GM Adhiban Baskaran Forfeited For Wearing A Watch

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.

The Display of the Future Might Be in Your Contact Lens

Mojo Vision’s prototypes can enhance your vision or show you your schedule—right from the surface of your eyes.

Courtesy of Mojo Vision

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

By Nick Lavars

November 20, 2019

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

by Medulasa

https://medulasa.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-cyborgs

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-mK3YJfFDnAJNMSgfhdUwg/videos

 

 

 

 

Peter Thiel Rips Google A New One

Former Chess player, and multi-billionaire Peter Thiel

has written an editorial in which he has shined a light upon the largest roach in the world, Google. The company has gotten out of bed with the United States and into bed with Communist China. Google is the quintessential American company; anything for a buck. How many companies took money from Putin and the Russians to subvert the will of We The People in order for Donald J. Trump, or as I think of him, Trumpster, the greatest con man of all time, to become POTUS? As Gordon Gekko said in the movie Wall Street:

Mr. Thiel writes:

“A.I.’s military power is the simple reason that the recent behavior of America’s leading software company, Google — starting an A.I. lab in China while ending an A.I. contract with the Pentagon — is shocking. As President Barack Obama’s defense secretary Ash Carter pointed out last month, “If you’re working in China, you don’t know whether you’re working on a project for the military or not.”
No intensive investigation is required to confirm this. All one need do is glance at the Communist Party of China’s own constitution: Xi Jinping added the principle of “civil-military fusion,” which mandates that all research done in China be shared with the People’s Liberation Army, in 2017.”

“That same year, Google decided to open an A.I. lab in Beijing. According to Fei-Fei Li, the executive who opened it, the lab is “focused on basic A.I. research” because Google is “an A.I.-first company” in a world where “A.I. and its benefits have no borders.” All this is part of a “huge transformation” in “humanity” itself. Back in the United States, a rebellion among rank and file employees led Google last June to announce the abandonment of its “Project Maven” A.I. contract with the Pentagon. Perhaps the most charitable word for these twin decisions would be to call them naïve.”

“How can Google use the rhetoric of “borderless” benefits to justify working with the country whose “Great Firewall” has imposed a border on the internet itself? This way of thinking works only inside Google’s cosseted Northern California campus, quite distinct from the world outside. The Silicon Valley attitude sometimes called “cosmopolitanism” is probably better understood as an extreme strain of parochialism, that of fortunate enclaves isolated from the problems of other places — and incurious about them.”

“A little curiosity about China would have gone a long way, since the Communist Party is not shy about declaring its commitment to domination in general and exploitation of technology in particular. Of course, any American who pays attention and questions the Communist line is accused by the party of having a “Cold War mentality” — but this very accusation relies on forgetfulness and incuriosity among its intended audience.”

The West has badly underestimated China

China has been quietly building up its military and it’s now in command of an astounding force. The West has been completely blindsided.

Jamie Seidel
News Corp Australia Network June 6, 20191:16pm

https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/military/the-west-has-badly-underestimated-china/news-story/9b040e11d4dde00eb001a434422e949d

Elwyn Berlekamp R.I.P.

Elwyn Berlekamp, a UC Berkeley mathematician and game theorist whose error-correcting codes allowed spacecraft from Voyager to the Hubble Space Telescope to send accurate, detailed and beautiful images back to Earth, died April 9 at his home in Piedmont, California, from complications of pulmonary fibrosis.

A professor emeritus of mathematics and of electrical engineering and computer sciences, Berlekamp was 78.

Berlekamp was a “genius” in many areas, according to colleague Richard Karp, a UC Berkeley professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer sciences and holder of computer science’s premier honor, the Turing Award.

“He was a brilliant person, caring father, accomplished juggler and he had a great sense of humor. He’ll not be forgotten,” said David Patterson, a professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer sciences at Berkeley who is now a distinguished engineer at Google and a Turing Award winner.

Berlekamp and his wife, Jennifer, supported various charitable causes and in 2013 founded the Elwyn and Jennifer Berlekamp Foundation, a small private operating foundation based in Oakland to support math and science outreach and education, in general, and combinatorial game theory, in particular.

Berlekamp was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American Mathematical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received various honors, including the Centennial Medal, the Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award and the R. W. Hamming Medal, all from IEEE, and was selected as Eta Kappa Nu’s “Outstanding Young Electrical Engineer” in 1971 and as a Putnam Fellow in 1961. He held more than a dozen patents, all of them now in the public domain.

His investments allowed him to reduce his teaching appointment to half time in 1982, and for the rest of his life, he concentrated on the theory of combinatorial games, the most simple example of which, Dots and Boxes, had fascinated him since first grade. He developed theories of the game that allowed him, or anyone, to always win.

Berlekamp playing games with Richard Nowakowski in 2015 following a symposium on combinatorial games, his life-long passion. (Photo courtesy of David Eisenbud)

His four-volume series, Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays,

written with John Conway and Richard Guy, delved into the math of Dots and Boxes and other popular games, including Amazons, a game played on a chess board with queens only.

Berlekamp playing the game Amazons with Georg Menz in 2015. Menz was that year’s Berlekamp Postdoctoral Fellow at MSRI. (Photo courtesy of David Eisenbud)

“In these books, he manages to describe deep mathematics in a way that is really enjoyable to the reader,” Karp said. “He presents it more as a narrative and explains it with real precision, but in a way that is actually charming. He was a wonderful author as well.”

One of his passions was the Asian game of Go, which he analyzed in the book Mathematical Go — one of the rare books on Go to be translated from English into Japanese, rather than vice versa. He focused on Go’s endgame, said mathematician and colleague David Eisenbud, and once challenged a top Japanese Go master to a series of endgames selected by Berlekamp. He beat the Go master in seven straight games, playing both sides of the board — white and black.

“It was mathematics against intuition, and mathematics won,” said Eisenbud, director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI). “It was an impressive demonstration of which he was very proud.”

While the mathematical analysis of games is still very popular, computers have taken the field in a different direction: they employ brute force or machine learning to beat Go and chess masters.

He is survived by his wife, Jennifer; daughters Persis Berlekamp, an art historian at the University of Chicago, and Bronwen Berlekamp O’Wril of Portland, Maine; and son David of Oakland.

Excerpts from the article Elwyn Berlekamp, game theorist and coding pioneer, dies at 78 By Robert Sanders, Media relations| April 18, 2019 in the Berkeley News. https://news.berkeley.edu/2019/04/18/elwyn-berlekamp-game-theorist-and-coding-pioneer-dies-at-78/?fbclid=IwAR2NUfFLgv7IAT-BNffgEKc3Lv8w8_XmJ2pQLPYW1vRmKPGhdpGydWAVPGQ

In a previous post I mentioned Elwyn Berlekamp (https://xpertchesslessons.wordpress.com/?s=Elwyn+Berlekamp).

These books left a lasting impression:

A nice blog post from: Computational Complexity and other fun stuff in math and computer science from Lance Fortnow and Bill Gasarch
https://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2019/04/elwyn-berlekamp-died-april-9-2019.html

GOOGLE: REPUBLICANS ARE NAZIS

This was found at the Drudge Report (http://www.drudgereport.com/). If you are wondering why I would go there so was Louisville Lefty when informed I checked Drudge every day. Thought he would have a heart attack, until told him I went there in order to see what the the enemy was doing. In lieu of having a heart attack, or stroke, he smiled.

Google listed “Nazism” as the ideology of the California Republican Party

By Alex Thompson May 31, 2018

“Less than a week before the California primary, Google listed “Nazism” as the ideology of the California Republican Party.”
https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/vbq38d/google-is-listing-nazism-as-the-first-ideology-of-the-california-republican-party

White nationalists are running for office in record numbers

https://www.msnbc.com/craig-melvin/watch/white-nationalists-are-running-for-office-in-record-numbers-1245616707632

Do you think maybe Google is onto something?

Weiqi (Go) Versus Chess

“Using a universally relevant metaphor, Zbigniew Brzezinski,

former National Security Adviser to US president Jimmy Carter,

wrote in The Grand Chessboard,

published in 1997 (http://www.takeoverworld.info/Grand_Chessboard.pdf): “Eurasia is the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played.” China’s New Silk Road strategy certainly integrates the importance of Eurasia but it also neutralizes the US pivot to Asia by enveloping it in a move which is broader both in space and in time: an approach inspired by the intelligence of Weiqi has outwitted the calculation of a chess player.”
“The chronicle by Japanese writer Kawabata Yasunari (1899-1972) of an intense intellectual duel, translated in English as The Master of Go,

contributed to the popularity of the game in the West, but Weiqi is a product of the Chinese civilization and spread over time in the educated circles of Northeast Asia. Kawabata, who viewed the Master as one of his favorite creations, knew that for China the game of “abundant spiritual powers encompassed the principles of nature and the universe of human life,” and that the Chinese had named it “the diversion of the immortals.”
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-gosset/weiqi-versus-chess_b_6974686.html)

Several years ago I contrasted the number of players in the US Chess Open with the number of players in the US Go Congress, posting the findings on the United States Chess Federation forum, and was excoriated for so doing, except for one person, Michael Mulford, who put the nattering nabobs of negativism to shame by congratulating me for “good work.” Basically, the numbers showed Chess losing players while Go had gained enough to have caught up with, and surpassed, Chess. It has continued to the point that if one thinks of it as a graph, with Chess in the top left hand corner; and Go in the bottom left hand corner, an “X” would appear.

I have spent some time recently cogitating about why this has come to pass. Certainly world Chess (FIDE) being administered as a criminal enterprise for at least a quarter of a century has not helped the cause of the Royal game. It has not helped that members of the USCF policy board have stated things like it being better to work within a corrupt system than to leave the corrupt system. See my post, Scott Parker Versus Allen Priest, of November 29, 2017 (https://xpertchesslessons.wordpress.com/?s=alan+priest)

Now that the bank account of FIDE, the world governing body of Chess, has been closed I do not foresee anything but further decline for the game of Chess. IM Malcolm Pein,

Mr. Everything tin British Chess, commented for Chessdom, “The statement from the FIDE Treasurer was alarming to say the least, but not totally unexpected. As the statement said, we had been warned. All legal means should be used to remove Ilyumzhinov

from office as soon as possible. Taking away his executive authority has not been good enough for the bank and FIDE will experience difficulty finding another institution to handle it’s accounts and this threatens the viability of the organisation. ((http://www.chessdom.com/trouble-for-chess-as-swiss-bank-account-closed/))

Although both Weiqi (Go in America) and Chess are board games there are major differences between the two. The following encapsulates the drastic difference between the two games:

R. Saxon, Member of a GO club in Tokyo (3k). USCF B rated at chess
Updated Mar 14 2017

From my experience, GO players are far friendlier and more polite than Chess players, who are prone to both trash talk and to gloating after a win. This is especially true for club players and younger players. Chess players may engage in gamesmanship to psych out their opponent. I’ve known quite a few superb Chess players that were real nut cases. More than just a few, actually.

That has not been my experience with GO players. GO players are almost always successful and well-adjusted outside of GO. GO players are willing to say with sincerity that they enjoyed a game that they just lost. I don’t recall a Chess player ever being so gracious.

The nature of the game is a good indicator of the personality of the players that like them. Chess is an attacking game in which you try to control the center. It’s very direct and may be over quickly if a player makes a mistake. The idea of a “Checkmate” is like a home run or a touchdown. It’s a sudden and dramatic moment that appeals to a particular type of person.

Chess appeals to people who like to attack and who savor the win over the process.

GO, on the hand, is a slower game which starts at the corners and edges and only gradually moves to the center. It’s extremely complicated, but in a subtle way. GO strategy is indirect. It’s a game of influence and efficiency more than a game of capture. The best players are those that know how to sacrifice pieces for territory elsewhere or to take the initiative. Making tradeoffs are key. There’s usually no “checkmate” type moment or fast victory.

GO is a game of patience and position. It appeals to very bright people who don’t expect to win quickly but who are willing to earn success one small step at a time. GO players enjoy the process as much as the win.
(https://www.quora.com/What-do-chess-players-think-of-Go-and-Go-players)

There are many Chess players involved with Go. Natasha Regan,

a Woman Chess International Master who has represented the English women’s team at both Chess and Go, says: “When I learnt Go I was fascinated. It has a similar mix of strategy and tactics that you find in Chess and, with just a few simple rules, Go uncovers a whole new world of possibilities and creativity. Chess players may also find that they can use their Chess experience to improve in Go very quickly. I highly recommend learning this ancient but ever new game!” (https://www.britgo.org/learners/chessgo.html)

Consider, for example, this by Mike Klein: “Many cultures have nationally popular strategy games, but rarely do top chess players “cross the streams” and take other games seriously. That is not the case with GMs Tiger Hillarp Persson and Alexander Morozevich,

who long ago claimed the top title in chess, and who both now take go somewhat seriously.” (https://www.chess.com/news/view/chess-go-chess-go-morozevich-beats-tiger-in-dizzying-match-2272) Check out Tiger’s website and you will see annotated Go games along with Chess games (https://tiger.bagofcats.net/). Chess Grandmaster Alexander Morozevich

plays in Go tournaments,

and holds Go classes.

(https://chess24.com/en/read/news/morozevich-on-go-computers-and-cheating)

AlphaGo has done for the game of Go in America what Bobby Fischer did for the game of Chess when he defeated the World Chess Champion, Boris Spassky, in 1972.

The number of people playing Go has increased dramatically in the past few years. After the world-wide release of a new movie about Go, The Surrounding Game,

the number of people playing Go will increase exponentially. In a very short period of time the game of Go will be unrivaled, leaving all other board games in its wake.

Sometime around 1980 a place named Gammons opened in the Peachtree Piedmont shopping center located in the section of Atlanta called Buckhead, the “high-end” district of Atlanta. In was a restaurant/bar, which contained tables with inlaid Backgammon boards.

I quit my job at a bookstore and began punching the proverbial time clock at Gammons, which closed at four am. The Backgammon craze burned brightly for a short period of time, as do most fads, such as putt-putt. Few remember the time when putt-putt was so popular it was on television, and the professional putters earned as much, if not more, that professional golfers.
(http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/24/magazine/putting-for-the-fences.html)

Although quite popular for centuries, Chess lost its luster after the human World Chess Champion, Garry Kasparov, was defeated by a computer program known as Deep Blue,

a product of the IBM corporation. The defeat by AlphaGo, a computer program from Google’s Deep Mind project, of first Lee Sedol,

one of the all-time great Go players, and then Ke Jie,

currently the top human Go player in the world, has, unlike Chess, been a tremendous boon for the ancient game of Go, which is riding a crest of popularity, while interest in Chess has waned.

I have wondered about the situation in the world considering the rise of China and the decline of the USA.

For example, consider these headlines:

China’s Rise, America’s Fall by Tyler Durden (https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-25/chinas-rise-americas-fall)

China’s rise didn’t have to mean America’s fall. Then came Trump. By Zachary Karabell(https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/11/15/chinas-rise-didnt-have-to-mean-americas-fall-then-came-trump/?utm_term=.59f66290ffff)

Is China’s Rise America’s Fall? by Glenn Luk (https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/01/03/is-chinas-rise-americas-fall/#41bd7a0d1e5f)

Also to be considered is the stark difference between the two games. It could be that the people of the planet are moving away from the brutal, war like, mindset of a war like game such as Chess and toward a more cerebral game such as Go.

“While in chess or in Chinese chess (xiangqi)

http://georgiachessnews.com/2018/01/09/why-you-need-to-learn-xiangqi-for-playing-better-chess/

the pieces with a certain preordained constraint of movement are on the board when the game begins, the grid is empty at the opening of the Weiqi game. During a chess game, one subtracts pieces; in Weiqi, one adds stones to the surface of the board. In the Classic of Weiqi, the author remarks that “since ancient times, one has never seen two identical Weiqi games.”

“In Written in a Dream, the polymath and statesman Ouyang Xiu (1007-1072), a magister ludi, captures the depth and mystery of Weiqi: “The Weiqi game comes to an end, one is unaware that in the meantime the world has changed.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-gosset/weiqi-versus-chess_b_6974686.html