I first read about Lord Dunsany - I am happy to report his full name was Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett - in a collection of Arthur C. Clarke's non-fiction.

I first read about Lord Dunsany - I am happy to report his full name was Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett - in a collection of Arthur C. Clarke's non-fiction.

The eye-catching victory of AlphaZero, the artificial-intelligence program that taught itself to play chess, over the No 1 computer engine Stockfish, has evoked comparisons with human legends.

in may 11, 1997, garry kasparov — the russian chess grandmaster — gave the final game against IBM’s deep blue supercomputer. a normal high-level chess game lasts up to four hours, but kasparov gave it up before even an hour was over, after a careless mistake.

What happens when you try to use 1987's Commodore Amiga 500 artificial intelligence to beat a 2019 MacBook at chess? You may not believe the result!... Made possible by the patrons & our friendly sponsor http://PCBWay.com - brill PCBs from $5!

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Anatoly Karpov, the 66-year-old former World Chess Champion, was comfortable playing chess underneath the bright lights and in front of the cameras on a television studio set. His opponent, Mikhail “Misha” Osipov, had never played on quite so big a stage before.

These are just the facts. On July 22, 2013, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, gave birth to her first child, Prince George. Two weeks later, an enormous “fatberg” was discovered in the sewers under London.

The story of IBM’s Deep Blue computer defeating world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997 has been told so many times that it’s practically shorthand for the philosophical debate over man vs. machine. But the story lacks subtlety and perhaps the right moral.

Skip Article Header. Skip to: Start of Article. In the mid-’90s, a computer program called Chinook beat the world’s top player at the game of checkers. Three years later, to much fanfare, IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer won its chess match against reigning world champion Gary Kasparov.

I want to compile a list of art works that used chance operations and/or randomness in their creation. I am keen to incorporate pre-20th century, non-Western works, and lots of works by female artists, but anything you can think of will be super helpful. Chance operations doesn't necessarily mean random, for instance, some Oulipo stuff fits. Like Georges Perec using the knight's move in chess to structure 'Life a Users Manual'. And chance doesn't have to mean the generation of a pattern or structure, for instance, Yoko Ono's 'Cut Piece' created the opportunity for chance events to take place that were hugely influential on how the work played out.

Works by John Cage, Alison Knowles, Stan Brakhage, Yoko Ono, Robert Filliou, Brian Eno, Burroughs/Gysin, Ewa Partum, Simone Forti, Nam June Paik, Cildo Meireles, Hans Haacke, Francis Alÿs, Jeremy Hutchinson, Daniel Temkin and others come to mind, as well as tonnes of Dada, Fluxus and computer generated work.

As I say, I am keen to move outside well known 'canonical' stuff, but really influential pre-20th century works would be particularly useful to know about. Also, any very early computer stuff. Thanks in advance!

Last week, the Australian writer Richard Flanagan stalked on to the stage wearing a broad grin, kissed the Duchess of Cornwall and grasped the 2014 Man Booker prize.

Author, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil famously and accurately predicted that a computer would beat a man at chess by 1998, that technologies that help spread information would accelerate the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that a worldwide communications network would emerge in the mid 19

Chou Chun-hsun, one of the world's top players of the ancient game of Go, sat hunched over a board covered with a grid of closely spaced lines. To the untrained eye, the bean-size black and white stones scattered across the board formed a random d...

LONDON — It was Game 8 of the World Chess Championship, and the four-time winner and defending champion, 42-year-old Viswanathan Anand of India, playing white, was a game down to the Israeli Boris Gelfand, 43. Gelfand, perhaps buoyed by his success in Game 7, had chosen an unexpectedly sharp line against Anand, who is renowned for his ability to calculate quickly on the board.

The screen of Deep Junior, the computer that the chess champion Gary Kasparov faced in 2003. Chip East/Reuters The screen of Deep Junior, the computer that the chess champion Gary Kasparov faced in 2003. Commenting live, the Hungarian grandmaster Peter Leko, a challenger for the world title in 2005, preferred Gelfand’s position. But just as he was expressing surprise at Anand’s strategy, Anand’s 17th move brought the game to a sudden close. Anand had deceived both his challenger and one of the strongest players in the world.

But many lesser players watching the game live with specialized computer chess engines weren’t flummoxed by Anand’s play; programs like Houdini had flagged Anand’s trap a few moves earlier. Computers have so flattened the game of chess that even novices like me can make some sense of the moves being played at the highest level.

Grandmasters of comparable skill now come to championship games with computer-generated analysis of their opponents’ opening lines and likely moves. Home preparation has always been important, but computers have made it much more so and have thereby changed the nature of the game. Now risky plays are almost inevitably punished because they’ve been anticipated, making Anand’s play in Game 8 of the recent championship a rare exception.

Computers don’t play chess perfectly — the game is far too complicated for that — but they play in a way that’s more exciting and more decisive. They also play better than humans. Which is why since chess is no longer about just two humans facing each other anyway — thanks to pre-game computer-assisted preparation — it makes sense to allow the use of computers during competitive games. (Of course, for the sake of fairness, the two players would have equal access to the same computer engine.) This idea, known as “advanced chess,” has been endorsed by the former chess champion Gary Kasparov.

So far, experiments with advanced chess suggest that the powers of man and machine combined don’t just make for a stronger game than a man’s alone; they also seem to make for a stronger game than a machine’s alone. Allowing chess players the assistance of the best computer chess engine available during top tournaments would ensure that the contests really do showcase the very best chess being played on earth.

It would also teach us important things about the world.

Take, for example, a game that’s winding down with this particular configuration: rook and a bishop versus two knights. This situation came up in a world championship qualifying game in 2007, and the match concluded in a draw. But computer analysis showed that the game was really a forced win for black in 208 moves. This revealed not just a strategic truth about chess, but also a phenomenological truth, a truth about reality, that would otherwise have remained inaccessible.

Computers have made possible a famous proof in mathematics — the four-color theorem — but most mathematicians continue to hope the proof can be found without the assistance of computers. With chess, though, some truths are simply unknowable without a computer. As computers get better at chess, letting the best chess players work with them more would give us a better understanding of the game, our own limits and the world.

Chess has problems. Not for most of us, perhaps - not for the bluffers and the fudgers and the seat-of-the-pants players who prod a path through matchups in which each side's strategy is a winsome, wobbling comedy of errors. No, chess has problems at the grandmaster level.

Prior to 1849, there was no such thing as a “normal chess set.” At least not like we think of it today. Over the centuries that chess had been played, innumerable varieties of sets of pieces were created, with regional differences in designation and appearance.

In an address to the New York State Chess Association in 1952, Duchamp attempted to define the link between chess and art: "I believe that every chess player experiences a mixture of two aesthetic pleasures: first, the abstract image akin to the poetic idea of writing; secondly, the sensuous pleasure of the ideographic execution of that image on the chessboard. From my close contacts with artists and chess players, I have come to the conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists."

At one level, I am sure that is right. I don't know anyone devoted to chess who is purely motivated by the desire to win; that is, for whom it is simply a mental sport, as everyone outside the game seems to suppose. When we sit down to play our intention is to win; but we also start the game looking at the pieces in their original positions and feeling overcome with a sense of the possibility of creating something beautiful with them. At the end of the game we are almost invariably disappointed. If we lose, of course, that's bad; but also if we win, yet then discover that we missed a more incisive way of concluding the game, we are filled with what I can only describe as a sense of artistic dissatisfaction — that we have made a crude daub on an otherwise harmonious work of art.

Earlier this year, IBM celebrated the 15-year anniversary of its supercomputer Deep Blue beating chess champion Garry Kasparov. According to a new book, however, it may have been an accidental glitch rather than computing firepower that gave Deep Blue the win. At the Washington Post, Brad Plumer high

Gadgetry of any sort has a rocky history in chess.

In the late 18th century, for example, a Hungarian engineer named Wolfgang von Kempelen toured Europe with a machine called The Turk, which he promoted as a mechanical chess master. Legend holds that Napoleon and Ben Franklin are among the chess aficionados who lost to Kempelen's brainchild. Decades after those big wins, word got out that The Turk, which Kempelen built to woo Empress Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina of Austria, was a royal scam: For all its pulleys and wheels, Kempelen always made sure an accomplished and totally human chess player was hiding inside the machine, making all the right moves.

The Virginia scandal involved the opposite ruse, in which a machine surreptitiously called the shots for a player. The chess engines this scheme centered on are relatively new: Computers only surpassed humans at the chessboard during young Smiley's lifetime. Scientists had an easier time designing digital brains that could produce atom bombs or navigate lunar landings than they did fashioning a machine that could play chess worth a darn. Plainly, until relatively recently, chess was too complicated for computers. An analysis of chess's complicatedness in Wired determined that the number of possible positions in an average 40-move game is 10 to the 128th power, a sum "vastly larger than the number of atoms in the known universe."