Potpourri

Here's a list of miscellaneous things I have come across recently that make interesting reading. 

The Last of a Veteran Chess Player is another one of Batgirl's great articles on The Turk at Chessdotcom.

Alumnus turned passion for chess into an international volunteer organization - With the support of her IB coordinator and a local librarian, Yuanling Yuan, a 2012 IB Diploma graduate from Victoria Park Collegiate Institute, North York, Canada, turned her Creativity, Action, Service (CAS) project into an international volunteer organization called Chess in the Library. The group brings together new and veteran chess players alike in public libraries throughout the U.S. and Canada...Read more

National Master Jude Acers and Hurricane Katrina...Read about his rescue.

All-Season Play for a Chess Crew in Harlem - On a cold evening, darkness enveloped a lonely street in Harlem, but for the glow of fluorescent lights cascading from a storefront. Inside, there were sounds reminiscent of combat. Hands slammed on time clocks in a vigorous percussion, accompanied by the taunts of opponents...Read more

The heart of Hastings: in praise of English chess veteran Bernard Cafferty - a regular visitor to the Hastings Chess Congress, still plays sparkling games, such as this recent victory from the ECF County Championship...Read more.

The State of Black Chess in America - An old article from 2012 appearing in The Chess Drum. 

Engines…My personal preference for engine rating lists is the CEGT 40/120 list because it uses a longer time control for the games which is more typical for what one would use for correspondence play. Also, I tend to disregard the ratings because I am more interested in how the top engines score against each other. 
     I have been using mostly Komodo 8 for the last couple of tournaments on LSS and it seems to me that it is not doing as well as Stockfish 6 did even though Komodo 8 has a higher rating.
     The Superfinal of Thoresen Computer Engine Competition finished in 2014 saw SF defeating Komodo 7 by a score of 35.5 -28.5 even though SF lost to Komodo 6 the previous season. On the current 40/120 list Stockfish 6 has a score against Komodo 8 of +12 -8 =30.
     In recent tournaments on LSS where I have been making heavy use of Komodo 8 my record is +6 -6 =24, but in the current tournament in which I am playing, out of 6 games, I am not happy with my positions in 4 of them. All in all, I prefer Stockfish 6.  Obviously, if SF and Komodo disagree on a move I am not in a position to say which of the two moves are better, but to my weak eye, it seems that often SF's moves "look" better and make more sense. But, who am I to judge?  They both have hundreds of rating points on me.
     If anyone is interested in running their own engine tournament then Chess Horizons has a set of instructions on how to do it. Most people probably won't be very interested though because, as the site points out, running a computer tournament is a long task that will tie up your computer for days. 

Math is Art – How Stockfish works. This is a 3rd year university paper written by a student who was working on a Machine Learning-based Braille translator research project.