Donkey Kong Plays Chess Only For Gold Stars ~ Mnemonic

For remembering: domain kingdom phylum class order family genus species

 Asimov Story on Computation

■ N 1958, American science fiction legend Isaac Asimov wrote a very short story called "The Feeling of Power." In it, lowly technician MyI ron Aub discovers that he is capable of duplicating the work of his computer by multiplying two numbers together on a piece of paper. Amazing! This miraculous discovery makes its way up the chain of command, where the generals and politicians are stunned by Aub's black magic. The top general is intrigued by the possibility that human calculations could g...

 AI Can't Tell You Why It Did Something

The problem comes when the database and the engine go from )ach to oracle. It happens quite often that I will ask one of the students about a move from one of their games, and why he made it. If the move comes early on, the answer is almost always, "Because that's the nain line." That is, that's the theoretical move in the database, likely 5layed by many Grandmasters before. Sometimes the move isn't thery, but the student prepared it with the help of an engine, so the anwer is similar: "It's ...

 Outboard Brain

Following in the grand tradition of nearly every new technology, nobody started to panic about the potential downsides of cognitive outsourcing until kids starting doing it, and doing it in ways that their parents didn't understand. They type with their thumbs in ugly slang and funny symbols. They have short attention spans. They can't remember their own phone numbers. They spend more time on social media than they did with their friends irl (that's "in real life," my daughter tells me). They...

 Tablebases

t. In 1977, Thompson showed up at the World Computer Chess Championship th a new creation, a database that played the king and queen versus king and rook endgame perfectly. (KQKR is the abbreviation.) It wasn'1 an engine; there was no thinking required. Thompson had generated a database that essentially solved chess backwards, what we call retrograde analysis. It started from checkmate and worked its way back until it contained every single possible position with that material balance. Then i...

 How Computational Review of Chess Games Revealed Narrativ...

Paradoxically, when other top players wrote about games in magazines and newspaper columns they often made more mistakes in their commentary than the players had made at the board. Even when the players themselves published analyses of their own games they were often less accurate than when they were playing the game. Strong moves were called errors, weak moves were praised. It was not only a few cases of journalists who were lousy players failing to comprehend the genius of the champions, or...

 Asymmetrical Psychology: Computers Use Knights Better Tha...

e. Chess players have the most trouble visualizing the moves of knights because their move is unlike anything else in the game, an L-shaped hop instead of a predictable straight line like the other pieces. Computers, of course, don't visualize anything at all, and so manage every piece with equal skill. I believe it was Bent Larsen, the first GM victim of a computer in tournament play, who stated that computers dropped a few hundred rating points if you eliminated their knights. This is an ex...

 Null Move

Called the "null move" technique, it tells the engine to "pass" for one side. That is, to evaluate a position as if one player could make two moves in a row. If the position has not improved even after moving twice, then it can be assumed that the first move is a dud and can be quickly discarded from the search tree, reducing its size and making the search more efficient. Null moves were used in some of the earliest chess programs, including the Soviet Kaissa. It's elegant and a little ironic...

 Processing Power to Chess Rating Ratio

50 here is what the Deep Thought team wrote about the relationship between search depth and chess strength in a 1989 article: The ascent of the brute-force chess machines back in the late 1970s made one thing crystal clear: there is a strong causal relationship between the search speed of a chess machine and its playing strength. In fact, it appeared from machine self-test games that every time a machine searches one extra ply, its rating increases by about 200-250 rating points. Since each...

 Chess Concept: Running Out of Book

One of the problems with playing against computers is how quickly and how often they change. Grandmasters are used to preparing very deeply for our opponents, researching all of their latest games and looking for weaknesses. Mostly this preparation focuses on openings, the established sequences of moves that start the game and have exotic names like the Sicilian Dragon and the Queen's Indian Defense. We prepare new ideas in these openings, and look for strong new moves ("novelties") with whic...