GoKawiil
Tech News
Modern chess engines can defeat the world's best grandmasters, but researchers note they still cannot converge on one definitive, infallible way to play the game. Rather than making chess feel 'solved' or stale, these AI systems are reportedly revealing new strategic ideas and approaches to the game.
A new visual archive titled Chess Atlas catalogs historic chess sets spanning nearly 1,300 years, from the abstract 7th-century Afrasiab chessmen of Samarkand to Bauhaus and Surrealist-era sets by artists like Man Ray and Max Ernst. The collection groups pieces by material and era, covering ivory sets such as the Lewis Chessmen and Vizagapatam exports, and wooden sets including the Selenus, Régence, and the now-standard 1849 Staunton design.
A developer built an open-source model that mimics TypeSafe's proprietary Jev system, which scores a variable list of text options in a single pass rather than generating answers word-by-word. The project, released without official documentation from TypeSafe, includes working demos where the same attention-based scoring head selects Doom combat moves and chess moves from image inputs, along with checkpoints, code and a rendering pipeline to visualize decision traces.
A 15.5 GB file containing over 7.3 million Chess.com user records surfaced for free on two data-leak forums, with no ransom attached. Analysis of the archive found genuine, recent Chess.com data including emails, usernames, ratings, and subscription status, but no passwords or payment details, pointing toward large-scale scraping rather than a server intrusion.
The Stockfish team has released version 19 of its open-source chess engine, claiming an Elo gain of up to 44 points over version 18 and a win rate more than three times its loss rate in test matches. The update introduces a new SFNNv16 neural network architecture, retires a secondary network added in version 16.1, and switches to universal binaries that auto-detect CPU features instead of requiring manual selection between AVX2, AVX-512 and similar builds. The release also adds native support for RISC-V and LoongArch processors.
Elon Musk argued on X that chess has only a small number of meaningful moves and predicted the game would eventually be fully solved by computers, similar to checkers. Chess.com's official account pushed back with a blunt 'skill issue' reply, prompting a back-and-forth in which Musk doubled down and speculated that a future superintelligence could compress and solve the game in ways humans can't grasp.
Chess.com quietly launched a free educational poker platform called Gambit in May, letting players learn poker and build an Elo-style rating without real-money stakes. The company says it's now developing similar rating systems for other classic games like go, backgammon, and mahjong, using AI-assisted coding to build these platforms faster with smaller teams.
Chess.com has launched Gambit, a free-to-play online poker site built to teach the game without real-money betting, following a beta test that started in May. The site mirrors Chess.com's design, including bot opponents, tournaments, review tools and lesson modes, plus its own rating system to keep gameplay engaging. The company says more companion games beyond poker are planned.