12/18/2018 – It's a new book, on a hot topic, and by two great experts: Prof Jonathan Schaeffer, one of the pioneers of computer chess, and Dr Karsten Müller, GM and leading endgame expert. It traces the progress of computers in our noble game, with explanations and analysis, and lots of meticulously annotated games. The book bears a proper review (which will follow), but for today we bring you the highly interesting foreword by a man who has faced down computers for a number of years.

12/7/2018 – It was a long time coming, but the wait is over. After nearly a full year, being ping-ponged from one peer reviewer to the next, the final paper on AlphaZero is out, shedding light on a number of hitherto unknown or misunderstood elements in its construction, not to mention some clarifications and corrections. These include sample code to help implement their work and all the games of the match against Stockfish, of which 20 were specially chosen by GM Matthew Sadler. | Graphic: Deep Mind

9/5/2018 – The Swedish Grandmaster HARRY SCHÜSSLER was a commentator on the Computer Chess World Championships in Sweden. Schüssler admittedly does not understand much about computer chess, per se, but does knows about chess itself. The grandmaster looks back on the Computer World Championship and describes his impressions of the engine games and what lessons can be learned from them. | Photos: ICGA / Günes

7/13/2018 – The 24th World Computer Chess Championship will start in Stockholm on Friday. Three titles are at stake: the software world champion, the open computer chess world champion and a blitz world champion. The two-time defending champion is Komodo. | Photo: Komodo operator Erdogan Guenes

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.

3/11/2018 – Today, in the time of strong engines, analysing chess games seems to be easy: fire up the engine and let the computer work out the lines. This is useful but does not help your chess as much as analysing actively. ChessBase offers a lot features that help to analyse, from entering games to analysing professionally. | Drawing: ChessBase

3/10/2018 – Meet Mathias Feist, the soul of Fritz, and a core member of the ChessBase team. Matthias has been the lead developer of Fritz since its inception, over 25 years ago. Fritz has been a world computer chess champion, but nowadays the focus is more on how to make it increasingly useful for humans as a fun and engaging training tool. Fritz 16 has raised the bar in this regard and in this interview with the Spanish magazine Peon de Rey, Jorge Casado seeks to uncover how the program and computer chess generally has evolved over the years. Mathias Feist has had a front row seat! | Photo: Nadja Wittman

2/14/2018 – The "Top Chess Engine Championship", TCEC for short, is considered a kind of unofficial computer world championship. Currently the 11th season is played, now in the form of a league with promotion and relegation. After the preliminaries, the "Premier League" started on Tuesday with the eight top programs. S.O. Platz gives an overview of the history of this unofficial chess computer world championship.

1/16/2018 – This article is dedicated to some brilliant games played by Fritz 16, annotated nearly move-by-move by Davide Nastasio. In fact we can learn a lot from these engine vs engine games, especially when compared to our own mental chess dos and don'ts, and asking ourselves some questions as to why some moves — even apparently good ones — were not played. Often we hear the advice to study master games to improve our chess level, and if you watch these games, you'll gain a lot of insight and ideas for your next tournament!

12/13/2017 – In recent years the TCEC tournament has turned into the unofficial Computer Chess World Championship. This year Houdini and Komomo made it to the final, a 100 game match. But even before all 100 games were played Houdini decided the match in its favour. In an interview during the match the programmers of Komodo and Houdini revealed their views on current developments in computer chess.

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.

11/23/2017 – Over the years the "Thoresen Chess Engines Competition" (TCEC) has become the unofficial Computer World Championship and the very best programs start in this tournament. After two qualifiers, season 10 now finishes with the superfinal in which Komodo faces Houdini. They play 100 games against each other, and the games are shared live on PlayChess. As a bonus, we bring you a brief modern history of computer chess. @StockfishLegalNotice

10/2/2017 – Inspired by the image of endgame expert Alexey Troitzky sitting in a Siberian forest, analyzing night after night whether king plus four knights can always beat king plus queen, Prof Azlan Iqbal set his AI composer Chesthetica on finding a nice 4N-Q chess problem. It took his program a week, and the result was deemed not aesthetically perfect. So we issued a challenge to our readers: come up with a better problem of four knights vs queen. Here are the results.

9/8/2017 – It is a seven-piece ending over which Troitzky once toiled. In the meantime endgame databases have mastered it and can solve billions of non-trivial positions, each in an instant. But can a computer program be taught to generate interesting studies or problems with the given material? KI researcher Dr Azlan Iqbal has instructed his software to try, and it has produced a mate-in-five. We ask our readers: can you do better?

6/7/2017 – The number of entries for this year's CCWC were disappointingly low, mainly due to the cost of participation. To overcome this problem the International Computer Games Association has decided to change the format and make it much like the FIDE human world championships. This year, from July 3rd-7th, there will be a tournament of four teams, each receiving a subsidy of €2000 from the ICGA. Anf from 2018 on the World Computer Chess Championship will be played as a match, between the reigning World Champion and a challenger chosen by a process that is still to be determined.

1/18/2017 – He learned chess at the age of 13, and the game became a preoccupation and obsession. Hans Berliner played for the US Olympiad team and four times in the US Championship. He later graduated in computer science and became a professor at the Carnegie Mellon University. There he pioneered hardware programming and built the first machine that exceeded 2400 Elo points. Last Friday he passed away in his retirement home in Florida. Hans Berliner is also remembered for what many have called the greatest chess game ever played.

12/29/2016 – "You will go down in history as the first person to be beaten by a machine in an intellectual pursuit where you were the most advanced member of our species," says American author, philosopher, and neuroscientist in this extraordinary podcast interview with Garry Kasparov. After discussing the current world political situation they go on to the subject of machine intelligence. Kasparov also announced a book called Deep Thinking that is due for release in May.

10/13/2016 – How about sitting in the comfort of your living room and challenging a player anywhere in the world to play a game with you, on a "real chess set"? Sound's impossible right! With the world's smartest chess board, "Square Off", it no longer is! This article deals with the journey of how a revolutionizing chess technology was created. After years of hard work and innumerable prototypes, the final product is now ready. And you can be the proud owner of the Square Off chess set by supporting their campaign on Kickstarter.

7/5/2016 – Its stiffest competition came from the German program Jonny, running on a giant 2400-core machine. With only 48 cores the US program Komodo finished the computer tournament in Leiden, Netherlands, equal first with Jonny, then went on to win a hard-fought tiebreak, making it the 22nd World Computer Chess Champion. It may interest you to know that the latest version of our flagship chess engine, Komodo 10, was released just a month ago.

6/4/2016 – "I used to tell people that in my youth I had three great sporting heroes: Muhammad Ali, Bobby Fischer and Franz Beckenbauer. Nobody else came close to them. A Dutch colleague had the same heroes, with Cruyff replacing Beckenbauer. Fischer died in January 2008, at the age of 64, Cruyff a few months ago at the age of 69, and now Dirk Jan and I both mourn the greatest boxer of all time." Eulogy by Frederic Friedel.

5/3/2016 – What was it like in the pre-computer era to analyse a game or compose a chess study? Games were "adjourned" and studied by the players overnight; and compositions had to be repeatedly corrected when errors were discovered. After Fritz and co. arrived on the scene adjournments had to be abandoned and studies became flawless – and often breathtakingly virtuoso. Amatzia Avni describes the process.

6/6/2015 – On June 6th 1985 the 22-year-old Garry Kasparov came to Hamburg to play a preparation match for his World Championship bid – and to do a remarkably critical interview with a leading German news magazine. During the visit he played a simul against 32 of the strongest chess computers of the day. We invite you to compare the games with today's chess engines. Garry annotated one of them for us.

10/26/2014 – Nate Silver is a US statistician and writer who analyzes baseball and elections – with remarkable accuracy. He is currently the editor-in-chief of ESPN's FiveThirtyEight blog and a Special Correspondent for ABC News. On Wednesday Nate released a gripping 17-minute documentary on ESPN. It is about computer chess and Kasparov's ill-fated 1997 match against Deep Blue. Must watch.

10/27/2013 – "The most striking thing about the movie is its amazingly detailed and precise reconstruction of the styles of the day," says Richard Brody in the New Yorker. "The black and white fly-on-the-wall style may appeal to some, but it overstays its welcome over 90 dull minutes," writes Sean Marsh in Chess Magazine. We have trailers and reviews of this recently released film by Andrew Bujalski, which you can download for $12.99. Judge for yourself.