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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.
He isn't a grandmaster if he cheated. :p
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.
Apparently he opted for the logical partition, rather than the extended. Wise move.
"He's got the kind of moral fiber we're always looking for, that will to win."
- [insert name], CEO
[insert big business name], Inc.
they use iPhones for toilet paper.
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.
There's an app for that.
There are two types of people in the world; those who believe there are two types of people, and those who don't.
"Siri, what move should I make next?"
This isn't as unusual as it sounds, Deep Blue always plays this way!
Note: The former World Chess Champion Tigran V. Petrosian died in 1984.
The comments were made by grandmaster Tigran L. Petrosian, born 1984 and named after the champion.
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.
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.
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.