Chess Grandmaster Used iPhone To Cheat During Tournament 237
A reader sends this quote from the Washington Post:
Gaioz Nigalidze's rise through the ranks of professional chess began in 2007, the year the first iPhone was released. In hindsight, the timing might not be coincidental. On Saturday, Nigalidze, the 25-year-old reigning Georgian champion, was competing in the 17th annual Dubai Open Chess Tournament when his opponent spotted something strange. "Nigalidze would promptly reply to my moves and then literally run to the toilet," Armenian grandmaster Tigran Petrosian said. "I noticed that he would always visit the same toilet partition, which was strange, since two other partitions weren't occupied." Petrosian complained to the officials. After Nigalidze left the bathroom once more, officials inspected the interior and say they found an iPhone wrapped in toilet paper and hidden behind the toilet. "When confronted, Nigalidze denied he owned the device," according to the tournament's Web site. "But officials opened the smart device and found it was logged into a social networking site under Nigalidze's account. They also found his game being analyzed in one of the chess applications." Nigalidze was expelled from the tournament, which is still ongoing and features more than 70 grandmasters from 43 countries competing for a first-place prize of $12,000. The Georgian's career is now under a microscope. His two national titles are under suspicion.
title is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: title is wrong (Score:2, Funny)
He's not even a master cheater.
Re: title is wrong (Score:5, Funny)
If he can argue his way out of the charges, he might be a masterdebater, though.
Re: title is wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
And if he's kicked out of chess, and makes a career out of baiting hooks, then he could be a...
ah nvm
Female chess players (Score:2, Funny)
Stop being abusive. Honestly that post is very close to being a form of assault.
The reason there's a Women's Chess Championship is that it's a "safe space". All men are capable of rape. Even grandmasters. We need a separate chess league to keep us focused on the game and not distracted by the potential of being abused. It has nothing to do with being worse at chess. Women are not worse at chess. We're just as capable as men so clearly there's something wrong with the SYSTEM.
Also men are guided int
Re: Female chess players (Score:2)
Obvious troll is obvious...I hope.
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Re:title is wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
Innocent until proven guilty, thought it doesn't look good.
"Innocent until proven guilty" applies to criminal courts of law in some jurisdictions. There is no reason that, say, a Chess Tournament in Dubai, should be held to that standard. Stripping him of his title would be an administrative, not legal, process. If he broke any laws, say, by claiming tournament money to which he was not entitled, that would be another matter.
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How much more proof do they need? They found an iPhone with a chess computer running under his account hidden in the bathroom he ran to after every move. Even in a court of law, which this isn't, that's a pretty solid case.
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My plan is coming together nicely. Now with him out of the way, nobody can beat me.
Seriously, if I was going to set someone up, this is likely how I would do it. Its sort of like a cop throwing a weapon on the guy he just shot.
What they should have done was turned the sound up and watch for him to go in then listen from the next stall. If they heard the phone, call the number and ask him to step out of the stall.
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My plan is coming together nicely. Now with him out of the way, nobody can beat me.
Seriously, if I was going to set someone up, this is likely how I would do it. Its sort of like a cop throwing a weapon on the guy he just shot.
What they should have done was turned the sound up and watch for him to go in then listen from the next stall. If they heard the phone, call the number and ask him to step out of the stall.
If he was setup, why would he conveniently always go to THAT stall? Why would he need to go to the bathroom so incredibly frequently? Why would it be hidden somewhat well? How did someone get ahold of his phone and he didn't notice for so long? It doesn't add up. I'm normally much more interested in facts than coincidences, but this is way too suspicious even for me. I wonder what happens if he plays while they hold onto his phone for the match...
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Maybe the other stalls werent empty like the person who 'caught' him is claiming. Maybe they are the ones who set him up. Its how I would do it. IDK, just playing devils advocate...but that is why innocent until proven guilty SHOULD be the way it is in all courts - even the court of public opinion. Of course most people are too stupid to think for themselves - as Honey BooBoo and Kim K's popularity prove - so it probably is just a pipe dream.
There's nothing wrong with playing the devil's advocate, and indeed I always try to look at situations from both points of view. But just look at it: you really have to stretch to make a case for this guy. The odds of him always going to the same stall, after every five moves (assuming there are only three bathroom stalls), is about 1/59049. Further more, how would the person framing him know what stall he was going to pick, and hide the phone accordingly? Why would it be fairly well hidden if they were tr
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While I'd agree that it seems very likely he was cheating...
The odds of him always going to the same stall ... is about 1/59049
I think that would be closer to 1/2 up to 1/10 max. Most people go to the same stall every time they go. People into competitive things often repeat the same (unrelated to the sport) actions every time for superstitious reasons. All that said, why is anyone at that level allowed to take a bathroom break every 5 moves!?!? On the second one, that'd be suspicious enough.
how would the person framing him know what stall he was going to pick
They don't have to if they just say they found it there after the fact.
Before the
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I think I hear a zebra approaching.
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How much more proof do they need? They found an iPhone with a chess computer running under his account hidden in the bathroom he ran to after every move. Even in a court of law, which this isn't, that's a pretty solid case.
...just thinking; if he held out for a few more months, he could've bought that iWatch thingy and saved all the trips to the crapper...
(now how well he could've hidden that, who knows?)
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If they want to revoke his grandmaster status as the original poster suggested, they ought to have some proof that he cheated in those tournaments, not just this recent one in Dubai. Otherwise a ban on future play and footnote on his grandmaster status is more appropriate.
Not a shocking revelation to be honest . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Cheating is rampant in all things anymore.
He's a grandmaster until he gets caught cheating. Until then, he dominates the field and the pressure is on for others to cheat as well just so the playing field is level. ( The Tour De France comes to mind, as does US Baseball's Steroid issue, Online Gaming / Gambling, Standardized Tests ( like the SAT, ACT, Bar exam, etc. etc. )
It makes it impossible to compete unless you're bending the rules also.
Makes you wonder of all the "winners" out there, what percentage of them made it to that pedestal legitimately ?
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No.
He is looking at a 15-year ban.
Even if he was not banned, he would no longer get invitations to tournaments. People would refuse to play tournaments where he was present.
I have no idea if he is going to lose his GM title or not, but it does not really matter - he won't be able to use it for anything.
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what percentage of them made it to that pedestal legitimately ?
Define legitimate. Is a performance enhancing drug legitimate? Is drinking water or consuming sugar? We have placed arbitrary restrictions on technology and biology.
I for one think we should be leveling the playing field. There's no doubt that getting someone else to answer for you (as in this case) is cheating. However I would argue that all performance enhancing drugs should be legal. We should be finding out what the upper limits of the human body are, and we should allow any means of doing so. Likewise
Shouldn't the title be reversed? (Score:5, Funny)
I think the real story here is that a Georgian man's cellphone became sentient and was using him as a proxy to enter chess tournaments. The phone is the real grandmaster here.
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The phone is the real grandmaster here.
With the right software, all smart phones are grandmasters. Even a cheap modern cellphone is plenty good enough to beat even the best humans. This isn't 1997 [wikipedia.org].
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New title: Grandmaster iphone uses poor human in scheme to win chess tournament
Toilet Partitions (Score:5, Funny)
Apparently he opted for the logical partition, rather than the extended. Wise move.
Hire this man, right now! (Score:5, Funny)
- [insert name], CEO
[insert big business name], Inc.
Re:Hire this man, right now! (Score:4, Funny)
Worked for Kirk when he encountered the Kobayashi Maru.
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Chess is not a no-win scenario.
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It is when I play it. ;-)
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I cry BS.. there is NO reason to be deceptive, and obsure tward your fellow man.. If there is an issue work it out through the engagement of the HIGHER learning and the usage of the art of communication..
my 2c
Scenario: you are captured by an oppressive, murderous dictatorship and being interrogated as to whether you've ever been in communication with the pro-freedom resistance movement. Your choices are to lie convincingly or be taken out and shot.
Generalizations are always* wrong.
* Almost always.
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This is often how the hypothetical is phrased but it almost never works out in just this way. The usual options are:
Door number 1: Tell the truth and accept those consequences.
Door number 2: Deny your involvement. The people arresting you usually have physical evidence of your association though, so in order to prove your loyalty they demand you become an informer and you have to turn over your friends. That's what's required to make your lie
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This is often how the hypothetical is phrased but it almost never works out in just this way. The usual options are [snip]
Wow, you've gone through this experience enough times to make statistically meaningful claims about it. Can I shake your hand? How are you even still alive?
Or to put it another way -- Says Who?
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Hannah Arendt, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Arthur Miller... read something, kiddo.
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Re:Hire this man, right now! (Score:4, Informative)
I dunno, the original claim was pretty general in nature and equally unsupported.
The actual "evidence" question is actually sorta beside the point. Arendt specifically in Origins of Totalitarianism discussed how the Nazis would systematically treat actual criminals better than political prisoners or random arrestees, because in the end the message they were trying to send was that they could destroy you whenever they wanted, and it didn't really matter if you'd done anything wrong. The only way you could be safe is by enthusiastically cooperating, and even then it was never really enough.
At this point we would make the distinction between a merely authoritarian regime and a more "bloodthirsty" thing. The first would be like, say, Morsi's Egypt or Iran, where they arrest people for opposing the state. The latter would be more like North Korea, where they arrest people at random wether they oppose the state or not, because the terror is an end itself.
Miller was writing about the Hollywood Blacklist in the end, but it's an important example of authoritarianism of the first kind. Joe McCarthy knew that Dalton Trumbo and Clifford Odets hung out, that they were fellow travelers with more committed Communists and even soviet agents, he had all the evidence he needed to prove association. But the logic of the 50s Red Scare wasn't driven by the desire to find Communist agents as much as it was to get "suspect" individuals to turn over their friends, so that even though there was no evidence of actual wrongdoing, there were simply so many people named that spectre of conspiracy took on a life all its own, and the spectacle of people evading the "justice" of HUAAC or the senate, of "hiding" their friends and associations, would cast disrepute on leftism in general. They arrest you to make you look guilty, and then they make you turn States Evidence to buy back your respectability.
How is the phone model relevant? (Score:3)
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Did you read the first sentence of the summary? Or that the game was being analyzed in an iPhone app?
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Re: How is the phone model relevant? (Score:5, Funny)
"Siri, what move should I make next?"
Solution to electronic cheaters (Score:5, Funny)
Chess tourneys should be played by naked participants in a large faraday cage.
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*shudder* While I'm sure this is someone's idea of where rule #34 should apply ... a bunch of nekkid/pasty/flabby chess players is a terrible idea.
Just ... no. Stop it.
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And almost overnight, the world of chess would get obliterated by the Muzychuk sisters, as every opponent (except each other) conceded the match "and then literally run to the toilet".
Re:Solution to electronic cheaters (Score:5, Funny)
This isn't as unusual as it sounds, Deep Blue always plays this way!
Re:Solution to electronic cheaters (Score:4, Interesting)
MOD UP, Jesus. This is the day I don't have mod points?
Of course it's great that they caught this guy, and obviously they'll have to investigate whether he's really a grandmaster at all, in addition to all the other penalties. But the point that what he did was essentially cyborg (in a competition where that isn't allowed) is a good one. What would a chess league where everyone does this look like? Gary Kasparov may have eventually lost to IBM, some cutting edge hardware, and a huge team of software engineers and chess experts doing everything they could to beat him, but what would Gary Kasparov plus extra analytical hardware/software look like?
That's what I'm interested in. Magnus Carlsen plus a supercomputer versus just Deep Blue wouldn't resolve in favor of the raw silicon. "Cyborg" league gogo!
Re:Solution to electronic cheaters (Score:4, Informative)
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Whoa, cool! And Kasparov even spawned it? This has been educational, thanks!
Helps chess as a sport (Score:3)
Chess tourneys should be played by naked participants in a large faraday cage.
If you think about it that really helps the sport appeal to younger people - instead of advertising a "chess tournament" (what is this, the middle ages)? you get to advertise the event as a STEEL CAGE CHESS MATCH TO THE FINISH!
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Don't forget the naked part and the chance for spectators to pawn over competitors.
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Have you seen what most chess players look like? Left out the "naked' on purpose.
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Have you seen what most chess players look like? Left out the "naked' on purpose.
I like big chess and I cannot lie.
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I'm not really interested in whether the players have an amazing bladder capacity or not. Bathroom breaks are fine. Probably want to ensure that there's no cheat methods in those bathrooms, though.
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No leaving the table once the game starts.
If you can't handle that, you're not fit to play.
He Did That Shtick For 7 Years? (Score:4, Funny)
All they have to do is remember how many times a tourney he has really bad IBS and they'll have the answer to whether he cheated a lot or not.
Professional chess players are so bling... (Score:5, Funny)
they use iPhones for toilet paper.
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Sorry I have no mod points, but this is funny.
a phone (Score:2)
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IMHO Kasparov played on a not level field, because his long career was open to study and his computer opponent's was not.
On the other hand, the computer program didn't study or understand his long career either. At best, the programmers could tune the evaluation algorithm a little bit towards the type of positions that Kasparov would like play, but that's hard to do, and there's no guarantee he would play in his usual style against a computer, especially because his usual style isn't very good against computers.
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I mean, lets be real here. IBM had meetings, and emails, and long engineering nights for Deep Blue to do that. They studied the HELL out him. He played a committee.
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In the decades before the match, no amount of meetings, emails and long engineering nights managed to build a computer program that could beat the world champion at chess.
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Well, it was a close run thing. I don't know whether Deep Blue analysed any of Kasparov's games or not, but I'd be surprised if a computer now couldn't beat any player even if that player's game were excluded from any analysis.
In fact, is past game analysis even a requirement for a chess computer to beat top human players these days?
Re:a phone (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact, is past game analysis even a requirement for a chess computer to beat top human players these days?
No, strong computer programs can easily beat any top human player. That's why you don't see any more straight up computer-human matches. One of the more recent encounters was between Stockfish and GM Nakamura over 4 games. But in two of the games, Nakamura was allowed assistance of an older chess program on a laptop, while in the other two games, he had an extra pawn. The match was won 3-1 by the Stockfish program. The computer played all of its games without an opening book, and without endgame tablebases.
http://www.chess.com/news/stoc... [chess.com]
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But in two of the games, Nakamura was allowed assistance of an older chess program on a laptop
That hardly seems fair.
"Grandmaster, we're going to pit you against the best computer program to ever play chess, it represents the combined efforts of decades of engineering. But, don't worry, here's a 386SX with Chessmaster 3000 to help you out."
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Re:a phone (Score:5, Funny)
This guy used his iPhone to connect to the internet
It was probably connected to an Android phone in his car.
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Computers matter in chess (Score:5, Informative)
The progress of computers in both power and miniaturization has had a strong effect on chess. The biggest effect is the end of the practice of adjourning tournament games. It used to be that games which ran long would be adjourned to the next day, but once overnight analysis by computer became a serious possibility (displacing overnight analysis by each player), the practice became pointless and now tournament games run continuously until they end.
The challenge of miniature devices both for chess analysis and for communication with analysis occurring elsewhere can't be so easily met by changing the rules, but diligent policing will help. Stricter no-cellphones-in-the-playing area policies would have to be implemented.
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The challenge of miniature devices both for chess analysis and for communication with analysis occurring elsewhere can't be so easily met
Nonsense. The time of naked chess has finally arrived.
You know, just like the TSA will soon make naked flying mandatory.
Want to be a grandmaster? (Score:5, Funny)
There's an app for that.
This dimwit became a grandmaster? (Score:5, Funny)
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I seem to recall a pair of young siblings who (in league with their dad, I think) had a few people fooled with their telepathy act, which turned out to involve high pitched sounds which adults couldn't hear.
The living Tigran Petrosian (Score:5, Informative)
The comments were made by grandmaster Tigran L. Petrosian, born 1984 and named after the champion.
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Partition protocol (Score:2)
I noticed that he would always visit the same toilet partition, which was strange
Why would that be strange? I'd think it was stranger if he visited a different one each time, pausing to consider his options as he enters. "Now, I tried number 3 last time, but I reckon number 1 could be a winner..."
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Agreed! I will sometimes go to another floor if my "regular" stall is not available...
Professional chess: hard to make a living (Score:3)
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There are at least 6 players by my calculations who wound up tied for the top score at this event and therefore split the top prize fund money, approximately $5,000 USD apiece. That is not an easy living if one is trying to survive on chess alone. This probably explains why some cheating at chess is so blatant, because one has to finish at the very top to get any money at all let alone turn a profit. Otherwise a rational cheater would do it sparingly and possibly versus lower level opponents.
If the monetary award is so small, one would have to question why someone would spend the time to learn the game and spend countless hours in tournaments in order to cheat their way to a pathetic prize.
I don't know what to call for here; more integrity or less stupidity.
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If it were me... (Score:5, Insightful)
I would have taken the phone and then sat back and watched the guy fall to pieces. Only after the match was complete (and the guy presumably lost) would I have busted him.
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Anyway, I'm pretty sure my friend played this guy a few years ago, and he's been toileting every turn from years ago. My friend had great satisfaction this guy got busted because my friend accused him of cheating back in the day, but the officials did nothing.
Re:If it were me... (Score:4, Interesting)
Literally ran to the toilet (Score:3)
Since 'literally' literally no longer means literally, I'm wondering if they guy actually jumped up out of his seat and sprinted to the toilets after each move. Maybe it wouldn't have been so suspicious-looking if he just casually walked to the facilities.
There is no way (Score:2)
Competition rules (or lack thereof) (Score:3)
Tigran Petrosian (Score:2)
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First thing that sprang to mind: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... [wikipedia.org]
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Chess has a large enough search space that full scale brute force and ignorance is quite a challenge; but more constrained states(like the actual state of the board partway through a game, or after the use
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Others have already posted, but from a pragmatic standpoint if you could select 2 or 3 candidate moves and do a quick check on them to see where they would go, it would be a much greater advantage than doing the analysis in your head.
The guy should get the hammer...
Re:Who cares about this guy? (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know what the state of the art is(and it would presumably vary a bit depending on whether the phone was running the analysis or just acting as a nice UI for a remote server)
In 2009, a version of Pocket Fritz ran on a 528 MHz HTC Touch phone, and won the Copa Mercosur tournament in Argentina with 9 wins and 1 draw, and a performance rating of 2898. That's good enough to win most tournaments, and that was more than 5 years ago.
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Are you suggesting that somehow makes it OK?
Because my take would be to strip him of titles, and bar him from future competition.
Saying he only cheated a little is meaningless.
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If anything, my intended thesis(that even a relatively weak or computationally limited computer could be a substantial aid to a reasonably skilled human) suggests that even modest machine assistance is quite dramatic cheating in terms of allowing you to beat people above your skill level. Being reasonably good
Re:computer program could assist (Score:2)
I guess I am getting old - the relentless Slashdot decline is finally getting to me. Slashdot couldn't be bothered to report (much?) on *either* of the chess world championships (the Women's just finished), but they pick up the story about cheating ... and it's not filed under "Games ... Classic Games", but ... wait for it ... filed under iPhone. And then only 20% of the comments are intelligent, and the rest are silly snarks about what is basically the biggest issue facing chess today. You'd think with the
Re:Who cares about this guy? (Score:5, Interesting)
There are three main programs that beat grandmasters on rather modest computers. Stockfish (an open source project), Komodo (A private original product that largely uses more correct algorithms and internal scoring), and Houdini (a project built by largely extending Rybka). There was a large increase in strength a few years back over the standard programs that had to do with much improved "search" and better pruning. Rybka took those ideas along with improved board scoring and led the field with an entire class difference in strength (about 300 elo increase). The programs since have raised that by about another 150 or so points. It may be that we have reached near apex with these techniques. And it may be hard to get more "strength" but there are surely points to be discovered. I suspect it may be in exception handling. There is a big resistance to to that, the argument being that exceptions just mean you have yet to understand enough. I'm not entirely convinced. There is also a movement to be exploitive. Magnus Carlsen is the top player in the world, and he uses exploitive technique a lot. He seeks positions unmemorized to allow rawer talent to shine and is really successful with that technique. And many of the top players do this more and more. There is little of this in computer play.
Re:Who cares about this guy? (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact, you are wrong on several points.
First, the strongest program is Stockfish 6. It's still improving at a rate of 50 ELO points at each version, and is already is above Komodo:
http://www.inwoba.de/ [inwoba.de]
You can see that Stockfish 6 is already 200 points above Rybka.
Stockfish is improved by a community and by using a distributed network: http://tests.stockfishchess.or... [stockfishchess.org]
The current version is already stronger than SF6.
Secondly, Rybka has been demonstrated as a copy of Fruit (an open-source chess engine), with only bit-tables added.
There has been an incredibly detailed decompilation about Rybka http://www.chessvibes.com/plaa... [chessvibes.com] which leads no doubt about this.
The only difference in recent versions of Rybka is that the evaluation function has been improved by GM Larry Kaufman, but he works now on Komodo.
I have no doubt that Stockfish is stronger than Carlsen, except that it does not use a creative style.
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... and why is that unusual? I use the same one at work. There's 3 just in that room and there's several rooms to chose from.
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> Smart enough to master of chess, but not bright enough to secure his phone.
Chess is some mix of high level strategy, getting in your opponent's head, visualization, and habituation.
Securing a phone is a technical problem. The two fields don't really have overlap.