| Vasik Rajlich | |
|---|---|
 Rajlich in 2006 | |
| Born | 19 March 1971 Cleveland, Ohio, U.S. |
| Title | International Master (2003) |
| FIDE rating | 2303 (January 2008) |
| Peak rating | 2384 (January 2002) |
| Citizenship |
|
| Alma mater | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Known for | Rybka |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 1 |
Vasik Rajlich (born 19 March 1971) is an International Master in chess and the author of Rybka, [1] previously one of the strongest chess playing programs in the world. [2]
Rajlich is a dual Czechoslovakian-American citizen by birth; he was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to Czech parents, at that time graduate students, but grew up in Prague. His father was Czech computer scientist Vaclav Rajlich. [3] He later spent years in the United States as a student, graduating from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). [4]
He married Iweta Radziewicz on 19 August 2006. Iweta, who is also an International Master in chess, [1] helps him with the development of Rybka as its tester. [5] In April 2012, the couple was living in Budapest, Hungary, and had one child, a son. [5] [6]
In April 2012, Rajlich participated in an April Fools' Day prank on ChessBase [7] —claiming by using Rybka he had proven to a "99.99999999% certainty" that the accepted King's Gambit is a draw for White, but only after 3. Be2. [6] Rajlich later admitted on ChessBase, that, "we're still probably a good 25 or so orders of magnitude away from being able to solve something like the King's Gambit. If processing power doubles every 18 months for the next century, we'll have the resources to do this around the year 2120, plus or minus a few decades". [8]
Rajlich's handle on the Internet Chess Club is "vrajlich". [9]
On 28 June 2011, the International Computer Games Association (ICGA) determined that Rajlich had plagiarized two other chess software programs: Crafty and Fruit. [10] The ICGA sanction for Vasik Rajlich and Rybka was the disqualification from the World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC) of 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010. [11] Vasik Rajlich is banned for life from competing in the WCCC or any other event organized by or sanctioned by the ICGA. [12] Rajlich had already responded to these charges with an e-mail to David Levy, president of the ICGA, in which he stated:
Rybka “does not include game-playing code written by others”, aside from standard exceptions which wouldn’t count as ‘game-playing’. [...] The vague phrase “derived from game-playing code written by others” also does not in my view apply to Rybka [13]
| International | |
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| National | |
The Computer Olympiad is a multi-games event in which computer programs compete against each other. For many games, the Computer Olympiads are an opportunity to claim the "world's best computer player" title. First contested in 1989, the majority of the games are board games but other games such as bridge take place as well. In 2010, several puzzles were included in the competition.
Computer chess includes both hardware and software capable of playing chess. Computer chess provides opportunities for players to practice even in the absence of human opponents, and also provides opportunities for analysis, entertainment and training. Computer chess applications that play at the level of a chess grandmaster or higher are available on hardware from supercomputers to smart phones. Standalone chess-playing machines are also available. Stockfish, Leela Chess Zero, GNU Chess, Fruit, and other free open source applications are available for various platforms.
ChessBase is a German company that develops and sells chess software, maintains a chess news site, and operates an internet chess server for online chess. Founded in 1986, it maintains and sells large-scale databases containing the moves of recorded chess games. The databases contain data from prior games and provide engine analyses of games, while endgame tablebases offer optimal play in some endgames.
The King's Gambit is a chess opening that begins with the moves:
In computer chess, a chess engine is a computer program that analyzes chess or chess variant positions, and generates a move or list of moves that it regards as strongest.
HIARCS is a proprietary UCI chess engine developed by Mark Uniacke. Its name is an acronym standing for higher intelligence auto-response chess system. Because Hiarcs is written portable in C, it is available on multiple platforms such as Pocket PC, Palm OS, PDAs, iOS, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.
David Neil Laurence Levy is an International Master of chess who plays for Scotland, and a businessman. He is noted for his involvement with computer chess and artificial intelligence, and as the founder of the Computer Olympiads and the Mind Sports Olympiads. He has written more than 40 books on chess and computers.
World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC) is an event held periodically since 1974 where computer chess engines compete against each other. The event is organized by the International Computer Games Association. It is often held in conjunction with the World Computer Speed Chess Championship and the Computer Olympiad, a collection of computer tournaments for other board games. Instead of using engine protocols, the games are played on physical boards by human operators.
Fritz is a German chess program originally developed for Chessbase by Frans Morsch based on his Quest program, ported to DOS, and then Windows by Mathias Feist. With version 13, Morsch retired, and his engine was first replaced by Gyula Horvath's Pandix, and then with Fritz 15, Vasik Rajlich's Rybka.
Advanced chess is a form of chess in which each human player uses a computer chess program to explore the possible results of candidate moves. Despite this computer assistance, it is the human player who controls and decides the game.
Game 6 of the Deep Blue–Kasparov rematch, played in New York City on May 11, 1997 and starting at 3:00 p.m. EDT, was the last chess game in the 1997 rematch of Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov.
Zappa, Zap!Chess or Zappa Mexico, is a UCI chess engine written by Anthony Cozzie, a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The program emphasizes sound search and a good use of multiple processors. Earlier versions of Zappa are free and the current version is available at Shredder Computer Chess.
Fruit is a chess engine developed by Fabien Letouzey. In the SSDF rating list released on November 24, 2006, Fruit version 2.2.1 had a rating of 2842. In the CEGT rating list released on January 24, 2007, Fruit version 2.2.1 had a rating of 2776.
Rybka is a computer chess engine designed by International Master Vasik Rajlich. Around 2011, Rybka was one of the top-rated engines on chess engine rating lists and won many computer chess tournaments.
Ikarus is a computer chess program created by brothers Munjong and Muntsin Kolss.
Iweta Rajlich is a Polish chess International Master and Woman Grandmaster, multiple winner of Women Chess Championships of Poland. She married Vasik Rajlich, the author of Rybka, on 19 August 2006. Iweta is the tester for the program. The couple presently live in Warsaw, Poland.
Anti-computer tactics are methods used by humans to try to beat computer opponents at various games, most typically board games such as chess and Arimaa. They are most associated with competitions against computer AIs that are playing to their utmost to win, rather than AIs merely programmed to be an interesting challenge that can be given intentional weaknesses and quirks by the programmer. Such tactics are most associated with the era when AIs searched a game tree with an evaluation function looking for promising moves, often with Alpha–beta pruning or other minimax algorithms used to narrow the search. Against such algorithms, a common tactic is to play conservatively aiming for a long-term advantage. The theory is that this advantage will manifest slowly enough that the computer is unable to notice in its search, and the computer won't play around the threat correctly. This may result in, for example, a subtle advantage that eventually turns into a winning chess endgame with a passed pawn.
Events in chess in 1971;
Don Dailey was an American researcher in computer chess and a game programmer. Along with collaborator Larry Kaufman, he was the author of the chess engine Komodo. Dailey started chess programming in the 1980s, and was the author and co-author of multiple commercial as well as academic chess programs. He has been an active poster in computer chess forums and computer Go newsgroups. He was raised as a Jehovah's Witness and served in recent years as an elder in the church of Roanoke.
