11/28/2024 – The International Chess Federation and Google are calling on developers worldwide to reimagine chess-playing AI with efficiency at its core. As part of Google’s sponsorship of the FIDE World Chess Championship 2024, this competition challenges participants to create smart, resource-light chess engines that perform impressively without relying on powerful computers or extensive data. Hosted on Kaggle, with a $50,000 prize fund, the initiative draws inspiration from Claude Shannon's vision of AI as a problem-solving tool.

11/9/2024 – The upcoming FIDE World Championship Match in Singapore, presented by Google, promises a grand chess celebration featuring elite players, chess legends and AI insights. Beyond the main event, visitors can enjoy interactive exhibitions, masterclasses, and simul games against grandmasters. Legends like Xie Jun and Boris Gelfand, alongside AI expert Nenad Tomašev, will provide fascinating perspectives on the game's evolution. The Singapore International Open, held alongside the match, offers an arena for aspiring players to compete.

10/9/2024 – DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, a DeepMind researcher who led the company's efforts to build AI models that could predict protein structures, shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, along with David Baker from the University of Washington. Through his AI company, he had already spearheaded breakthroughs in Go and chess with AlphaGo and AlphaZero, and he has now won the Nobel Prize thanks to AlphaFold2. (photos: DeepMind)

9/12/2024 – FIDE and the Singapore Chess Federation have announced that search giant Google is the Title Sponsor of the FIDE World Chess Championship in Singapore, which takes place at Resorts World Sentosa in November. This is the first time the World Championship has been sponsored by a global technology leader. Congratulations to FIDE for arranging this groundbreaking sponsorship.

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.

1/21/2024 – Since we can’t hope to emulate the calculating ability of modern engines, what we must do is to plough a sensible course, in which we calculate as much as possible within the constraints of the time limit, aiming for positions to play in which we feel reasonably comfortable. There’s little advantage in going for some horrifically complicated line in which the machine is very happy but we feel seasick! | Photo: Lennart Ootes / Tata Steel Chess

12/18/2023 – D Gukesh scored his first win of the event against Alexandr Predke in the fourth round of the Chennai Grand Masters. Gukesh joined Pentala Harikrishna in the lead with 2.5/4 points each. Harikrishna had a well contested draw against Levon Aronian. Parham Maghsoodloo also scored his first win of the event, against Sanan Sjugirov. Arjun Erigaisi had a well contested draw against Pavel Eljanov. Five players are trailing the leaders at 2/4 each. They are Aronian, Eljanov, Maghsoodloo, Sjugirov and Arjun. | Photos: Shahid Ahmed

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)

9/6/2023 – The new ChessBase Magazine #215 offers, among other things, 36 extensively annotated games. More than half of them build the "Special" of this issue: an exclusive collection of outstanding games by Hikaru Nakamura! In addition, Anish Giri, Grigoriy Oparin, Ivan Cheparinov, Thai Dai Van Nguyen et al. provide analyses from Norway Chess 2023 and Sharjah Masters 2023. Arjun Erigaisi played a brilliancy against Vladislav Kovalev in Sharjah - you can find an abridged version of his analysis here!

4/20/2023 – Vladimir Kramnik recently participated at the Armageddon Series organized by World Chess in Berlin. In a 35-minute interview conducted in the German capital, the former world champion talked about his new projects, his work with Indian talents and Alireza Firouzja, and his assessment of Magnus Carlsen’s place in the history of the sport. His conclusion: “He just changed chess. Chess is Magnus Carlsen.” | Photo: World Chess

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.

8/21/2022 – Pushing the g-pawn early in the game has become so common that when GM Jon Speelman watches Shakhriyar Mamedyarov play, he feels tempted to bet with himself when ‘the bayonet’ will be deployed. This week’s thematic column features a couple of classics (by Paul Keres and Alexei Shirov), an example from Mamedyarov’s practice and a remarkable win by Richard Pert from the British Championship. | Photo: Niki Riga

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.

8/10/2022 – The 2022 World Computer Chess championship was just held, and was the first edition since 2019 and the outbreak of the pandemic. After over two years, the traditional event took place in Vienna, Austria, and the winners were Ginkgo AKA Fritz using new neural net technology, and a powerful new Komodo (free update today!). Don't miss Komodo's fantastic knight sacrifice (with video!). (photo: Erdo Gunes, operator of Komodo)

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

7/15/2022 – This is the 2nd episode in the series of Olympiad stories with Saravanan. In this episode, we discuss the Madras Tiger Vishy Anand and some of his memorable games at the Olympiad. In discussing the games, Saravanan and Sagar also go into the history of how Vishy developed as a chess player. Saravanan saw the lightning kid style of play of Anand and also the more mature and calm style. This is part of a 6-episode series of the most interesting stories from the Chess Olympiads. | Photo: Abhyudaya Ram.

5/7/2022 – Bent Larsen is the "hero" of the new issue of ChessBase Magazine. In CBM #207 our authors — among others Emanuel Berg, Jan Markos and Yannick Pelletier — comment on their favourite game of the great Dane. CBM readers can expect a collection of 19 special encounters from the period 1956 to 1998. In addition, Mihail Marin presents Larsen as a "universal player" in his strategy column and Karsten Mueller analyses a selection of Larsen's best endgames. You can watch the Larsen-Andersson game (1982) with Jan Markos' analysis here. Enjoy!

4/13/2022 – Who am I? Tactician or position player? Attacker or defender? Should I play 1.d4 or 1.e4? Sicilian or French? If you know your strengths and weaknesses you will score more points and you will be more successful. In their "Player Types" ChessBase course Karsten Müller and Luis Engel take a close look at playing styles, and in an extensive interview Karsten Müller reveals a few things they discovered.

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.

2/4/2022 – Ashton Anderson, a computer scientist at the University of Toronto, wanted to know whether chess players have a unique playing style. To answer that question, he and his team gathered more than "50 million human games played on the Lichess website. They collected games by players who had played at least 1000 times and sampled sequences of up to 32 moves from those games. ... [Then] they gave the system 100 games from each of about 3000 known players, and 100 fresh games from a mystery player. The system ... identified the mystery player 86% of the time." An article in "Science" takes a closer look at the pros and cons of this experiment. | Photo: Xi Jian/stock.com | Source: "Science"

1/18/2022 – During the Tata Steel Chess Tournament, the worlds of Artificial Intelligence and Chess will come together at a unique event called ‘The Game Changer’. The event will take place online on Friday 21 January, starting at 15.30 CET. How is AI used in chess? Could Magnus Carlsen also have become world champion without the use of AI? And more importantly, how can the world of manufacturing adopt lessons learned in the world of chess?

1/14/2022 – In the second part of the series, Joshua Doknjas examines opening system influenced by the neural network engines and discusses the modern battle between two well-prepared players. | Graphic: Europe Echecs

1/7/2022 – In 2017, AlphaZero shocked the chess world by crushing Stockfish in a 100-game match. Since then, chess engines have undergone a substantial revision based on deep learning methods to develop a neural network. Joshua Doknjas examines the impact of the AI revolution in chess. | Graphic: Europe Echecs

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.