![]() Not only was it the first time such a final did not feature Houdini, but also it was being played at the same time as the human World Chess Championship was being decided in Chennai, India.Īt least for this author, the TCEC final was more exciting than the human championship. The TCEC final between Komodo and Stockfish was a very dramatic event, for many reasons. TCEC is regarded, against the wishes of its organizer Martin Thoresen, as an unofficial world championship for chess engines. Together, they made headlines in chess circles when they obtained the two highest scores in the most recent Thoresen Chess Engines Competition (TCEC), above Houdini and many other engines. Not one, but two engines have risen with a legitimate challenge to the alpha dog: Komodo and Stockfish. But now, for the first time in four years, something else has reached Houdini’s level of play. Humans are not real competitors against Houdini, and for a long time, neither were other engines. The current release, Houdini 4, is the de facto gold standard against which all other chess engines are measured. ![]() A new version is released every year, and each one exceeds the previous one. Since its appearance in the chess world back in 2010, Houdini has been widely regarded as the best chess player ever in the long and rich history of the game. Arguably the strongest chess engine of all is Houdini, developed by Robert Houdart. Seldom have humans reached the rarefied stratosphere of speed and precision where these chess engines fight. These algorithms are called chess engines, and - among the myriad currently available - at least two dozen have an estimated playing strength (or ELO) higher than the best human ever. Today, thanks to the increase in computing power of the average computer and to the appearance of a new generation of chess software, there is no longer need of specialized hardware to beat the best human: any decent laptop would maul World Champion Magnus Carlsen in a match.Īt the core of this new software are algorithms that evaluate chess positions and calculate variations in order to decide on the best move. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, the opponent I’m talking about is my laptop… and yours!īack in 1996, when most of the current MIT undergrads were still in the process of being potty trained, Gary Kasparov - the Carlsen of the previous generation - lost his first game ever against Deep Blue, a top-secret, multi-million dollar supercomputer that IBM built using thousands of chess-specific processors with the sole purpose of defeating this one individual. Carlsen won’t budge, and is wise in doing so, because - as he and all other Grandmasters know - even he himself is too weak and too slow to stand a chance against this opponent. That opponent is here in front of me as I type, quietly waiting for the champ to accept the challenge. Yet even Magnus, at the peak of his powers, refuses to meet one opponent in a match, notwithstanding the incessant pleadings from chess fans. Less than two months ago, he beat World Champion Vishy Anand in a match without losing a single game. None of us mere humans stand a chance against him: he is too fast, too strong and too accurate. Mean as he may sound, the awful truth is that Carlsen is right: Fressinet, and almost everyone else on the planet, is indeed too weak and too slow for him. The other guy, at the receiving end of Magnus’ Muhammad Ali-esque taunts (“Too weak, too slow! C’mon! What, you wanna play?”) is his close friend and sparring partner, Grandmaster Laurent Fressinet. The cocky guy in the green shirt, with the looks of a Viking and the nose of a boxer, is a 22-year-old chap named Magnus Carlsen, who happens to be the strongest chess player to ever walk the earth. They are fighting each other to the death, with bravado and gusto, in one of the oldest battlefields known to the human mind: the chessboard. ![]() Search in YouTube for “too weak, too slow” and you will find a video of two young men sitting across from each other at a small table, frantically moving carved tokens on a wooden grid and slapping a clock mercilessly. ![]()
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