Chess

Australia takes the Netherlands to the wire in Samarkand

Olympiad round three: Anish Giri had to squeeze water from stone in an endgame against GM Bobby Cheng to keep the Dutch from a 2–2 tie. Elsewhere the seeding meant less than usual — Singapore (50th) beat Norway (21st) 2½–1½, and Kyrgyzstan (79th) did the same to Brazil (31st).

In the women's event Koneru Humpy beat Stavroula Tsolakidou as India put away Greece 3½–½ — payback for the Global Chess League final. Argentina (38th) took down Ukraine (6th) 3–1.

Chess.com — Olympiad round 3

Maths

Gowers explains why he didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter

The letter warns that AI will produce mathematical results faster than the field can absorb them, eroding the ground where new mathematicians are made. Tim Gowers agrees with the worry but not the framing: he argues problem-solving and conceptual understanding sit on a spectrum rather than a hierarchy, and that mathematicians legitimately weight them differently.

His actual fear is narrower and sharper — that young people stop choosing maths once solving problems is no longer the thing that pulls them in. His conclusion is that the fixable part is institutional structure and motivation, not the pace of the technology.

Gowers’s Weblog

AI & Software

A model that rewrites its own weights instead of filling its context

A proposal for “infinite-parameter” LLMs: rather than freezing weights and shovelling everything into the prompt, a small hypernetwork turns runtime data into a low-rank modulation of a shared base network, generated on the fly. A Bayesian belief over the generator’s latent code keeps updating through a session, so the weights drift as the conversation does.

The claimed payoff is that it frees the context window entirely, persists across turns, and holds a constant memory footprint — with a proposed protocol for testing it against retrieval and in-context baselines. Still a proposal, not a result.

arXiv 2609.18842

Embedded

Fujitsu ships MONAKA: 144 Arm cores, cache on its own die

The 2nm ARMv9 part is formally launched. The interesting structural choice is the split: cores on 2nm, the entire cache and I/O on a separate 5nm die stacked underneath, running to 3.8 GHz and 8800 MT/s memory. SVE2 plus dedicated matrix instructions get Fujitsu to a claim of twice the inference throughput of other CPUs.

SKUs are 144 cores at 2.1 GHz air-cooled or 2.9 GHz liquid, twelve RDIMMs per socket, PCIe Gen6. Production starts November; GCC 15 support was upstreamed before the announcement, which is the part that suggests they mean it.

Phoronix

Craft

A 2014 stopgap with 20 million installs gets retired by its author

Jake Smith wrote a 174-line PHP shim during an AOL CMS migration from 5.2 to 5.3 — a polyfill for a deprecated extension, meant to last months. Composer was just taking off, sharing was easy, and it ended up at nearly 20 million Packagist installs plus WordPress plugins and Linux distros.

He’s deprecating it publicly rather than quietly: naming a bug where trailing slashes corrupt file paths, pointing at PHP 8.5’s native URI extension, and explicitly refusing to hand it to a volunteer maintainer because “a widely installed package with a new maintainer nobody downstream has vetted is exactly what attackers look for.”

jakeasmith.com

Game Design

Cargo ships are back on the wind — and the software is the hard part

Over 100 large merchant ships now carry modern wind propulsion — rotor sails, rigid wings, suction rigs — totalling more than 5 million deadweight tons. Retrofits save single to low-double-digit percentages of fuel; purpose-built hulls do better.

The part worth stealing: none of it works standalone. Weather-routing software decides where the ship goes to find wind without blowing the schedule, and Norway’s WINTEGRATE programme treats sails, engines, batteries and voyage planning as one system. That trade — detour for lift, against a clock — is a whole game loop sitting there.

gCaptain

Astronomy

Sakurai’s Object: a dead star reignites on a human timescale

Found by amateur astronomer Yukio Sakurai in 1996, the object has undergone a Very Late Thermal Pulse — a helium flash that reheated a cooling white dwarf. Over thirty years it has brightened sixfold and turned into a Wolf–Rayet-type star.

Stellar evolution normally hides behind millions of years. This one is running fast enough to watch, which makes it a rare direct test of the models rather than an inference from a population.

Universe Today

Film Music

Benstead takes Guy Ritchie; Bertelmann on Verity; Holt does Shaun the Sheep

Chris Benstead is scoring Ritchie’s thriller Wife and Dog — their fourth or so collaboration and the kind of pairing that usually produces something with more shape than the genre requires. Volker Bertelmann (Oscar winner for All Quiet) takes Verity.

And Natalie Holt — Loki, Obi-Wan — has written Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom, which on paper is the most fun assignment of the week: a dialogue-free film where the score does all the narrative work.

Film Music Reporter — Benstead · Shaun the Sheep · Verity

Musicals

Carousel is playing eight minutes’ walk from the house

A Pyrmont-local one: Carousel runs at the Foundry Theatre, Pyrmont, 15–17 October — short season, so tickets are worth looking at now rather than later.

Also on the board: SIX opens at Theatre Royal on 1 October in its 80-minute concert format; My Fair Lady is at the Opera House through to 31 October; How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying closes at the Hayes on 27 September; and Beetlejuice hits the Capitol from 21 November.

BroadwayWorld Sydney

Sydney

Sandbox Festival takes over White Bay Power Station on Saturday

Saturday 19 September, 2pm to 11pm, at White Bay Power Station — close enough to Pyrmont to matter for the walk home, and it stacks on top of an already heavy day: NRL semi at Allianz (7:50pm), the Everest carnival’s Surf to Turf at Randwick, and Jason Derulo at Sydney Olympic Park.

Tonight is the AFL preliminary final, Swans v Fremantle at the SCG, first bounce 7:40pm. Sunday is quieter: Cabramatta Moon Festival and the Kings at Olympic Park.

Transport NSW — events