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Bobby Fischer felt the same way and proposed Chess960 which has a random initial board configuration for that reason:

In a 2006 Icelandic Radio interview, Fischer explained his dissatisfaction with the current chess:[575]

[In] chess, so much depends on opening theory, so the champions before the last century didn't know nearly as much as, say, I do and other players know about opening theory. So if you just brought them back from the dead they might not do too well, because they'd get bad openings. You cannot compare the playing strength, you can only talk about natural ability, because now there is so much more opening theory, so much more memorization. Memorization is enormously powerful. Some kid of fourteen today, or even younger, could get the opening advantage against Capablanca, or especially against the players of the previous century, like Morphy and Steinitz, easily. Maybe they'd still be able to outplay the young kid of today, but maybe not. Because nowadays when you get the opening advantage, not only do you get the opening advantage, but you know how to play the opening advantage â" they have so many examples of what to do from this position. So it's really deadly, it is very deadly... that's why I don't like chess anymore... It's all just memorization and prearrangement, it's a terrible game now. A very un-creative game now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

This is usually called Fischer Random, and the current world champion of Fischer Random is Magnus Carlsen.

BTW, Chess has been solved but I wouldn't consider a search of all possible moves AI either. With a fast enough computer, you can brute force solve many problems. It would be like calling a textbook or wikipedia intelligent because it has answers to questions.

Well, I would really like to play on any Open tournament if some of this women would be playing in such conditions :)

http://egotvonline.com/2010/10/20/the-seven-sexiest-female-chess-players/

http://ajedrez.chess.com/forum/view/general/smart-and-sexy---top-10-prettiest-female-chess-players

http://chesscraft.blogspot.com.es/2011/09/14-most-beautiful-and-hottest-chess.html

But if you think there they have just choosen the better looking female players, let's look at the top 16 in the last Women World Chess Championship held just one week ago:

"The Women's World Championship begins" http://en.chessbase.com/post/the-women-s-world-championship-begins
"Closing ceremony: Mariya Muzychuk is crowned" http://en.chessbase.com/post/closing-ceremony-mariya-muzychuk-is-crowned

I am not going to comment about handsome men chessplayers, it's not my play field :)

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...

The shocking thing is that You can imagine how shocked I was to read:

I guess I proved my point by screwing up this sentence :-/

It seemed obvious to me, even when I was young, that lots of practice is important in mastering a skill.

[...] Guy with 90 IQ is never gonna be a chess grandmaster or a nuclear physicist, even after 10,000 hours or 100,000 hours.

Or maybe I'm not a genius and these are pretty damn obvious points that should occur to anyone looking without blinders on [...]

I'm sure it is true for nuclear physicist. For years I would have agreed with the statement about chess grandmasters (being a chess player myself). The shocking thing is that You can imagine how shocked I was to read:

After a century of investigation, not a single study with adult chess players has managed to establish a link between chess skill and intelligence. Intellect had little predictive power among strong chess players.

So what did the studies find? From the same article:

Studies have found that adult chess players are more introverted and intuitive than the general population.

It seemed obvious to me, even when I was young, that lots of practice is important in mastering a skill.

[...] Guy with 90 IQ is never gonna be a chess grandmaster or a nuclear physicist, even after 10,000 hours or 100,000 hours.

Or maybe I'm not a genius and these are pretty damn obvious points that should occur to anyone looking without blinders on [...]

I'm sure it is true for nuclear physicist. For years I would have agreed with the statement about chess grandmasters (being a chess player myself). The shocking thing is that You can imagine how shocked I was to read:

After a century of investigation, not a single study with adult chess players has managed to establish a link between chess skill and intelligence. Intellect had little predictive power among strong chess players.

So what did the studies find? From the same article:

Studies have found that adult chess players are more introverted and intuitive than the general population.

Chess players are drug tested like athletes in traditional sports. Wonder if eSports will do the same.

He won the last round with no broadcast.

Some sources (commenters on chess sites) say the feed was back on for the last round. http://www.chess.com/news/suspected-cheater-strip-searched-4830?page=2

This explains it, but without an exact source:
http://blog.chess.com/clizaw/did-ibm-cheat-kasparov

When there's only four high-profile chess players....

Uhuh. Yeah, there's a few more than that.