Chess Endgame News

This review starts with a demonstration of the power of FinalGen and the new Lomonosov 7-man endgame tables, each giving an alternative 'bionic' ending to the 'five Queens' Hao-Carlsen (Tata Chess 2013) game. The completion of the Lomonosov 7-man DTM EGTs is announced. The final two parts of the Bourzutschky-Konoval 7-man-chess series in EG are summarised.

Turing, Kasparov and the future

The 'Turing 100' Conference in Manchester was the main event of the Turing Centenary Year in 2012. This is a report and reflection on Kasparov's popular talk. Within it, he explained how Turing and influenced computer chess, his career and the chess community. Kasparov also played Chessbase's 'TURING' emulation of Turing's second paper chess engine, here labelled 'AT2'. Quasi Turing-tests, computer contributions to world championship chess, and suspected cheating in chess are also mentioned.

Chess Endgame News

Three topics are discussed. First, an issue in the epistemology of computer simulation - that of the chess endgame 'becoming' what computer-generated data says it is. Secondly, the endgames of the longest known games are discussed, and the concept of a Bionic Game is defined. Lastly, the set of record-depth positions published by Bourzutschky and Konoval are evaluated by the new MVL tables in Moscow - alongside the deepest known mate of 549 moves.

WCSC 2013: the 3rd World Chess Software Championship

The 3rd World Chess Software Championship took place in Yokohama, Japan during August 2013. It pits chess engines against each other on a common hardware platform - in this instance, the Intel i7 2740 Ivy Bridge with 16GB RAM supporting a potential eight processing threads. It was narrowly won by HIARCS from JUNIOR and PANDIX with JONNY, SHREDDER and MERLIN taking the remaining places. Games, occasionally annotated, are available here.

Chess endgame news

This note defines what it means by the 'chess endgame' and looks at the frequency of sub-n-man and 'FinalGen' positions in games and studies and in the FIDE 2013 World Cup. It includes the exposition of the DTM-minimaxing line from one of the three DTM-deepest known (KQPKRBN) positions. It refines the definitions of 'longest game' and 'bionic game'. The games of the FIDE 2013 World Cup and the longest known decisive game are available here.

Rook versus Bishop

The focus here is on the influence of the endgame KRPKBP on endgames featuring duels between rook and bishop. We take advantage of the range of endgame tablebases and tools now available to ratify and extend previous analyses of five examples, including the conclusion of the justly famous 1979 Rio Interzonal game, Timman-Velimirović. The tablebases show that they can help us understand the hidden depths of the chess endgame, that the path to the draw here is narrower than expected, that chess engines without tablebases still do not find all the wins, and that there are further surprises in store when more pawns are added.

Chess Endgame News

This note includes some endgame reflections on the last World Chess Championship, an update on the search for the longest decisive games between computers, and a brief mention of the sets of endgame table (EGT) statistics recently received from Yakov Konoval (2013) and from Victor Zakharov (2013) for the Lomonosov team.

Haworth's Law

The maximum 'Depth to Mate' (DTM(k)) data for k-man chess, k = 3-7, is now available: log(maxDTM(k)) demonstrates quasi-linear behaviour. This note predicts maxDTM for 8- to 10-man chess and the two-sigma distributions around these figures. 'Haworth's Law' is the conjecture that maxDTM will continue to demonstrate this behaviour for some time to come. The supporting datafile is a pgn of maxDTM positions, each having a DTM-minimaxing line of play from it to 'mate'.

Chess Endgame News

This paper notes FIDE's 75-move rule (9.6b) and suggests some implications. It reviews two endgame-table initiatives associated with the 50-move rule. One is Huntington's mainly sub-6-man multi-valued DTM50 EGTs implemented in HASKELL. The other is Ronald de Man's WDL' and DTZ50' EGTs which introduce a 5-way evaluation of positions, and ascribe a depth to decisive positions which are not 50-move-rule wins or losses. There is also some first detail about the Lomonosov '7-man DTM EGT' team, and comments on reactions to 'Haworth's Law'.

Chess Endgame News

The DTZ metric indicates the minimaxed 'Depth To Zeroing of the ply-count' for decisive positions. Ronald de Man's DTZ50' metric is a variant of the DTZ metric as moderated by the FIDE 50-move draw-claim rule. DTZ50'-depths are given to '50-move-rule draws' as well as to unconditionally decisive positions. This note defines a two-dimensional taxonomy of positions implicitly defined by DTZ50'. 'Decisive' positions may have values of (wins/losses) v =1/-1 or v = 2/-2. A position's depth in the new DTZ50' metric may be greater than, equal to or less than its DTZ depth. The six parts of the taxonomy are examined in detail, and illustrated by some 40 positions and 16 lines. Positions, lines and the annotation of these lines are supplied in the ancillary data files.

Chess Endgame News

This note investigates the recently revived proposal that the stalemated side should lose, and comments further on the information provided by the FRITZ14 interface to Ronald de Man’s DTZ50' EGTs. The history of stalemate is convoluted, and there is an argument for computing chess endgame tables to revised rules to examine the impact of any change. The FRITZ14 interface to the DTZ50' EGTs exhibits residual 'one-out' and end-of-phase errors. Example positions are provided to illustrate the stalemate and the DTZ50' issues described.

Depth to mate and the 50-move rule

The most popular endgame tables (EGTs) documenting ‘DTM’ Depth to Mate in chess endgames are those of Eugene Nalimov but these do not recognise the FIDE 50-move rule ‘50mr’. This paper marks the creation by the first author of EGTs for sub-6-man (s6m) chess and beyond which give DTM as affected by the ply count pc. The results are put into the context of previous work recognising the 50mr and are compared with the original unmoderated DTM results. The work is also notable for being the first EGT generation work to use the functional programming language HASKELL.

WCSC 2015: the world chess software championship

This is the official report of the ICGA's 2015 World Chess Software Championship held in Leiden, The Netherlands.

Swedish Primary Teachers' Attitudes towards Integrating Gaming in the EFL Classroom

A current topic in Swedish schools is the use of computer games and gaming. One reason is because computers are becoming more and more integrated into the schools, and the technology plays a large role in the everyday lives of the pupils. Since teachers should integrate pupils’ interests in the formal teaching, it is of interest to know what attitudes teachers have towards gaming. Therefore the aim of this empirical study is to gain an insight into the attitudes Swedish primary teachers have towards online and offline computer games in the EFL classroom. An additional aim is to investigate to what extent teachers use games. Five interviews were conducted with teachers in different Swedish schools in a small to medium-sized municipality. After the interviews were transcribed, the results were analyzed and discussed in relation to relevant research and the sociocultural theory. The results show that teachers are positive towards games and gaming, mostly because gaming often contains interaction with others and learning from peers is a main component in sociocultural theory. However, only one out of the five participants had at some point used games. The conclusion is that teachers are unsure about how to use games in their teaching and that training and courses in this area would be valuable. More research is needed within this area, and it would be of value to investigate what suggested courses would contain and also to investigate exactly how games can be used in teaching.

Writing, English and digital culture

In their out-of-school lives, young people are immersed in rich and complex digital worlds, characterised by image and multimodality. Computer games in particular present young people with specific narrative genres and textual forms: contexts in which meaning is constructed interactively and drawing explicitly on a wide range of design elements including sound, image, gesture, symbol, colour and so on. As English curriculum seeks to address the changing nature of literacy, challenges are raised, particularly with respect to the ways in which multimodal texts might be incorporated alongside print based forms of literacy. Questions focus both on the ways in which such texts might be created, studied and assessed, and on the implications of the introduction of such texts for print based literacies.

This paper explores intersections between writing and computer games within the English classroom, from a number of junior secondary examples. In particular it considers tensions that arise when young people use writing to recreate or respond to multimodal forms. It explores ways in which writing is stretched and challenged by enterprises such as these, ways in which students utilise and adapt print based modes to represent multimodal forms of narrative, and how teachers and curriculum might respond. Consideration is given to the challenges posed to teaching and assessment by bringing writing to bear as the medium of analysis of, and response to, multimodal texts.