Chess (#659)

There’s a little hiatus in top quality human events. London is gearing up for the Chess Classic, starting on Wednesday. The premier features Anand, Carlsen, Kramnik, Nakamura and England’s four highest-rated in Adams, Short, McShane and Howell. Concurrently there will be an open where 11 GMs have guaranteed participation.

Meanwhile, 17-year-old S P Sethuraman logged his third and final GM norm and thus, claimed the GM title, by winning a tournament in Poland with 7 points scored from 9 rounds. Sethuraman, who is a former world sub-junior (U-16) champion becomes India’s youngest GM at this instant.

The Russian women’s super championship was won by Alisa Galliamova, who retains the title she took in 2009. It was a very exciting event with a triple-tie between Galliamova, Natalia Pogonina and Tatiana Kosintseva, all with 7/11. Kosintseva was eliminated on a poor tibebreak score and Galliamova beat Pogonina in a blitz playoff.

However, while this was unmatched for excitement, there was a higher-quality event on simultaneously — arguably one of the strongest ever played. The 30th edition of the Dutch Computer Chess Championship had no hardware restrictions and there were three engines with unbelievable specs.

Jonny, was running on a remote cluster of 800 Intel i7 cores off programmer Johannes Zwangzer’s university’s hardware at Beyreuth. Deep Sjeng, programmed by Gian-Carlo Pascutto of Belgium, runs on a 256 cluster of 32 x 8 AMD Opterons, each at 2.4 GHz. The reigning champion, Rybka initially started on a cluster of 248 Intel i7 cores at 2.93 GHz, and later upgraded to 260 i7 cores.

By chess programmer’s rule of thumb, a doubling of computing speed means a gain of 50-70 Elo. Despite the hardware superiority, Jonny is a much weaker program and Rybka was the hot favourite. Vasik Rajlich's “fish” didn’t disappoint her fans as she retained her title with a 8.5 /9 result. Spike, Deep Sjeng and Hiarcs tied for second with 6 each. As one would expect, the play was of outstanding quality, if slightly weird to human eyes.

In positional terms, the diagram, BLACK TO PLAY, (Jonny Vs Rybka Lieden 2010) features a sacrifice that Petrosian or Nimzowitz would have approved. White has placed the rook a2 in a bizarre spot. Now 15. – a4! Black intends to storm the king-side The point of this sac will become evident 8 moves later.

16.Nxa4 Nh5 17.Kh2 e5 18.dxe5 Bxe5 19.Nf3 f4 20.gxf4 Bxf4+ 21.Bxf4 Nxf4 22.Nc3 Qe6 23.Ng1 Ra5! This is the point. 24.Qe4 Re5! 25.Qxb7 Rh5 26. Qe4 Rxh3+! 27.Nxh3 Qxh3+ 28.Kg1 Rf5! The extra rook a2 is irrelevant. 29.Rd5 Nxd5 30.Qe8+ Kg7 31.Qd7+ Kh6 32.Qxf5 Qxf5 33.cxd5 Qg5+ 34.Kh2 Qd2 (0-1). Black will just push the h-pawn home while white simply can’t disentangle his pieces.

Devangshu Datta is an internationally-rated chess and correspondence chess player