LCCC Still Meeting at BWW in Brighton - and Stockfish is the Best Chess Player in the World

 

Who's on f6?

Older chess players will catch the joke.

LCCC met again at the Buffalo Wild Wings in Brighton, MI, with 12 players in attendance. Your humble scribe could not attend battling a head cold (and no, not Covid). But the Club Secretary Paul filled in as host and made sure everyone had a good time.

We had some new faces join us – Jim and Matt, as well as two old faces (that means players that used to attend the club. But in this case they are old faces also) – Dave and James. Welcome all four of you.

LCCC will be meeting next on Monday June 21 at 4pm at the same Buffalo Wild Wings in Brighton, MI in the Green Oak Mall just off of US-23 at the Lee Road Exit. See you then.

Practice must start as over the board chess tournaments seem to be starting back up! An email announcement let me know that the Michigan Open Chess Tournament will be held again!

The Michigan Open will be held at the Radisson Hotel Lansing from Friday September 3 thru Monday September 6. There will be a 3-day and a 4-day schedule, and two sections – the Open and the Reserve.

This is great news and visit the Michigan Chess Association website or the United States Chess Federation website for details on how to enter.

Now for a partial reprint of information from an article that appeared the US Chess magazine in March 2021 by John Hartmann, along with some commentary.

STOCKFISH retains the title of the best chess computer program.

The tournament is called the Top Chess Engine Championship or TCEC. Stockfish won the 20^th version of the tournament and has won it for the third straight year.

Stockfish beat Leela 53 – 47 over a 100 game match, winning 14 games and losing 8, the rest ending in draws, so a 14 – 8 – 78 record.

Leela upended Stockfish four years ago when it arrived on the computer chess world with it’s new ‘neutral network-based intelligence’ and beating the traditional ‘alpha-beta driven’ chess engines.

Now for drumroll………………Stockfish top addition has a rating of 3601!

Wood pusher Leela comes in at a pathetic 3586.

Magnus Carlsen, the current best human player on the planet has a rating of 2847 at this writing.

To give you a perspective as to how great this spread is, players not within 100 points of Carlsen have literally no chance of being him, and maybe only a 25% of even drawing.

I know back here where us mere mortals play chess, a 100-point difference is rating usually translates into about a 55-35 and 10 draws difference in results over 100 games. At that top level, a 100 point difference would probably look like this 50 – 5 and  45 draws.

This leads to the logical question – will programs ever solve chess and ruin the game for humans?

This humble scribe says no. Not any more than the automobile or airplane eliminated running competitions for humans. We will always know that our brains will never catch up to the calculating speed, strength, stamina and complete lack of emotion during the process as computers, but …..after all…..we still created those programs and machines.

Humans still win.