Archive for the ‘Chess’ Category

Can You Spot The Tactics That Puzzle World Champion Ray Robson Missed? – Chess.com

GM Ray Robson recently won the 2022 Puzzle Battle World Championship for the third consecutive year. To achieve this incredible feat, he had to outperform players like none other than GMs Hikaru Nakamura, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, Daniel Naroditsky, and more! Watching Robson speed through more than 50 puzzles in less than three minutes was indeed something special:

While most of us can only dream of being as sharp or fast as Robson, we shouldn't feel bad for missing tactics on our own games. Using Chess.com's Insights, we can see that even the greatest puzzle warrior in the world can falter from time to time. As chess coaches love to point out, puzzles in real games are always different from puzzles in practice. We all miss things in games that we would solve instantly in a puzzle.

Below is a compilation of some of the tactics that Robson missed in the games he played on Chess.com. Can you spot the best moves in each position?

Game 1: GM Ray Robson vs. GM Aram Hakobyan

Game 2: GM Ray Robson vs. FM Saidakbar Saydaliev

Game 3: GM Ray Robson vs. FM @catask

Game 4: GM Jorden van Foreest vs. GM Ray Robson

Game 5: GM Ray Robson vs. GM Sam Sevian

Game 6: GM Daniel Naroditsky vs. GM Ray Robson

Game 7: IM Arystanbek Urazayev vs. GM Ray Robson

Game 8: Naroditsky vs. Robson

Game 9: Robson vs. Sevian

Game 10: Naroditsky vs. Robson

This last puzzle could've made it this recent article featuring the hardest puzzles on Chess.com. With a few mind-blowing moves and less than a minute on his clock, it's no wonder the puzzle king couldn't find this beauty:

The puzzles above show that even the greats can miss a few tactics. But that shouldn't keep us from playing chess and having fun with Puzzle Rush, should it?

Could you find the moves that Robson missed? Let us know in the comment section below!

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Can You Spot The Tactics That Puzzle World Champion Ray Robson Missed? - Chess.com

Eddie Cha Is Playing Chess At The Highest Level – The Official Website of the Ultimate Fighting Championship

You have no family life, pretty much, he said. So having an understanding and unbelievable wife is honestly the secret, but it's hard to juggle both. It's not just me; it's our whole coaching staff. They're right there with me. We do team practices and then we gotta do these super camps. We call them super camps because we invest so much time and money and effort into them. So it's hard to juggle but it's definitely worth it and I think that's how we build the bond, relationship and rapport with these guys. When you spend eight-plus weeks, six hours a day and getting into the innermost secrets and demons and so forth, you share that bond.

The latest super camp for the Arizona squad is for former UFC flyweight champion Deiveson Figueiredo, who will attempt to regain his crown this Saturday in Anaheim when he faces Brandon Moreno in the trilogy fight that serves as the co-main event of UFC 270. Its another road trip, another fight week, another pressure-filled fight night. But its everything Cha always wanted when he was building his All In MMA gym and rep back in Southern California.

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When I was starting out in Southern California, I opened up a gym and I picked up some really good fighters at that time, and I could never get a break on getting some of the bigger names, Cha recalls. I'm like, why can't I get these guys? And eventually, I just said, forget it, the guys that I have, I'm gonna build them the best I can and that's pretty much what I did and how I got started. I started with Francisco Rivera, he won six straight (three in the UFC), got to the Top Ten, and he was pretty much my first ace. And then I worked with Bobby Green, Darrion Caldwell, Dominick Reyes, Alex Reyes and a bunch of other guys.

Enter former UFC lightweight champion Benson Henderson, who heard about Cha and reached out along with longtime MMA LAB coach John Crouch. Soon after, Cha moved out to Arizona.

And the rest was history, he laughs.

Still in Arizona and now working with the Fight Ready team in Scottsdale, Cha is still not a fan of the blistering heat, but he got his wish to work with the elite of the sport, with Figueiredo, Zhang Weili, Chan Sung Jung, Henry Cejudo and Jon Jones just a few of the names hes worked with over the past few years. And why has his system worked with such a diverse crew?

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Eddie Cha Is Playing Chess At The Highest Level - The Official Website of the Ultimate Fighting Championship

Jonathan Kuminga carries Klay Thompson’s chess board as part of rookie duties – NBC Sports Bay Area

Jonathan Kuminga has the look of a future NBA star, but that doesn't mean he's exempt from his duties as a Warriors rookie.

That includes, apparently, carrying around a chess and checkers board for one Klay Thompson. Kuminga brought the board into his postgame availability after the Warriors' 119-99 loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves on Sunday and explained why he was toting around the game on the Warriors' road trip.

"I don't play neither of those games," Kuminga said with a smile when asked if he was a chess or checkers guy. "I just got to do my rookie duty and carry that for Klay."

While the Warriors finished their four-game road trip at 1-3, Kuminga was the lone bright spot. The No. 7 overall pick gave the Warriors good minutes in losses to the Milwaukee Bucks and Timberwolves and had a career night during Golden State's blowout win over the Chicago Bulls on Friday.

Kuminga has left a positive impression on his veteran teammates as he works to earn more consistent minutes for one of the NBA's best teams.

"Jon is an incredible athlete," Thompson said Sunday. "His ability to play at the rim is incredible. I loved his aggressiveness tonight. It shows with 10 free throws. He's going to be a huge part of this team for a long time."

Man, he is an athlete, Andrew Wiggins said of the rookie. He can jump out the gym. Hes fast. Hes strong as st. Hes got it all. And today, he showed out. He was aggressive toward the rim, hitting his shots, played amazing defense. The skys the limit for him.

The sky very well could be the limit for Kuminga. He is developing faster than anticipated, and there is a chance he will play a role in the title chase to come.

Even if that's the case, he'll still have to perform his rookie duties. The only thing that can bring those to a close is the start of his sophomore season. Only 10 more months to go.

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Jonathan Kuminga carries Klay Thompson's chess board as part of rookie duties - NBC Sports Bay Area

The Games That Machines Play. After Chess and Go, what game will | by Kartik Hosanagar | Jan, 2022 | OneZero – OneZero

South Korean professional Go player Lee Se-Dol (R) prepares for his match against Googles artificial intelligence program, AlphaGo, during the Google DeepMind Challenge Match on March 10, 2016 in Seoul, South Korea. (Photo by Google via Getty Images)

In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate. Isaac Asimov

Historian and technologist David Nye has argued that the meaning of a tool is inseparable from the stories that surround it. In the context of artificial intelligence (AI), those stories have been dominated by the games that AI systems play.

It started with the Mechanical Turk, the chess-playing machine unveiled in the late 18th century. Although the so-called machine was a hoax, it set a precedent you could even say, initiated an obsession for computer scientists for centuries to come. According to Nathan Ensmenger, a computer science professor at Indiana University, many in the computing community believed that once a machine mastered chess the intellectual game par excellence, according to Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon one would seem to have penetrated to the core of human intellectual endeavor.

In 19651966, Soviet mathematician Alexander Kronrod called chess the drosophila of AI. By that he meant that the game was to artificial intelligence research what the fruit fly had been to genetics research: a testbed for the fields biggest ideas, at once accessible enough to experiment on easily and complex enough to learn from. Fruit flies are easy to maintain in a small lab, have a short reproductive cycle of one to two weeks (enabling researchers to study multiple generations in a matter of months), and have over 60% of the disease-causing genes in humans. As David Bilder, former president of the National Drosophila Board of Directors, points out, fruit fly research has led in one way or another to five Nobel prizes over the past 85 years. Chess, computer scientists believed, could have a similar impact on AI. Ensmenger noted a few years ago that, It is a rare discussion of AI, whether historical, philosophical, or technical, that does not eventually come around to chess-playing computers.

Nor were computer scientists the only people convinced that chess was AIs alpha and omega. When on May 11, 1997, IBMs Deep Blue computer beat Garry Kasparov, the media and public response was enthusiastic. This seemed to prove the legitimacy of computers, demonstrating that they could now emulate, and even beat, humans at a task that was both mathematically and technically difficult but also one that involved as much art as science. Was Kubricks HAL 9000 just around the corner?

As the initial excitement settled down, critics began questioning what this accomplishment actually meant for machine intelligence. John McCarthy, the organizer of the worlds firstAI conference at Dartmouth, wrote in a piece published in Science in 1997 that Computer chess has developed as much as genetics might have if the geneticists had concentrated their efforts starting in 1910 on breeding racing Drosophila. We would have some science, but mainly we would have very fast fruit flies.

Others shared that critique. In 1990, MIT professor Rodney Brooks argued that the fields obsession with games was problematic in that it anchored intelligence to systems of symbols rather than to the sort of physical reality that supports and propels human intelligence. Traditional AI has tried to demonstrate sophisticated reasoning in rather impoverished domains, wrote Rodney Brooks in an article titled Elephants Dont Play Chess. Programmers, he said, should aim for AI that performs simpler tasks like understanding language or manipulating objects in the physical world than winning chess tournaments but that operates robustly in noisy complex domains rather than the sea of symbols that games provide. The programmers, however, did not heed his advice. Games conveniently offered a setting in which AI systems could compete against the top-ranked humans and against each other to easily quantify progress.

Jeopardy would be their next touchstone. In 2011, IBMs Watson, a natural language processing (NLP) and question-answer system built on a supercomputer, set out to beat Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, the two best players in the history of the hit television game show. Research showed that in order to surpass human Jeopardy champions, a computer would have to be far more multi-faceted than Deep Blue was in 1997. For example, turn-taking doesnt exist in Jeopardy. Instead, a player has to decide, very quickly, how confident it is that it will be right. It also needed to be able to choose categories and clues, and to develop wagering strategies. Watson was able to manage all those tasks. When the game ended, the computer had won $77,147, Jennings $24,000, and Rutter $21,600. Jennings responded to his defeat with good humor. At the bottom of his Final Jeopardy response, broadcast live, he wrote, I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.

In 2014, Google bought the UK start-up DeepMind, a company specializing in AI research and neural networks, and turned its attention to a new game board Go. Its AlphaGo program beat Gos reigning champion, Lee Sedol four games to one.

Recently, a research team at CMU built a Poker-playing bot that beat top professionals at six-player no-limit Texas holdem Poker. Unlike Chess and Go where you know the exact positions of your pieces and those of the opponent at any given time (i.e. games of perfect information), Poker is a game of imperfect information. Your opponent has hidden cards that influences their gameplay in the future. Having AI that can play Poker well is a huge step forward because most real-world interactions (e.g. consider negotiating with a counterparty) involve imperfect information.

So what comes next now that AI can beat humans at even Poker? What game would push machines to new levels of human-ness, in order to surpass humans? The history of computing has shown that what we conquer determines where we go next.

I recently spoke with James Barrat, a documentary filmmaker and author of The Final Invention. At some point in the conversation, the subject of games arose, and I asked him which one he thought computer scientists and their AI systems might tackle now that even Go had been conquered. He sat back, considered it, and finally said something Ive not been able to forget: I dont think there are any games left. The next game is reality.

This post is based on a chapter from my book A Humans Guide to Machine Intelligence.

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The Games That Machines Play. After Chess and Go, what game will | by Kartik Hosanagar | Jan, 2022 | OneZero - OneZero

Rams Finishing Preparations for Chess Match With Cardinals – Sports Illustrated

As humans, familiarity is often sought after for comfort.

We enjoy routine, and the more we understand something, the more we're willing to accept it.

However, in the world of pro football, familiarity isn't always comfortable, especially when it comes to divisional opponents.

The Arizona Cardinals and Los Angeles Rams are set to meet for a third time on Monday night. The two teams split their first two meetings with the road team emerging victorious in each instance.

This time, the winner advances to the next round of the postseason while the loser packs their bags until next season.

Arizona and Los Angeles have played each other twice a season since the Cardinals joined the division from the NFC East following the league's realignment in 2002, yet this will be the first meeting between the two in the playoffs since 1975.

Aside from the Rams and Cardinals seeing each other twice each year, their respective head coaches (and play-callers) consider each other good friends.

Hes been awesome, Cardinals head coach Kliff Kingsbury said Monday about Rams head coach Sean McVay.

We have a great relationship. Probably would be even closer if we werent in the same division, but its kind of hard to share some trade secrets whenever youre playing each other a couple times a year.

"But I think the world of Sean. The job hes done there. The consistency theyve had since hes been there, so its been fun to watch him have that type of success and Im always pulling for him except when they play us.

Since taking over Los Angeles, McVay holds a strong 9-1 record against the Cardinals. Only two of those games have been within one possession.

Defensive coordinator Raheem Morris is still in his first season with the Rams, but he understands just how much of a chess match the Cardinals and Rams present each other.

It's almost scary," said Morris on Friday.

"You go to those guys and you lose. And then I remember the first game we played them when we lost and I went to those guys and I say, Hey man, great game plan. That was awesome. And then I remember the second time we beat those guys and the head coach came to me and said, Man, it was a great plan, Rah. And those are the scariest moments, because he's just trying to lull you to sleep in that chess match, right?

"So let me go back to the drawing board, not try to act like you can recycle information. And you got to go through the whole process over and over again and make sure you do it right. And I think that's what the best thing about the chess game that you're talking about. It's like, what do you want to change? What is changing too much? And what do you want to repeat to try to see if you can get the same results.

Offensive coordinator Kevin O'Connell also alluded to Monday night as a chess match.

"It's a great question because you could talk yourself out of a lot just by knowing some of the things you've not only put on tape versus this opponent, but some of the other people that maybe play similar styles or similar matchups throughout the week in and week out process of the NFL season," said O'Connell.

"But at the same time, that's why we teach a lot of the things we do from a core foundational standpoint of our system. Because everything is built off the marriage of the run and the pass. It's built off of sameness and likeness and, really, attacking the defense in a smart way, having the ultimate respect for this opponent because they've played really, really good defense all year long.

"They've got skill players. They've got defensive skill at all three levels. It really is a challenge for us. So really what you're doing is you're really measuring the things you've been able to have success on, maybe things they've had success on against us. And then where does it all meet somewhere in the middle where we're actively trying to maybe take advantage of any area that we see and I'm sure they're doing the same over there.

"So, the chess match will go on. It obviously goes on all the way up until kickoff, but then, that can be a separator during that three-and-a-half-hour window on Monday night.

On the other side of the chess board is Kingsbury, who's an avid watcher of shows on various streaming servicesbut has not publicly stated if he's watched the popular chess-centralizedQueens Gambit series.

However, Kingsbury will once again have an opportunity to put his pieces in the right spots come Monday night. We'll see who plays better when the stakes are higher than before.

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Rams Finishing Preparations for Chess Match With Cardinals - Sports Illustrated