| The little boy on the right grew up to be José Raúl Capablanca–playboy, celebrity, and (computers now tell us) the best chess player our planet ever saw, says ChessBase News.
How do you compare chessplayers who never played against one another? Matej Guid and Ivan Bratko used the open-source program Crafty to analyze games played over the course of more than 100 years by 14 World Champions. They scored players move-by-move, comparing each move played against the “best” move Crafty could find with a search depth of up to 12 “plies.” (Read their scholarly article for the whole story.) |
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It’s a fascinating example of the way scientists crack problems that most people assumed would forever remain undecidable.
My thanks to Frank Wilczek for emailing me this story!
The World Chess Network has lots more photos and stories from Capablanca’s life.