Carlsen beats the World

Magnus Carlsen beat The World, led by Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Hikaru Nakamura and Judit Polgar, in the G-Star RAW World Chess Challenge on Friday in New York. After reaching a positionally difficult position the World Team put up a stiff resistance but, in his aggressive but controlled style, Magnus emerged the winner in 44 moves and 2.5 hours. The G-Star RAW World Chess Challenge took place yesterday at the Penthouse of the Cooper Star Hotel in New York City, as part of G-Star’s global Fall/Winter advertising campaign. Carlsen played in a room with a physical chess set and a clock, and a butler entered the moves played by The World on the board.

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Chess and quantum physics: Amazing

The unpredictable nature of quantum physics has been mimicked by Queen's University computer scientists to invent a new version of chess. In the quantum chess computer game created by undergraduate computer science student Alice Wismath, a piece that should be a knight could simultaneously also be a queen, a pawn or something else. The player doesn't know what the second state might be or which of the two states the piece will choose when it is moved. "It was very weird," said Ernesto Posse, a Queen's postdoctoral researcher who took part in a recent "quantum chess" tournament. "You only know what a piece really is once you touch the piece. Basically, planning ahead is impossible." Read the full article here.

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