Chess

Germany takes down the top seed in Samarkand

Round 5 produced the Olympiad’s first real upset: Germany beat the top-seeded USA 2.5–1.5, decided by Frederik Svane’s win over Hans Niemann. Uzbekistan crushed Hungary 4–0 and India beat the Netherlands 3–1 — Praggnanandhaa grinding down Giri — leaving those three on a perfect 10/10 match points with five teams a point back.

In the women’s section Poland beat defending champion India, their second win over them across recent Olympiads. Poland, China, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan are all 5–0.

Chess.com — Olympiad Round 5

Software

A 286 emulator that checks its own arithmetic against the CPU it’s running on

Chris Wellons has shipped Stars!VM: the 1995 Win16 4X game Stars! packaged as a single native executable, no DOSBox, no Wine. Inside is a hand-written 80286 emulator with a Win16→Win32 bridge that marshals handles across the architecture gap, plus 4K scaling and modern file dialogs bolted onto a thirty-year-old binary.

Two details stand out. The emulator borrows the host’s x87 unit for floating point and validates the result by differential fuzzing against the real CPU — the discrepancies are the test suite. And rather than build a JIT, he profiles, finds the hot 286 routines, and swaps them for native C implementations: about 2× on turn generation for a fraction of the complexity. Custom LZ gets the 3 MB original down to ~1.5 MB.

null program — A custom virtual machine for Stars!

Maths & AI

Po-Shen Loh: “fine to drive faster than you can run — not faster than you can steer”

A guest post on Terence Tao’s blog answers the question mathematicians keep being asked. Loh’s argument is not that machines can’t prove things; it’s that capability multiplies the number of control points that need a competent human at them, and there will never be enough such people. His uncomfortable observation: “There are zero examples of any intelligent species which is vastly more capable than another species, yet surrenders decision-making control over its own future to the less-capable species.”

It sits alongside a run of posts from Tao this week on benchmarks, the Fields medallists’ letter, and what mathematics is for beyond proof.

What’s new — Why do we need human mathematicians anymore?

AI & Software

Every frontier model loses to a beginner doing a photon rush

Ben Swerdlow ran 171 round-robin StarCraft: Brood War matches between frontier models at varying effort levels, tracking win rate, APM and cost per game. Codex Astra took 100% at top effort; Claude Fable genuinely tried to play — economy first, then tech — while Grok variants burned reasoning tokens between actions and never held a control loop.

The honest line in the report is the useful one: nobody played above beginner level, and “a beginner playing photon rush would win every single one of these games.” The winning strategy was harassment, not macro: send probes across the map and break the opponent’s attention. A benchmark whose value is in the failure modes it exposes rather than the leaderboard.

Brood War Bench

Astronomy

Cold plasma as a Martian fuel depot

MIT PhD candidate Lanie McKinney, in Carmen Guerra-Garcia’s Aerospace Plasma Group, is running Martian CO₂ through a nanosecond repetitively pulsed dielectric barrier discharge reactor paired with an oxygen-selective membrane. Out comes oxygen and carbon monoxide — breathable air and propellant feedstock, made on site rather than hauled from Earth.

The conversion is the easy half. Separating the resulting mixture at useful rates is the open problem: “We convert it, and then we get a mixture that needs to be separated. We are not entirely sure what we will see.”

Universe Today

Design

The Canadian Mac keyboard nobody at Apple wanted to draw

Marcin Wichary’s second instalment of “Key symbols we lost to time” turns to the Mac. The find is a late-1990s Canadian layout following European conventions but with its own unique glyphs for Ctrl, Alt, Tab and Caps Lock, plus bespoke arrow designs — icons Wichary cheerfully calls ugly, and which somebody inside Apple’s type-obsessed culture must have hated shipping.

Elsewhere: the Japanese Kotoeri layout put a pencil on the Control key, a nod to how much mode-switching Japanese input demands, and survived until 2014; German PowerBooks got beige keyboards because local ergonomic regulations said so. Design archaeology of the best kind — every oddity turns out to be a constraint someone was quietly obeying.

Unsung — Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2

Film Music

Mansell back on MobLand; a week of assignments

Clint Mansell returns for MobLand season 2 on Paramount+, Marcelo Zarvos takes S.W.A.T. Exiles for Starz, and Raffertie scores Netflix’s Tyson docuseries. On the British side, Sarah Warne has written the music for The Blame, a six-part ITV detective drama.

Also new: Ariel Rechtshaid and Will Canzoneri pair up on NBC’s Line of Fire, and Madison Gate has released Robert Duncan’s American Hostage score digitally.

Film Music Reporter

Formula 1

Baku this weekend — and a Saturday race

Round 15, the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, runs 24–26 September, with the race itself moved to Saturday rather than the usual Sunday. Late-braking, wall-lined, and historically the best chance on the calendar for the order to be scrambled by something other than pace.

Standings are unchanged since last week: Antonelli 292, Russell 211, Hamilton 191, Norris 186, Leclerc 167, Verstappen 145. Antonelli’s 81-point cushion over his own team-mate is the story of the season; Piastri sits seventh on 120 and the McLaren question remains whether he and the ’26 car ever agree on anything.

Formula1.com — 2026 calendar · Motorsport.com on the Saturday race

Musicals

Last week for How to Succeed at the Hayes

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying closes at the Hayes Theatre in Elizabeth Bay on 27 September — a short trip from Pyrmont and the last chance this season. Frank Loesser at his most cheerfully cynical, and a good one for a teenager who has worked out that the jokes are about office politics.

After that the Hayes turns over to We Are The Tigers (a cheerleader slasher musical, from 9 October), while My Fair Lady continues at the Opera House to 31 October, marking 70 years since the Broadway premiere.

BroadwayWorld Sydney · Hayes Theatre Co

Sydney

A quiet week, then Carriageworks and the Opera House both fill up on Saturday

Nothing major disrupts the network mid-week. Saturday 26 September is the pinch point: the Australian Native Food Festival at Carriageworks (Redfern) and the Wild Things International Kids Festival at the Opera House land on the same day, so expect Circular Quay and the Redfern approach to be busier than a normal Saturday.

Smaller things worth knowing: Ben Lee and Georgia Maq at City Recital Hall on Friday 25th, and Jurassic Lounge — the Australian Museum’s adults-only after-hours party — on Saturday evening.

City of Sydney — What’s On