The latest expedition by divers to the wreck of the Mentor, which sank just off the island of Kythera (also spelled Kithira and Kythira) in 1802, has recovered several pieces of the ship's rigging, coins, the leather sole of a shoe, a metal buckle, a token for playing cards, two chess pieces, fragments of cooking… Continue reading Greek ship carrying parts of the Parthenon is giving up more secrets
Tag: chess
Researcher uses machine learning to classify stellar objects from TESS data
A game of chess has 20 possible opening moves. Imagine being asked to start a game with tens of millions of openings instead. That was the task assigned to Adam Friedman, a 2020 summer intern at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. A chess champion in high school, Friedman analyzed his opponent—a deluge of data on the brightness changes…
How The Band Phish Played Chess Against Its Fans on New Year’s Eve
An anonymous reader writes: So on New Year’s Eve, the “jam” rock band Phish re-broadcast their legendary 1995 performance on New Year’s Eve — while playing a game of chess against the audience. (Just as they’d done in 1995 — although during that tour they’d made two just moves during each show.) In a video promoting this year’s event, a chess…
What Are You Paying For in a $300 Chess Set? Mostly the Knights
If you bought a wooden chess set after watching “The Queen’s Gambit,” the price you paid was most likely dictated by just four pieces. From a report: The knights alone can account for as much as 50 percent of the cost of a nice wooden set. While the rest of the pieces can be machine-made, the knights are carved by hand…
DeepMind’s AI Agent MuZero Could Turbocharge YouTube
DeepMind’s latest AI program can attain “superhuman performance” in tasks without needing to be given the rules. From a report: Like the research hub’s earlier artificial intelligence agents, MuZero achieved mastery in dozens of old Atari video games, chess, and the Asian board games of Go and Shogi. But unlike its predecessors, it had to work out their rules for itself….
Winner Announced In the World’s First ‘Quantum Chess’ Tournament
Aleksander Kubica is a postdoctoral fellow at Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and Institute for Quantum Computing. And he’s also the winner of the world’s first quantum chess tournament. (It’s now available for streaming on Twitch, and begins with a clip of the late Stephen Hawking playing a 2016 game against Ant-Man star Paul Rudd.) “It’s a complicated version of…
AI Just Controlled a Military Plane For the First Time Ever
On December 15, the United States Air Force successfully flew an AI copilot on a U-2 spy plane in California, marking the first time AI has controlled a U.S. military system. Dr. Will Roper, the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, reveals how he and his team made history: With call sign ARTUu, we trained uZero…
First ever quantum chess tournament won by Amazon researcher
Quantum chess – a complicated game in which pieces can be in more than one place at the same time – has had its first tournament, and a player from Amazon won Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2262613-first-ever-quantum-chess-tournament-won-by-amazon-researcher/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
‘The Queen’s Gambit’ Scores As Netflix Most-Watched Scripted Limited Series To Date
“The Queen’s Gambit,” a Netflix exclusive about an orphan chess prodigy, set the record as the most-watched scripted limited series to date on the streaming platform — with 62 million member accounts tuning in to the show in the first 28 days, according to the company. Variety reports: There’s a caveat, though: The way Netflix reports viewing is based on the…
Chess’s Cheating Crisis: ‘Paranoia Has Become the Culture’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: In one chess tournament, five of the top six were disqualified for cheating. In another, the doting parents of 10-year-old competitors furiously rejected evidence that their darlings were playing at the level of the world No 1. And in a third, an Armenian grandmaster booted out for suspicious play accused his opponent…