A machine has bested us at yet another intellectually challenging game. It shows artificial intelligence is progressing rapidly, but it doesn’t mean humans are redundant quite yet.
This October, the Planet Hollywood Casino in Las Vegas is hosting a chess tournament with the largest prize fund in the game’s history. The competition is unambiguously called Millionaire Chess. More than…
The death of a chess player in the middle of a match at the world’s most prestigious competition may have shocked those who view the game as a relaxing pastime. Kurt Meier, 67, collapsed during his final…
Garry Kasparov’s unsuccessful campaign for the presidency of chess’ governing body, the Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE), has once again seen chess became an arena for political and ideological…
The world is certainly not short of pundits claiming to have a grasp on where the economy is heading or what the future holds for Ukraine. But history reminds us how poor humans are at making predictions…
Take a set of chess pieces and throw them all away except for one knight. Place the knight on any one of the 64 squares of a chess board. Can you make 63 legal moves so that you visit every square on the…
For his precocity, newly crowned World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen was named “The Mozart of chess”. For his tenacity and comfort with long games he was dubbed “The Nadal of chess”. More prosaically…
After six games, the 12-game World Chess Championship Match is now led, 4 games to 2, by 22-year-old Magnus Carlsen. This is a very important advantage, but reigning champion Viswanathan Anand is no stranger…
In the spirit of the current world championship bout between Norwegian grandmaster Magnus Carlsen and Indian grandmaster Viswanathan Anand, we should seriously consider the role of chess in how young students…
In a previous article in The Conversation, I presented the Norwegian chess prodigy Magnus Carlsen. He obtained the [grandmaster](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmaster_(chess%29) title at the age of…
We’ve all heard it before (usually accompanied by repeating hours of music scales or sports drills over and over): Practice makes perfect. But your music teachers and sports coaches were wrong - well…