Chess

Nihal hangs his queen and Uzbekistan walks into sole first

Round 6 broke the logjam. Uzbekistan beat India, decided on board three where Nihal Sarin was better on the board and on the clock against Nodirbek Yakubboev, then blundered his queen with half an hour still in hand. Germany’s unbeaten run ended 3–1 against China, Ding Liren and Xu Xiangyu scoring. Uzbekistan lead on 12, China and Armenia on 11.

In the women’s section China put 3.5–0.5 past Poland and Georgia did the same to the hosts; India hit back against the USA 3–1. Australia sit 27th in the open on 9 match points from 4 wins, 1 draw, 1 loss.

Chess.com — Olympiad Round 6

Formula 1

The F1 Commission shortens the race

Meeting in London on Monday, the Commission agreed to cut race distance from 305 km to 290 km for 2027 — two or three laps — tied to refinements of the power-unit fuel-flow rules. Read that backwards: the 2026 cars are fuel-limited enough that the regulators would rather trim the race than watch everyone lift-and-coast to the flag.

Also agreed: a hard stop time for rain-disrupted races replacing the three-hour overall limit (the two-hour racing limit stays), more latitude to extend interrupted practice, and gearbox homologation dropped for 2027 so suppliers keep developing. All still subject to World Motor Sport Council sign-off. Baku is this week — and in 2026 the race runs on Saturday.

Formula1.com — F1 Commission · Azerbaijan GP storylines

Software

Resident Evil 4 decompiled to the byte, all 111 modules

A decompilation of the GameCube Resident Evil 4 debug build (G4BE08, 25 November 2004) has reached 100% matched and linked: ~523,000 lines of C/C++ across one executable and 110 overlays, which when rebuilt with the period toolchains — SN Systems ProDG 3.9.3 for game code, Metrowerks CodeWarrior for middleware and SDK — produce binaries identical to the originals.

The interesting part is the verification rig rather than the source. Every module is checksummed with decomp-toolkit, diffed word-by-word with objdiff, and narrowed with purpose-built bytecmp.py and fdiff.py. There is no “looks right” state: a function either matches or the tooling shows you exactly which instruction doesn’t.

GitHub — adonis-singh/re4

Embedded

Using the ionosphere as a satellite you don’t have to launch

Rhizomatica, the non-profit founded by Peter Bloom, has open-sourced HERMES — High-frequency Emergency and Rural Multimedia Exchange System — a digital shortwave stack that moves files, not just voice, over 400–600 km with no satellite and no infrastructure in between. It runs in the 3–30 MHz band alongside Mercury, its companion software modem, with optional encryption.

Photos, GPS fixes, email, SOS. The example that sticks: a Bangladeshi fishing boat with a dead engine in the Bay of Bengal transmitted its coordinates over HERMES and was found.

IEEE Spectrum

Maths & AI

Tao’s foundation wants the maths model to belong to mathematicians

SAIR — the Foundation for Science and AI Research, which Tao co-founded — has announced an Open Math Model initiative, pulling the announcement forward because of “current events and the high demand for open models”. The pitch is ownership rather than capability: open-licensed weights and code, published training methods, reproducible evaluations, and the mathematical community deciding what the training data is used for.

Target uses are unglamorous and telling — understanding difficult arguments, checking references, exploring examples, writing code, formalising proofs. Funding so far is private, including XTX Markets; they are collecting expressions of interest from partners with compute or expertise.

What’s new — Open Math Model initiative

Astronomy

The Sun’s missing vibrations were just too fast to see

A team led by Yuhang Gao and Hui Tian at Peking University has found high-frequency magnetic waves in plumes above the Sun’s north pole, using Solar Orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager at a 5-second cadence and 420 km per pixel. An automated wave-tracker picked out more than four times as many events as older instruments could resolve.

Mean speed 15.4 km/s, and collectively 2.6× the power previously estimated — enough, via resonant absorption and phase mixing, to be a serious candidate for both the million-degree corona and the solar wind’s acceleration. The waves were always there; the sampling rate was the bottleneck.

Universe Today

Game Design

The Grim Fandango puzzle document, in full

LucasArts’ April 1996 internal puzzle design document for Grim Fandango — Tim Schafer with Peter Tsacle, Eric Ingerson, Bret Mogilefsky and Peter Chan — is circulating again via the Video Game History Foundation and the Internet Archive.

It is worth reading as an artefact rather than a reference. It is illustrated throughout, written in Schafer’s voice rather than spec prose, and argues the puzzles from character outward instead of listing lock-and-key pairs. The design rationale is visible on the page, which is precisely what most design documents launder out.

Video Game History Foundation · Internet Archive (full PDF)

Design

CRTs didn’t make old pixel art look good — the artists did

A widely-shared essay pushes back on the idea that a CRT was a magic softening filter. The visible artefacts depended far more on the cable than the tube — RF was mush, composite less so, RGB was sharp — and a good late-90s monitor with tight dot pitch showed pixel art about as crisply as an LCD does.

What actually did the work was deliberate technique: dithering and hand anti-aliasing to fake resolution and colours the hardware didn’t have, plus non-square pixels (320×200 was displayed stretched, not as squares). The author’s complaint about modern pixel art is that it skips those techniques and comes out blockier than the originals ever were — then blames the screen.

datagubbe.se — The Effect of CRTs on Pixel Art

Sydney

Quiet until Saturday, then Carriageworks, the Opera House and the Museum all go at once

The first half of the week is clear. Saturday 26 September is the pinch point: the Australian Native Food Festival runs at Carriageworks in Eveleigh across Saturday and Sunday, the Opera House launches Wild Things, a new international kids’ festival, and the Australian Museum runs an adults-only Jurassic Lounge that night.

School holidays are also under way — Harry Potter: The Exhibition and a skate camp at Sydney Olympic Park mean the Olympic Park line will be carrying families all week, not just on event days.

What’s On Sydney · Transport NSW events

Musicals

Last weekend for How to Succeed at the Hayes

Hayes Theatre Co’s How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying closes on Sunday 27 September after a month in Elizabeth Bay. The Frank Loesser satire is a good fit for the Hayes’ 111 seats — a corporate-ladder comedy played close enough that you can see the plotting — and it’s a fifteen-minute trip from Pyrmont.

Also running: Opera Australia’s My Fair Lady at the Joan Sutherland Theatre, and The Lion King continues at the Capitol. Further out, SIX returns to the Theatre Royal from early October and We Are The Tigers takes over the Hayes from 9 October.

Hayes Theatre Co · BroadwayWorld Sydney · Opera Australia