6/26/2018 – Does correspondence chess have any meaning in 2018, when chess engines definitely overcame the best humans already back in about 2005? Is it useful for a chess player to study a database of correspondence chess games? Or to use it as a reference? Discover more in an interview with Wolff Morrow, one of the top ten correspondence chess players in the USA!

6/19/2018 – The "Top Chess Engine Championships" (TCEC) is a competition of the world's best computer programs which play in several divisions. The strongest programs start in "Division Premier". TCEC Season 12 just came to an and was won by the new Komodo 12, place two went to Stockfish. On Monday, June 18, Komodo 12 and Stockfish started to play their 100-game superfinal.

6/15/2018 – The inclusion of the new Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) version of Komodo has had many users surprised, confused, and even describing it as a gimmick. However, its value is not to be underestimated, and it allows the astute user to find resources the very best engines are completely blind to. GM Karsten Mueller has helped illustrate this with some finely chosen examples in the following article. Read on to see what makes Komodo MCTS so special!

4/26/2018 – It might sound like a joke, but it is not: the revolutionary techniques used to create Alpha Zero, the famous AI chess program developed by DeepMind, are now being used to engineer an engine that runs on the PC. This project has now been underway for about two months, and the engine, Leela Chess Zero, is already quite strong, playing at 2700 on good hardware, and is freely available. As will be seen, just about every aspect of this new engine is revolutionary and breaks all the paradigms that had dominated the field until now.

1/24/2018 – Kasparov has been making the media rounds as he does, but lately he's been fielding questions on chess rather than the subjects that are more often in his sights: Russia, politics, and AI. He's recently been featured in a serious conversation with conservative commentator Bill Kristol, a not-so-serious Q&A session with Twitter users published by Wired Magazine, and a wonderful mini-history lesson for The New Yorker magazine. | Photo: WIRED YouTube

1/23/2018 – In the early 1980s Ken Thompson, working at the Bell Laboratories, generated one of the world’s first chess endgame databases — king and queen vs king and rook. At the time he explained to Frederic Friedel how this revolutionary new technology worked. He did it in the form of a parable: God calculating the 32-piece endgame and playing chess. It is an amusing thought experiment that has gained interesting relevance at the current time.

12/22/2017 – Other chess reviewers have been at best dismissal and at worst harshly critical of The Secret of Chess, by Lyudmil Tsvetkov. However, according to GM David Smerdon, this book is a one of a kind work that legitimately has the potential to revolutionise how we think about chess. | Photo: Smerdon at the Tromsø Chess Olympiad, by Andreas Kontokanis CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

12/13/2017 – Garry Kasparov's match against the IBM computer Deep Blue was considered a milestone in Artificial Intelligence, a watershed moment. But was it really that? Kasparov has written a number of best-selling books on chess and other subjects, but his latest work, Deep Thinking, could be the most important one. It puts his 1997 defeat at the hands of a brute force computer and the latest development of self-learning systems into perspective. Who do you think is the ideal person to review this book?

12/13/2017 – In time for the start of the London Chess Classic DeepMind, a subsidiary of Google, published a remarkable report about the success of their "Machine Learning" project Alpha Zero. Alpha Zero is a chess program and won a 100 game match against Stockfish by a large margin. But some questions remain. Reactions from chess professionals and fans.

12/6/2017 – Imagine this: you tell a computer system how the pieces move — nothing more. Then you tell it to learn to play the game. And a day later — yes, just 24 hours — it has figured it out to the level that beats the strongest programs in the world convincingly! DeepMind, the company that recently created the strongest Go program in the world, turned its attention to chess, and came up with this spectacular result.