• 4 Posts
  • 704 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 20th, 2023

help-circle

  • Chess has always been overwhelmingly male. In the old days there were separate men’s tournaments and women’s tournaments. That changed in the 1980s when Susan Polgar was by far the strongest female player in Hungary. She didn’t have any serious opposition in women’s tournaments there, and wasn’t allowed to enter men’s tournaments, so she started a big fight. The result was that men’s tournaments were abolished and they are now “open” tournaments that anyone can play in, though they are still overwhelmingly male. Women’s events exist basically so that female players don’t have to endure the gauntlet of a socially inept nerd sausage fest in order to play chess.

    For a while there was also something called “centaur” tournaments, where a centaur was a human player assisted by a computer. The idea was that the computer could outcalculate humans, but humans still had better strategic judgment, so a human-computer team could outperform either member individually. After a while though, computers became strong enough that human interference just made them play worse. The current strongest chess tournament in the world is called TCEC (Top Chess Engine Championship, tcec-chess.com) and it is always running, 24/7/365 unless something happens. Some really incredible games have come out of it.


  • Ding Liren is the current human “open” world champion, but there is also a women’s world championship, currently held by Ju Wenjun. Plus there is a world junior championship, world rapid championship, world blitz, etc. Magnus is probably still the world’s best human player, but he decided to drop out of the WC cycle because he got tired of winning it so often, basically.

    The strongest chessplaying entities in the world are entirely machines, which have surpassed humans by enormous and uncrossable margins. The top engine for the past few years has been whatever the latest version of Stockfish is. The top human players spend enormous amounts of time studying machine analysis of various openings and game positions.






  • solrize@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldYarr
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    83
    ·
    10 days ago

    I looked him up and he is English. Weren’t English sailors called Limeys because of the lime juice in their rations, specifically for scurvy prevention? He should have signed up with the Admiralty instead of the pirates.





  • It was ok at the time, and if it isn’t ok now, that means you want to run something that is too bloated for its own good.

    Really though, special hardware for this doesn’t make too much sense. A raspberry pi with two ethernet interfaces would be great, but if you can live with ethernet plus wifi, the current rpi’s will do it. Otherwise there are lots of similar boards that really do have two ethernet.

    I have not really felt much use for self hosted server hardware at home. I use VPS’s for that and it’s less hassle. Maybe it doesn’t count as completely self hosted, but conceptually it’s a miniature colo box.







  • I’ve been to a few. I literally met Joe Biden at one of them, when he ran for president in 1988 but tanked in the primaries. He gave a stump speech at my school with maybe 100 people gathered, and he stayed around and chatted afterwards. It was pretty relaxed, Biden spouted platitudes, and he tried to recruit one of the student organizers to his local campaign (no idea what if anything happened with that).

    Frankly I wouldn’t go to one now, especially an indoor one. Think of Herman Cain who now has an award named after him. The Biden one I went to was outdoors. If you go, wear a properly fitted N95 mask and keep it on the whole time, or as much as possible.