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Chess Grandmaster Used iPhone To Cheat During Tournament
SternisheFan 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.
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.
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...
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/
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...
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... 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.