The title of a new article at Chessbase is:
A forfeit for wearing an analogue watch?
by Shahid Ahmed
2/9/2020
At the 40th National Team Open, a big shock in round three when GM Adhiban Baskaran
Adhiban is the first GM casualty in India of the analog watch rule | Photo: Gopakumar Sudhakaran
was forfeited on board one for possessing an analogue watch
after 16 moves against IM C R G Krishna. His team still won the match, thanks to wins on the lower boards. It’s an unusual case, though evidently all according to the tournament rules.
Please surf on over to Chessbase and read the entire story. https://en.chessbase.com/post/adhiban-loses-for-possessing-analog-watch-in-national-teams-2020
A recent article caught my attention causing me to reflect upon an earlier article concerning the future of the contact lens and what the future of technology holds for the antiquated Royal game.
A glance to the left. A flick to the right. As my eyes flitted around the room, I moved through a virtual interface only visible to me—scrolling through a calendar, looking up commute times home, and even controlling music playback. It’s all I theoretically need to do to use Mojo Lens, a smart contact lens coming from a company called Mojo Vision.
The California-based company, which has been quiet about what it’s been working on for five years, has finally shared its plan for the world’s “first true smart contact lens.” But let’s be clear: This is not a product you’ll see on store shelves next autumn. It’s in the research and development phase—a few years away from becoming a real product.
A Future with Less Screens
Mojo Vision is all about “invisible computing.” The company, whose founders include industry veterans from the likes of Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, wants to reduce our reliance on screens. Instead of pulling out your phone to check why it buzzed in the middle of a conversation, look to the corner of your eye to activate an interface that will tell you in a split second.
“We want to create a technology that lets you be you, lets you look like you; doesn’t change your appearance; it doesn’t make you act weird walking down the street,” said Mike Wiemer, cofounder and chief technology officer at Mojo Vision. “It’s very discreet and frankly, substantially, most of the time it doesn’t show you anything.”
https://www.wired.com/story/mojo-vision-smart-contact-lens/
What will it mean for the Royal game when these contact lens become ubiquitous? As I have heard all my life, “You cannot stop progress.”
Smart contacts: The future of the wearable you won’t even see
One day, contact lenses could do much more than just correct our vision
Google
The notion of wearing lenses over our eyes to correct our vision dates back hundreds of years, with some even crediting Leonardo da Vinci as one of the first proponents of the idea (though that remains somewhat controversial). Material science and our understanding of the human eye have come a long way since, while their purpose has remained largely the same. In the age of wearable computers, however, scientists in the laboratories of DARPA, Google, and universities around the world see contact lenses not just as tools to improve our vision, but as opportunities to augment the human experience. But how? And why?
As a soft, transparent disc of plastic and silicone that you wear on your eyeball, a contact lens may seem like a very bad place to put electronics. But if you look beneath the surface, the idea of a smart contact lens has real merit, and that begins with its potential to improve our well-being.
Google has explored the idea of a glucose-monitoring contact lens
Google
Power of the eye
Professor Jean-Louis de Bougrenet de la Tocnaye with his battery-packing contact lens
IMT Atlantique
In France, Professor Jean-Louis de Bougrenet de la Tocnaye leads an optical research team at IMT Atlantique, a technology university in Brest Nantes and Rennes. The scientists are working on a new generation of optical devices that could perform some exciting functions. A big one is the ability to detect the precise direction of a user’s gaze, which could lead to assistive technologies for everything from driving, to surgical procedures to augmented reality systems that don’t require goggles and helmets.
“It is clear that if we have complex electronics and computing tasks to incorporate into the contact lens, it would be necessary to have a battery to make that lens autonomous, and it had never been done,” de Bougrenet de la Tocnaye tells New Atlas.
Until 2019, that is. In April, he and the team unveiled a prototype of a device that will be central to its aims, the world’s first standalone contact lens with a battery inside. As a demonstration of what it could do, the team used the onboard battery to power an LED for a few hours, but they expect things to go a whole lot further than that.
“The efficiency of the battery will depend on the thickness and the surface area,” explains de Bougrenet de la Tocnaye. “We can’t put something over the iris completely, so the battery at the moment is a kind of ring around it. But of course, in the future you’ll also want to cover the pupil part, and in that case the battery should be transparent. This will become possible through the use of graphene technology to make electronics transparent.”
A standalone contact lens with an onboard power supply could serve all kinds uses
IMT Atlantique
Coming to an eye near you?
Secretive augmented reality startup Magic Leap filed a patent for a smart contact lens in 2015. Sony, which launched its augmented reality smart glasses for developers back in 2015, filed a patent for a contact lens that records what you see in 2016.
In the same year, Samsung applied for a patent for a contact lens with a built-in camera, and then generated headlines again this August when it was granted a patent for a contact lens capable of recording video and taking photos, potentially just through blinking.
And these are just the projects we know about, working on what we consider to be possible today. Give it another decade of progress in material science and miniaturized electronics, and who knows what the humble contact lens will be capable of?
“We are just at the beginning, says de Bougrenet de la Tocnaye. “It is very difficult to answer what we will be able to do, because we are just discovering what the capabilities are. The technology is there and we can really integrate a lot of things into a contact lens, and also into a patch on the skin. In the future, the human being will really get ahead with these kinds of sensors and devices on the body.”
https://newatlas.com/wearables/contact-lens-future-wearable-augmented-reality/
It is more than a little obvious that Chess, as it has been known for the last couple of centuries, must either change, or die. It is inevitable humans of the future will live in some kind of “mind-meld” with technology. The only humans still playing Chess in the future without technology will be akin to the humans seen battling robots in dystopian Sci-Fi movies.
“The technology is there and we can really integrate a lot of things into a contact lens, and also into a patch on the skin. In the future, the human being will really get ahead with these kinds of sensors and devices on the body.”
“Give it another decade of progress in material science and miniaturized electronics, and who knows what the humble contact lens will be capable of?”
What will the Chess world do? (I first typed “FIDE” but after laughing, decided to type “Chess world”)
It may be that with costly technology tournament directors and officials will be able to detect a “loaded” contact lens, but what about that “patch on the skin”? Even naked Chess would not stop a human with technology contained in a patch of skin. There is technology now that can detect technology on a person, and maybe in a person. But what if everyone has technology within? Maybe in the future society will be divided into human hybrid’s
and those without, who we will call the “natural’s.”
Which group do you think will be playing Chess?
Now is the time for Chess people to discuss how to adjust to the future. While laughing I thought, “Who am I kidding. The dysfunctional FIDE is still trying to cope with the use of large objects used to cheat, such as a cell phone.”
Music for Cyborgs
https://medulasa.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-cyborgs
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-mK3YJfFDnAJNMSgfhdUwg/videos
Illingworth Chess
