I am suspicious.
On March 31 the author of the Rybka program, Vasik Rajlich, and his family moved from Warsaw, Poland to a new appartment in Budapest, Hungary. The next day, in spite of the bustle of moving boxes and setting up phone and Internet connections Vas, kindly agreed to the following interview, which had been planned some months ago.
So ... April 1.
Our algorithm works in an iterative manner – it first forms a hypothesis, and then it confirms or alters that hypothesis over a number of passes using a non-deterministic Turing Machine program running across the clusters.
A "Turing Machine program"? Really? (And there are other awfully suspicious-looking things in that paragraph. Strategy stealing, in a highly asymmetrical chess position?)
Not anywhere near conclusive, but pretty strongly suggestive. I think this is a hoax.
non-deterministic Turing Machine program
You know, you can't actually build one of these, at least not without exponentially growing resources...
Edit: it was unfortunately a prank. I definitely checked the date of the article (which is dated Apr. 2), before posting on it. Kind of mean to make an April Fool's prank after April Fool's. I didn't realize I'd have a chance to practice what I preach so soon.
I guess I need to just say oops.
Original Post:
Chess analyst Vasik Rajlich had some big news today: solving the King’s Gambit.
I know that this doesn’t add much new to the complexity theory aspects of games like chess, but I would say it’s a beautiful result, very much like the recent improvement on the complexity of matrix multiplication, and it certainly emphasizes the role computation plays as the King’s Gambit is a pretty popular, classical opening. By most any human standard it’s a respectable opening, and yet we can conclusively say it is unequivocally bad for White assuming two rational players.
I wrote up a short blurb about it at my blog.