The two URLs I provided don't convince you that this isn't a fad? Of all the SWEs I know, every single one who previously used Eclipse, Atom, or Sublime is now using VSCode. Some of my Emacs & Vim friends have switched, too. I can't imagine what would change this trend in the next 5-10 years. Perhaps a new editor with an integrated LLM coding assistant that's FAR ahead of all competitors? Except VSCode is currently leading there, too.
Nice! Years ago I added home row chording to a simple text editor I was writing. It worked so well that I wondered why it's not common practice. You should write more about your project! :)
For time management, the rough approach is to allocate a fixed % of the remaining time and increase or reduce it, mostly depending on the stability of the evaluation with increasing search depth.
Games are played on the same computer, with only one engine analyzing at a time.
The graph shows each engine's evaluation of the position for each move in the game. The red line is from a 3rd engine "observing" the game.
Capablanca preferred playing quiet, positional chess, often patiently nursing tiny endgame advantages into a win. It's generally much easier to play accurately in simple endgames than complex middlegames, and that's a big factor in his low ACPL score. (I don't mean to take anything away from him - he was probably the best ever at that style of play.)
Just wanted to say thanks for many years of fantastic work on both Stockfish and Leela. The computer chess community owes you a huge debt of gratitude!
Possibly Craig Silverstein, but my guess is Urs Hölzle. He was Google's first VP of engineering and a huge advocate for everything mentioned in the article: "design docs, audited code reviews, early design reviews, readability reviews, resisting introduction of new languages, unit testing and code coverage, profiling and performance testing".
Early Google had more than its fair share of genius engineers with giant egos. Urs was brilliant and tough - a perfect combination for keeping everybody in check and shaping the engineering culture.
There was a recent thread about challenging projects every programmer should try, and I think writing a chess engine would be a nice addition to that list. Chess programming is a refreshing change from modern software development, because you don't need any complicated frameworks or libraries, just a basic grasp of the minimax algorithm for searching a game tree. I have fond memories of writing an engine as a fresh college grad - it was my first "big" project and I made every mistake imaginable, but it was great fun and sharpened my coding skills immensely. It's exhilarating to play against your own program and then try to improve it. Highly recommended!
The chess channels you're visiting are grossly overstating Alpha Zero's impact. AFAICT, it hasn't made any impact on opening theory at all. AZ's strength is in the middlegame, where it appears to be slightly better than traditional engines (like Stockfish) at finding material sacrifices for long term piece activity and/or mating attacks.
One use case I haven't seen mentioned is note-taking. Apple Pencil is a truly amazing device. I use it at work all the time, especially in meetings. It's quieter than typing and because I don't have my laptop open, I'm much less likely to get distracted by slack, email, HN, etc. It's also slower typing, but that may be a good thing because it forces me to mentally organize/consolidate whatever I'm writing.
You definitely can't force a draw against a higher rated player, but you can make one more likely by choosing quiet openings and simplifying in the middlegame. But it's often tricky to pull this off. If you make too many second-best moves in pursuit of simplification, you'll drift into a position that's both simple and bad. :)
Svidler and Grischuk at chess24.com are fantastic, but they're both world class players and beginners will find their commentary and analysis difficult to follow. I'd recommend chess.com - Danny Rensch and Robert Hess are a bit more accessible.
I have a similar Google lunch story. A guy sat down, introduced himself as Rob, and told me it was his first day at Google. We had a nice chat, and later I told my office mate that the new guy seemed really smart. He laughed and told me I'd just had lunch with Rob Pike. :)