Russia puts faith in AI computer training to steal crown at world chess championship

RUSSIA is hoping a closely guarded supercomputer will help its challenger snatch back the world chess title – a prize that president Vladimir Putin has coveted for almost 15 years.

Ian Nepomniachtchi, the pony-tailed Russian Grandmaster, today begins a month-long bid to unseat Norway’s Magnus Carlsen – who has dominated the game for a decade – in a series of matches at the £1.6million World Chess Championship in Dubai.

While Mr Carlsen, 30, has prepared with super-fast matches watched by fans online, Mr Nepomniachtchi – known as Nepo – has turned to an artificial intelligence engine called “Zhores” that can evaluate tens of millions of chess positions per second.

Nepo, 31, has told the media that working with the computer, among the most powerful in Russia and housed at the Skolkovo tech institute in Moscow, has made him more confident of his analysis.

While AI training has become the norm among top Grandmasters as they search for chinks in their opponent’s armour, Zhores is understood to have a larger capacity than anything available to Carlsen, who has been known to use Stockfish, a freely available opensource chess engine.

Mr Carlsen has played down the advantage offered by the Russian artificial intelligence algorithm, saying ahead of the first match: “My biggest advantage is that I am better at chess.”

For 60 years the Soviet Union and then Russia held an iron grip over the world chess title, punctured only by a brief interruption from the American Bobby Fischer.

Yet, after the crown was lost in 2007, Russia has repeatedly failed to regain its status as the game’s premier superpower. Mr Putin has a well-documented interest in his nation’s performance in chess. He has met the Russian team on several occasions, most notably before the 2018 Chess Olympiad in Georgia when he turned up to give a pep talk to the players. Russia finished third.

Russia dominates FIDE, the game’s world governing body and organiser of the title match. The organisation has had a Russian president since 1995 and the current incumbent Arkady Dvorkovich, is a former deputy prime minister.

Mr Dvorkovich is also chairman of the Skolkovo Foundation, but FIDE has denied any involvement in Nepo’s use of Zhores.

Nepo will not be playing under the Russian flag at the championship, as the country is serving a four-year World Anti-doping Agency ban from all international sports. There is no suggestion that there is a drugs problem in chess.