 prize fund, has been wrapped in controversy. In the semifinal round, newcomer Li Xuanhao (China) managed to defeat the reigning world champion Shin Jin-seo (South Korea). Li’s own teammate accused him of receiving AI support during the game.

3/24/2023 – The historic Sparkassen Chess Trophy will celebrate its golden jubilee edition this year. The 50th Dortmund Chess Days Festival will take place from June 24 to July 2 at the Westfalenhallen Goldsaal in Dortmund, Germany. The NC World Masters will feature the 14th world champion Vladimir Kramnik, former World Championship challenger Fabiano Caruana, defending champion Dmitrij Kollars, and the winner of the two previous editions of the Deutschland Grand Prix, Pavel Eljanov.

8/11/2022 – André Hollstein is a professor for information technology and digitisation at the International University of Applied Sciences (with over 90,000 enrolled students). In a podcast for his students and for the general public he interviewe ChessBase co-founder Frederic Friedel. The subject of their discussion: the digitization of chess, and the revolutionary changes ChessBase brought to the game. The podcast is in German, but André sent us a full English transcript.

7/23/2022 – Vishy Anand continues to lead the standings in the No-Castling World Masters after drawing Dmitrij Kollars on Friday. In the Sparkassen Open-A, one of many tournaments taking place as part of the Dortmund Chess Festival, Dutch GM Max Warmerdam has scored 7 points in as many games. Warmerdam beat Thomas Beerdsen in style and analysed his victory in the post-game interview. | Photos: Michelle Lassak

5/16/2022 – Midsummer is traditionally the time of the Dortmund Chess Days. After last year's relaunch, the festival will be expanded this year with, among other things, a large international open. At the weekend, the pairings have been drawn, which also means that the schedule is fixed. It all starts on 17 July. | Photos: Dortmunder Schachtage

3/19/2022 – After the successful first edition last year, the No-Castling World Masters Tournament will be expanded in Dortmund in July 2022, as former world champions Vladimir Kramnik and Viswanathan Anand will be joined by Krishnan Sasikiran and local hero Daniel Fridman. Concurrently, the Deutschland Grand Prix, the NRW Youth Cup and two opens will take place at the massive festival set to kick off four months from now.

11/18/2021 – Researchers at DeepMind and Google Brain, in collaboration with Grandmaster Vladimir Kramnik, are working to explore what chess can teach us about AI and vice versa. Using Chessbase’s extensive historical chess data along with the AlphaZero neural network chess engine and components from Stockfish 8, they ask: what can we learn about chess history by studying AlphaZero, how does AlphaZero learn to evaluate positions, and is AlphaZero computing anything human-like? Their paper, “Acquisition of Chess Knowledge in AlphaZero”, has just been published.

9/7/2021 – The pioneering ‘NC World Masters 2021’ saw Vladimir Kramnik and Vishy Anand playing No-Castling chess — an interesting experiment. Kramnik analysed the games together with Deep Mind experts Ulrich Paquet and Nedad Tomasev. The Russian explains motifs and ideas in three instructive videos.

8/10/2021 – Chess tournaments in Dortmund, Germany, have a long and illustrious tradition. In 2021, the Sparkassen Chess Trophy continued this tradition. Vishy Anand won a "No Castling" match against Vladimir Kramnik, Pavel Eljanov won the "Deutschland Cup". Now, the organizers released a video that reviews highlights of this year's tournament. In a personal statement during the award ceremony, Carsten Hensel, former manager of Kramnik, and driving force behind the organisation of the tournament, had already explained why Dortmund 2021 was a real highlight for him.

7/14/2021 – Yesterday, 13 July 2021, the 48th Schachtage Dortmund began in Dortmund's Westfalenhalle. In the opening round of the Deutschland Grand Prix the young German Dmitrij Kollars (pictured) defeated the even younger German Vincent Keymer. Pavel Eljanov (against Andreas Heimann) and Daniel Fridman (against Mateusz Bartel) also won their games. | Photos and video: The Organiser

7/7/2021 – Vladimir Kramnik and Viswanathan Anand will play a special 4-game match in Dortmund starting on July 14, as castling will not be allowed. The event will be supported by world-leading AI company DeepMind. Online audiences will get to experience novel AlphaZero insights first hand in the post-match commentary of the no castling tournament.

2/19/2021 – This summer Vladimir Kramnik and Viswanathan Anand will face each other in an innovative chess variant, proposed by Kramnik: No-Castling chess. There is one simple rule change – no castling allowed, everything else remains the same as in the regular chess – is meant to combat over-preparation and drawing tendencies in chess. Experience shows that it also leads to more exciting games. In parallel the online Sparkassen Playchess Open for participants from all over the world will be in the "No-Castling“ format. This is your chance to try it out.

2/15/2021 – In 1987 Frederic Friedel co-founded ChessBase – a company that leads the world in chess software. It created the first professional chess database in history and the iconic Fritz chess playing program. The "guru" of ChessBase believes that Artificial Intelligence can be the key to mankind's future. He is as optimistic and enthusiastic, as ever, expressing hopes, but also his fears and doubts. How will we coexist with computers of a new type when they have become as intelligent as we are, and even more so?

12/25/2020 – Do you know how many chess variants there are? In 1994 David Pritchard counted 1,450. Many are complex and require long explanations of the rules. Here's a variant that takes just a few seconds to explain, but completely changes the spirit of the game: Checkless Chess! Try it over the holiday season with friends – or solve a few brain-numbing puzzles. A Merry Christmas to all our readers!

12/4/2020 – This weekend, ChessTech organizes a major international online conference on chess and technology. Numerous speakers will give online lectures on a variety of topics. In addition to the English lectures, there are contributions in Spanish, French and German. ChessBase is represented by Matthias Wüllenweber and Albert Silver.

10/9/2020 – Modifying the existing rules for chess to make it more dynamic or decisive, needs years of experience and a large numbers of games if we are to assess the quality and appeal of any new variant. The company DeepMind has used their AI technology to evaluate nine variants proposed by former World Champion Vladimir Kramnik in a much shorter period of time. Here are their findings for "Torpedo Chess", where pawns can move two squares forward from anywhere.

9/30/2020 – Modifying the existing rules for chess to make it more dynamic or decisive, is a non-trivial task: you need years of experience and large numbers of people playing new versions in order to assess the quality and appeal of any new variant. Former World Champion Vladimir Kramnik has proposed new variants, and DeepMind has used their AI technology to evaluate them in a much shorter period of time. Here are their findings for No-castling, Pawn one square and Stalemate=win chess.

9/14/2020 – Publishing chess problems on this news site has a long tradition: especially at Christmas time we publish a set of entertaining puzzles for our readers to solve. But over the years – two decades actually – it became progressively more difficult to find problems that chess engines could not solve in seconds. It became pointless to issue a challenge and provide prizes. So we have taken to giving you problems which cannot be solved by computers. Here are some samples from a collection by Burt Hochberg.

9/10/2020 – Modifying the existing rules for chess, attempting to make it more dynamic or decisive, is a non-trivial task: You need years of experience and large numbers of people playing new versions in order to assess the quality and appeal of any new variant. Former World Champion Vladimir Kramnik has proposed nine new variants, and DeepMind has used their AI technology to evaluate them in a much shorter period of time. Here are their findings.

7/9/2020 – “Game Changer” by Matthew Sadler and Natasha Regan, published by New in Chess, won the Averbakh-Boleslavsky Award to the best book of 2019. Artur Jussupow, who was a member of the jury, said of the book: “It is a unique project that combines human achievements with remarkable development in AI and opens a new approach to our beloved game. We could not choose a more deserving winner”. Books by Sam Shankland and Davorin Kuljasevic were shortlisted. | Photo: Alina l’Ami

3/24/2020 – The entire world is in disarray, everything has ground to a halt. No more parties, movie theaters, pubs or restaurants, no more public sporting event – even the 2020 Olympic Games and the Chess Olympiad have been cancelled — both today. One chess tournament after the other is being abandoned, leagues, opens, everything. And at least one top player has caught the virus, another is trapped. Everyone is search for a cure — even the AlphaZero team of DeepMind!