The 16th Top Chess Engine Championship: TCEC 16

TCEC16 was the 16th season of the Top Chess Engine Championship and ran from July 14th to October 13th, 2019. TCEC has become the largest Open Computer Chess Championship. It attracts the best engines in the field and provides an opportunity for a comparative analysis of the Shannon-AB and the new Neural-Network engines’ styles of play. STOCKFISH regained the title of Grand Champion by beating ALLIESTEIN in the Superfinal. The defending Grand Champion, LEELA CHESS ZERO was third. The attached files at http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/86830 provide the 950 games with engine PVs, the detail on them and some summary statistics

Chess endgames: 6-man data and strategy

While Nalimov’s endgame tables for Western Chess are the most used today, their Depth-to-Mate metric is not the most efficient or effective in use. The authors have developed and used new programs to create tables to alternative metrics and recommend better strategies for endgame play

TCEC Cup 3

This is a report of the 'TCEC Cup 3' computational experiment, the 3rd TCEC knockout event and the second major part of TCEC’s 15th season. It featured the best 32 engines of the ‘TCEC 15’ league event and the games were held at Blitz tempo. The different format called for different optimal settings in the engines, thereby enabling a comparison with performance at slower tempi. LEELA CHESS ZERO retained the TCEC Cup, defeating STOCKFISH this time. All decisive games in the supplementary data have been played out by FRITZ17 at search depth 24 to enable and benchmark endgame practice

Understanding distributions of chess performances

This paper presents evidence for several features of the population of chess players, and the distribution of their performances measured in terms of Elo ratings and by computer analysis of moves. Evidence that ratings have remained stable since the inception of the Elo system in the 1970’s is given in several forms: by showing that the population of strong players fits a simple logistic-curve model without inflation, by plotting players’ average error against the FIDE category of tournaments over time, and by skill parameters from a model that employs computer analysis keeping a nearly constant relation to Elo rating across that time. The distribution of the model’s Intrinsic Performance Ratings can hence be used to compare populations that have limited interaction, such as between players in a national chess federation and FIDE, and ascertain relative drift in their respective rating systems

Chess endgame news

Reports the availability on the web of the entire run of Beasley's 'British Endgame Study News', and reviews a recent report by Bourzutschky and Konoval on their discoveries with 7-man endgame tables

Making a star on the small screen: The case of Mina and RAI

© 2015 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. Anna Maria Quaini (née Mazzini), or Mina as she is more commonly known, is a prolific Italian pop singer who rose to fame in the late 1950s. She was particularly dominant from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, before her retirement from television appearances in 1974 and public performances in 1978. In particular, it was her relationship with and continued appearances on Radiotelevisione Italiana/Italian Radio-Television (RAI) programmes during this dominant period, which helped to cement her popularity with Italian audiences. This article examines Mina’s celebrity status through a detailed analysis of the construction of her star persona in a televisual context, taking as case studies her appearances on three RAI television series: Studio Uno/‘Studio One’ (1961-1962), Canzonissima 1968/‘Lots of Songs 1968' (1968-1969) and Teatro 10/‘Theatre 10' (1972). A comparative reading of her performances on these variety shows enables us to evaluate the extent to which RAI facilitated the construction of Mina’s star persona according to a specific set of cultural and ideological values. Ultimately, this article demonstrates the ways in which Mina’s evolving celebrity came to challenge the homogenizing mission of RAI during the period

Scandal, motherhood and Mina in 1960s Italy

Celebrity scandals are a useful tool to reveal the pervasiveness of expected ways of behaving within a particular culture or society. Italy of the early 1960s was particularly marked by these kinds of scandals, including that of singer Mina's pregnancy by Corrado Pani in 1963. This article takes this scandal as a case study to explore how star image in this period in Italy was influenced by the established ideologies that governed social convention, morality, and traditional gender roles. It examines in detail the ways in which the popular press reported on this scandal, using the reports that covered the announcement of the pregnancy and then the birth to cast light on the extent to which the mainstream social values and ideas regarding the status quo and expected ways of behaving for women in Italy during the early 1960s were destabilised and/or reasserted through the star persona of Mina

Camille Silvy: A Photographer of Modern Life

Camille Silvy (1834-1910) enjoyed a major reputation as a photographer in Paris and London in the period 1858-68. He was a photographer of modern life, in the sense introduced by his contemporary, Charles Baudelaire. Silvy's best-known work, 'River Scene, France' (1858), is a tableau of modern leisure - including working class leisure - on the outskirts of town. In addition, Silvy created a series of 'Studies on Light' in London in 1860. These studies of fog and twilight include, arguably, the first use of blur as a creative effect in the history of photography. Silvy redefined still life in a work which includes the Times newspaper and a mass-produced sauce bottle. However, Silvy's modernity was expressed in many other ways. He was highly entrepreneurial: he ran his studio as a portrait factory, experimented with new techniques and pioneered the reproduction of works of art and wartime battlefields

Discarding Like Pieces

The guideline of ‘discarding like men’ to estimate the merit of a chess position is well known. This note compares it with some statistics