Dev.SN

World Chess Champion Launches App

posted by Dopefish on Thursday February 27 2014, @02:30PM   
from the bobby-fischer-lives-on dept.

andrew writes "Magnus Carlsen, arguably the best chess player ever, has made a new chess app available on iTunes. PlayMagnus claims to be able to mimic the play of Magnus at different ages from age 5 to his current world championship strength at 23 years old. This is made possible by use of a customized chess engine built on thousands of different positions from his games.

From Reuters article:

So what is it like for Carlsen to play against his younger self?

"He is really tricky," the champion said. "Even Magnus at 11 years old was a very gifted tactician. A while ago I played as a test Magnus (aged) 14. I outplayed him at some point positionally. And just boom, boom, he tricked me tactically.

"But he makes mistakes as well, so I just have to be patient."

Magnus also plans to eventually add the functionality of on-line chess games against other app users, a service as old as the Internet, putting his app in direct competition with long established chess servers like FICS and ICC."

• Re:How this game engine different from others (Score: 3, Interesting) by wonkey_monkey on Friday February 28 2014, @04:43AM

  by wonkey_monkey (279) on Friday February 28 2014, @04:43AM (#8378)

  There are 7^64 possible chess positions

  There aren't. For starters there are black and white pieces, which makes the naive figure 13^64. Then there can only ever be exactly one black king and one white king, a player's pawns can never be on his back row, and (pawns+promoted pieces)=8, and so on. A lot of double checkmates are ruled out, 10 bishops of one colour can never all be on the same colour square, etc, etc.

  Whether or not that works out to more than 7^64 is left as an exercise for the reader.

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