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The world champion, Magnus Carlsen, starts his 2020 campaign on Saturday when he meets his arch rival Anish Giri in the opening round at Tata Steel Wijk aan Zee, the traditional Dutch tournament which he has dominated ever since he won its C group aged 13. In his past eight Masters appearances there Carlsen has won seven times and placed second once.

Carlsen and Giri have had some sharp clashes on Twitter, and a highlight of the 29-year-old Norwegians interview with the Guardian on Thursday was his relish in recounting how he psychologically crushed the Dutch champion when they met at Zagreb last summer.

The Wijk pairings have been kind to Carlsen in his quest to set a world record streak of 111 games unbeaten, breaking Sergei Tiviakovs mark of 110 against lesser opponents in 2004-05. He is in the top half of the draw with an extra White, and will hope for full points from some of his next opponents Yu Yangyi, Jeffery Xiong and Jorden van Foreest.

Carlsen is in the best form of his career after his vintage 2019 when he won 10 elite events, was unbeaten in classical play, held three global crowns, and in his spare time briefly reached No 1 in Fantasy Premier League. The fifth round at Wijk will be played in PSV Eindhovens Philips Stadion. Rounds start at 1.30pm and are free and live to watch online with grandmaster and computer commentaries.

Last summer, when Carlsen triumphed in Zagreb, where his game was zestful and sharp after his work with AlphaZero, he looked ready to break his own record rating of 2889 points and go for a round 2900. That proved a bridge too far and he starts the year at 2872. He will not achieve all those 28 points at Wijk but a strong performance there would set up another shot at the record in the spring.

Dangers abound. Fabiano Caruana, the world No 2, chose a lower profile in 2019 but will aim at a good start to the year before the candidates in March where the American aims to qualify for a world title rematch and avenge his defeat in 2018. Wesley So, the winner at Wijk 2017 in Carlsens only blemish, crushed him in Oslo for the Fischer Random title.

Alireza Firouzja, the 16-year-old whose world blitz game against Carlsen sparked a huge controversy, will aim to match Bobby Fischer, Boris Spassky and Carlsen himself, who all showed their world class at that age.

Tata Steel Wijk is such a reliably classic fixture to launch the chess year that it is easy to forget that its future is not assured. Steel production is in severe decline in Europe, and 2019 was a poor year for Tata Steel Netherlands. In November the Indian multinational announced job cuts which may involve nearly 20% of its 9,000 Dutch workforce.

Chinas Ju Wenjun, 28, took a 2.5-1.5 lead on Thursday in her womens world title defence against Russias Aleksandra Goryachkina, 21. Their 12-game series has a record prize fund 500,000 for any womens world championship, though this is still only a fraction of what Carlsen and his challenger will earn later this year. The first half is in Shanghai, with a 7.30am start, and the second half at Vladivostok from 5.30am.

For most of this century the womens title has been decided by a 64-player knockout, leading to a rapid turnover of champions, but the format has now reverted to a candidates tournament and a title match. Nigel Short is trebling up as chairman of the appeals committee, official match commentator and Fide representative.

The womens match which would attract most interest from chess fans, between the two clearly best players of all time, has never happened except for a single game in the 2012 Gibraltar Open. Judit Polgar v Hou Yifan is the female version of Bobby Fischer v Anatoly Karpov, the legends match that never was. It could still happen if Rex Sinquefield, who organises many similar events at St Louis, gets involved.

3653 After 1...Rd6+? 2 Kc3 Qf3+ 3 Qe3 Blacks checks ran out and White won with his extra rook. Instead 1...Qf3+! wins after 2 Kc4 (2 Kc2 Re2 wins Q for R) Re4+! 3 Kc5 Qa3+! when 4 Rb4 a5 and 4 Kxc6 Qa6+ both win a rook when Blacks extra pawns decide.

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Chess: Magnus Carlsen to face arch rival Anish Giri in opening round at Wijk - The Guardian

Magnus Carlsen ended his vintage year of 2019 as he began it, as a superb all-round player who outclasses his rivals. Carlsen won at Wijk in January last year and at Moscow in December where he took both the world 30-minute rapid and the five-minute blitz crowns, losing only one game out of 38.

Overall the Norwegian, 29, won 10 elite tournaments over the year, with just two odd failures at speed in St Louis and at Fischer Random in Oslo. The standout difference between todays champion and Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov is that Carlsen has been far more active than the other legends in their peak years, taking on new challenges with hardly a break. And in his spare time he briefly became world No 1 in Fantasy Premier League. True, Kasparov was No 1 for some 21 years while Carlsen is eight years and counting.

Carlsens style has become sharper since he worked in 2018 with AlphaZero and the creative tactician Daniil Dubov: For me it is easier to play for a win. Perhaps the others risk more if they do so. I think thats the brutal truth. If you are a bit better you can afford to take more risks.

It will be different in 2020, as Carlsen has already announced: I will definitely play less. I have played a lot this year and my level of energy has become empty at the end. Not realistic to play as much in 2020, he said.

Three major targets remain. At Tata Steel Wijk aan Zee starting on 11 January he can break Sergei Tiviakovs record of 110 classical games unbeaten. Carlsen missed out on a 2900 classical rating despite getting near it in mid-year, so this can be a 2020 target. His current rating is 2872 and his all-time peak remains at 2889.

Perhaps most of all, Carlsen will want to defend his title more convincingly than in 2014, when with the scores level at 2.5 each Vishy Anand missed a simple winning chance, or 2016 and 2018 when the classical scores were tied at 6-6 before Carlsen defeated Sergey Karjakin and Fabiano Caruana in speed tie-breaks. As of now, Caruana and Chinas Ding Liren are the favourites to win the candidates in March and Carlsen respects them both as serious contenders.

Aside from Carlsen, the main talking point at Moscow was Alireza Firouzja, who quit his native Iran due to its ban on playing Israelis and will probably represent France, where he now lives.

The 16-year-old is already perceived as a potential world title challenger in the mid 2020s, so the dramatic end to his blitz game with the champion, where he missed several wins before his controversial loss on time, has become compulsive viewing.

The final position, where Carlsen had a lone bishop and a tablebase draw, was a loss for Firouzja under Fide rules because a mating position was legally possible. The teen often plays blitz games on websites where the rule is different, so that WK a8 WP a6 v BK c7 BN c8 with White to move and 1 a7 Nb6 mate is forced, may become a draw online if White loses on time and the server then decrees that Black lacks mating material.

Firouzja requested to see the Fide rule in print, an action paralleled long ago when Yuri Averbakh and Viktor Korchnoi were not sure of the rules on castling. His appeal against the result was doomed to fail because he had not complained during the game when he alleged he was disturbed by Carlsen speaking in Norwegian. Carlsen was magnanimous afterwards, but such incidents can have lasting effects on relationships between players.

Hastings has its final two rounds on Saturday and Sunday afternoon (2.15pm start). Online viewing is available on two different sites and includes computer commentary.

3652 1...Bxg2+! 2 Rxg2 and now Duda fell for 2...Re1+?? 3 Rg1 Qc1 4 Rxh5+! Instead 2...Qc1+! 3 Qg1 (3 Rg1 Rxh2+) Re1 wins for Black.

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Chess: Carlsen wins speed titles after controversial game with rising star - The Guardian

12/25/2019 Another eventful chess year is behind us, with great events and tournaments, impressive personalities and fantastic chess games. Help us choose the player of the year, the female player of the year, the game of the year, the combination of the year and the endgame of the year in our annual ChessBase reader poll. First up: The Player of the Year...

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For each poll, our editorial team has provided a list of nominees.Even with a panel involved, these are of course a bit subjective.And since we have limited ourselves to five players, undoubtedly some readers may miss theirfavoured choice.Our shortlist is one of many possible, we know!

The order of the players is arbitrary and you can votebelow.

Alongside Ding Liren and Wei Yi, Wang Hao is one of the greatest Chinese talents.He became a grand master at the age of 16 and since then has enjoyed numerous international successes.He won the Al Ain Classic in 2015, the HD Bank Cup in Ho Chi Minh City in 2016 and the Sharjah Masters and the Asian Continental Championships in 2017.But Wang celebrated the high point of his career so far in 2019. In addition to repeating histriumph in Ho Chi Minh City by winning 9th HD BankCup, in October, with his victory at the FIDE chess.com Grand Swiss tournament on the Isle of Man, perhaps the strongest open tournament of all time, he qualified for the 2020 Candidates Tournament in Yekaterinburg. Thatmakeshim the second Chinese player after Ding to make it into this or anyCandidates Tournament.

Wang Hao with the Isle of Man win | Photo: John Saunders

Alexander Grischuk has had a long and very successful career.Among other things, he has already participated in candidates competitions four times (2007, 2011, 2013 and 2018) and was world champion in blitz chess in 2006, 2012 and 2015.

In 2019, Grischuk qualified for his fifth candidates tournament thanks to his success at the Grand Prix tournaments in Moscow, Riga and Hamburg.

Alexander Grischuk at the Grand Prix | Photo: Niki Riga

For Magnus Carlsen, world champion since 2013 and number 1 in the world rankings since July 2011, this year was extremely successful.During the course of the year he played 77 games with classic time control, won 30, and drew47.So Carlsen not only remained unbeaten in 2019, but in fact he has not lost a single game at the tournament since Biel 2018 when he went down toShakhriyar Mamedyarov on July 31, 2018. That's107 classical gamesin a row!

Carlsen's record in 2019 corresponds to an Elo performance of 2893 and in the first half of the year Carlsen won every classical tournament he played in.

Magnus Carlsen has reasons to smile | Photo: Lennart Ootes

Teimour Radjabov had great success as a teenager.He became grandmaster in March 2001 at the age of 14, which made him the second youngest of all time.In 2003 he caused a sensation when be beat Garry Kasparov in a dramatic game at theLinares tournament.

In 2011 and 2013, Radjabov qualified for the candidates tournament and in November 2012 he reached as high as number 4 in the world rankings.But after his disappointing performance at the 2013 Candidates Tournament in London, Radjabov continued to slide down in the world rankings and, he says, was thinking about ending his chess career.

However, the Azerbaijani made a comeback at the World Cup 2019: he defeated Ding Liren in the final matchwinningthe tournament and thus qualified for the 2020 candidates.

Teimour Radjabov at the World Cup | Photo: Kyrill Merkuryev

Ding Liren wasthe first Chinese to qualify for a candidates tournament.In the past few years Ding has established himself among the world elite through consistently good results and strong play.From August 2017 to November 2018, he remained unbeaten in 100 games with a classical time control, and he also celebrated a number of successes in 2019.

In August 2019, Ding won the Sinquefield Cup in St. Louis after beating Carlsen in the tiebreak the first time that Carlsen lost a tiebreak as the reigning World Champion.In October, Ding finished second in the World Cup for the second time in a row.He lost to Radjabov in the final, but qualified for the 2020 candidates tournament. The Chinesewas more successful at the Grand Chess Tourfinal in London in December: Ding won against Levon Aronian in the semi-finals of the tournament and then against Maxime Vachier-Lagrave in the final, which ensured overall victory in the 2019 Grand Chess Tour.

Ding Liren | Photo: Lennart Ootes

Who is your pick forthe "Player of the Year 2019"?

spieler-des-jahres-2019

Voting ends on 12/31/2019, at 22:00 UTC

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Vote: The player of the year 2019 - Chessbase News

In 1997, Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov, the reigning world chess champion. In 2011, Watson defeated Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, the worlds best Jeopardy players. In 2016, AlphaGo defeated Ke Jie, the worlds best Go player. In 2017, DeepMind unleashed AlphaZero, which trounced the world-champion computer programs at chess, Go, and shogi.

If humans are no longer worthy opponents, then perhaps computers have moved so far beyond our intelligence that we should rely on their superior intelligence to make our important decisions. Nope.

Despite their freakish skill at board games, computer algorithms do not possess anything resembling human wisdom, common sense, or critical thinking. Deciding whether to accept a job offer, sell a stock, or buy a house is very different from recognizing that moving a bishop three spaces will checkmate an opponent. That is why it is perilous to trust computer programs we dont understand to make decisions for us.

Consider the challenges identified by Stanford computer science professorTerry Winograd,which have come to be known asWinograd schemas.For example, what does the word it refer to in this sentence?

I cant cut that tree down with that axe; it is too [thick/small].

If the bracketed word is thick, then it refers to the tree; if the bracketed word is small, then it refers to the axe. Sentences like these are understood immediately by humans but are very difficult for computers because they do not have the real-world experience to place words in context.

ParaphrasingOren Etzioni,CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, how can machines take over the world when they cant even figure out what it refers to in a simple sentence?

When we see a tree, we know it is a tree. We might compare it to other trees and think about the similarities and differences between fruit trees and maple trees. We might recollect the smells wafting from some trees. We would not be surprised to see a squirrel run up a pine or a bird fly out of a dogwood. We might remember planting a tree and watching it grow year by year. We might remember cutting down a tree or watching a tree being cut down.

A computer does none of this. It can spellcheck the word tree, count the number of times the word is used in a story, and retrieve sentences that contain the word. But computers do not understand what trees are in any relevant sense. They are likeNigel Richards,who memorized the French Scrabble dictionary and has won the French-language Scrabble World Championship twice, even though he doesnt know the meaning of the French words he spells.

To demonstrate the dangers of relying on computer algorithms to make real-world decisions, consider an investigation of risk factors for fatal heart attacks.

I made up some household spending data for 1,000 imaginary people, of whom half had suffered heart attacks and half had not. For each such person, I used a random number generator to create fictitious data in 100 spending categories. These data were entirely random. There were no real people, no real spending, and no real heart attacks. It was just a bunch of random numbers. But the thing about random numbers is that coincidental patterns inevitably appear.

In 10 flips of a fair coin, there is a 46% chance of a streak of four or more heads in a row or four or more tails in a row. If that does not happen, heads and tails might alternate several times in a row. Or there might be two heads and a tail, followed by two more heads and a tail. In any event, some pattern will appear and it will be absolutely meaningless.

In the same way, some coincidental patterns were bound to turn up in my random spending numbers. As it turned out, by luck alone, the imaginary people who had not suffered heart attacks spent more money on small appliances and also on household paper products.

When we see these results, we should scoff and recognize that the patterns are meaningless coincidences. How could small appliances and household paper products prevent heart attacks?

A computer, by contrast, would take the results seriously because a computer has no idea what heart attacks, small appliances, and household paper products are. If the computer algorithm is hidden inside a black box, where we do not know how the result was attained, we would not have an opportunity to scoff.

Nonetheless, businesses and governments all over the world nowadays trust computers to make decisions based on coincidental statistical patterns just like these. One company, for example, decided that it would make more online sales if it changed the background color of the web page shown to British customers from blue to teal. Why? Because they tried several different colors in nearly 100 countries. Any given color was certain to fare better in some country than in others even if random numbers were analyzed instead of sales numbers. The change was made and sales went down.

Many marketing decisions, medical diagnoses, and stock trades are now done via computers. Loan applications and job applications are evaluated by computers. Election campaigns are run by computers, including Hillary Clintons disastrous 2016presidential campaign.If the algorithms are hidden inside black boxes, with no human supervision, then it is up to the computers to decide whether the discovered patterns make sense and they are utterly incapable of doing so because they do not understand anything about the real world.

Computers are not intelligent in any meaningful sense of the word, and it is hazardous to rely on them to make important decisions for us. The real danger today is not that computers are smarter than us, but that wethinkcomputers are smarter than us.

Featured image credit: Lumberjack Adventures by Abby Savage. CC0 via Unsplash.

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AI is dangerous, but not for the reasons you think. - OUPblog

We wish you a headless robot/ We wish you a headless robot/ We wish you a headless robot/ and an alpha zero. If that ditty lacked a certain something, you should be going Da da da doom! about the festive piece in Saturdays Post about a computer saying Roll Over Beethoven and finishing his fragmentary 10th Symphony for him, possibly as a weirdly soulless funeral march.

Evidently this most ambitious project of its type ever attempted will see AI replicate creative genius ending in a public performance by a symphony orchestra in Bonn, Beethovens birthplace part of celebrations to mark the 250th anniversary of the composers birth. Why its not being performed by flawless machines synthesizing perfect tones is unclear.

What is clear is that its one of those plans with only two obvious pitfalls. It might fail. Or it might work.

Its one of those plans with only two obvious pitfalls. It might fail. Or it might work

A bad computer symphony would be awful, like early chess programs beneath contempt in their non-human weakness. But now their non-human strength is above contempt, as they dispatch the strongest grandmasters without emotion.

So my main concern here isnt with the headless Beethoven thing failing. Its with it succeeding. I know theres no stopping progress, that from mustard gas we had to go on to nuclear weapons then autonomous killer bots. But must we whistle so cheerfully as we design heartless successors who will even whistle better than us?

Its strange how many people yearn for the abolition of man. From New Soviet Man to Walden II, radicals cant wait to reinvent everything, including getting rid of dumb old languages where bridges have gender, and dumb old Adam and Eve into the bargain. Our ancestors stank. And we stink. The founder of behaviourist B.F. Skinners utopian Walden II chortles that when his perfect successors arrive the rest of us will pass on to a well-deserved oblivion.

So who are these successors? In That Hideous Strength, C.S. Lewiss demented scientist Filostrato proclaims that In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mould What if were nearly there?

Freed of the boring necessities of life we might be paddocked in a digital, this-worldly Garden of Eden. But unless we are remade, we shall be more than just restless there. Without purpose we would go insane, as in Logans Run or the planet Miranda.

Ah, but we shall be remade. Mondays Post profiled Jennifer Doudna, inventor of the Crispr-Cas9 gene-editing technique so simple and powerful theres an app for it. Scientists can now dial up better genes on their smartphones and leave all the messy calculating to the machines. But if the machines can outcompose Beethoven, why would they leave the creative redesign of humans to us?

If the machines can outcompose Beethoven, why would they leave the redesign of humans to us?

To her credit, Prof. Doudna has nightmares about Hitler welcoming her invention. But forget Hitler. Here comes Leela to edit us away. And if Walden IIs eagerly anticipated design of personalities and control of temperament are within reach, and desirable, why should the new ones look anything like our current wretched ones? Is there anything to cherish in fallible man? If not, what sleep shall come?

So as we ponder Christmas, if we do, let us remember that 2,000 years ago the world was turned upside down by a God made Man because he loved weakness not strength. As a baby, then in the hideous humiliation of crucifixion, Christ gave a dignity to the helpless and downtrodden you find nowhere else including operating systems. Is it all rubbish, from the theology to the morality?

Years ago I argued for genetic modifications to restore the normal human template. But not to improve it, from eagle eyes to three legs to eight feet tall. But what will the computers think, and why should they? If nature is an obstacle to transcendence, where will they get their standards? Not from us. Nor will they want a bunch of meat around, sweating, bruising, rotting. Say goodnight, HAL.

Already algorithmic pop music is not just worse but in some important way less human. Where is Greensleeves or Good King Wenceslas in this Brave New World? And where should it be?

Shall the digital future burst forth from our abdomens and laser away the mess? Or is there something precious about us frail, vain, petty and, yes, smelly mortals? If so, what?

Many people love Christmas without being Christian. But many do not. And I think it comes down to your ability, or inability, to love humans as we are, which the Bible says God did but which supercomputers have no obvious reason to do.

So sing a carol for fallen man while the machines work on a funeral march.

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John Robson: Why is man so keen to make man obsolete? - National Post