Saturday, 31 October 2026

Sindarov steals Clutch Chess on the final day

Javokhir Sindarov started day 3 in Saint Louis 2½ points behind and finished on 20½, ahead of Praggnanandhaa (19), Caruana (16½) and Nakamura (12). Pragg lost to both Sindarov and Caruana on the last day.

Chess.com calls Sindarov’s win over Nakamura the game of the event: a bishop sacrifice followed by two exchange sacrifices. It’s a strong warm-up for his World Championship match. Caruana and Pragg now fly to Budapest for Total Chess, where Carlsen is in the field.

Chess.com · ChessBase

World Rapid & Blitz goes to Istanbul, 25–30 December

FIDE has confirmed Istanbul as host of this year’s World Rapid and Blitz Championships, with Open and Women’s sections. Magnus Carlsen is defending both Open titles.

ChessBase

Mexico: Antonelli sick on media day, title still one P9 away

Kimi Antonelli missed Thursday’s media day with a viral illness. Mercedes expects him back for practice, and Valtteri Bottas also stayed away as a precaution. Antonelli leads by 123 points with five races left: ninth on Sunday clinches it, and so does a race that neither Russell nor Hamilton wins.

Russell says the season “won’t break me”; Antonelli has nine wins to his three. The race runs Monday morning Sydney time.

Speedcafe · Sky Sports

Breakout with no game code: a tiny world model on a Pico 2 W

tinyworldformer trains int8 transformers of 26k–131k parameters to predict each next frame of Breakout, Pong, Flappy Bird and a Doom-lite. No game logic runs on the chip. An agent trained only inside the “dream” cleared 54.4 of 56 bricks in the real Breakout.

The README admits the firmware hasn’t been run on a board yet, so the Pico frame rate is unmeasured.

GitHub: tinyworldformer

Simantic: timing-first MCU simulation as a CI check for agents

A YC startup simulates STM32 F0/F4/H7, ESP32-S3/C3 and RP2040 in the cloud, so each commit (and an AI reviewer) can run firmware against a virtual board. The team dropped their Renode wrapper for a timing-first Rust engine and checks it against real boards on test rigs that run around the clock.

The HN thread split along familiar lines: “Claude wrote an emulator in two hours” versus “silicon errata take weeks on the bench.”

Launch HN

Computers in unlikely places: DOOM maps and Qwen weights

DOOMFORMER compiles trained neural nets into DOOM levels, where crowds of voodoo dolls crossing lava lines and doors do the arithmetic. It got 966 of 1,000 MNIST digits right. Every output is checked against a NumPy integer reference with zero tolerance, and the test suite deliberately tampers with results to prove the check can fail.

Separately, nesformer sets the weights of a stock Qwen model so it executes a 6502, RAM and cartridge ROM. A 600-frame run matched a reference emulator frame for frame, 150–290× slower than a real NES.

DOOMFORMER · nesformer

AI agent teams in Minecraft and Mindustry

YC Labs put 50 GPT agents to work building a Minecraft civilisation, then pitted Claude and GPT teams against each other at Bed Wars and Mindustry (GPT won 6–3 and 6–1). When stuck, the GPT agents read Mindustry’s source code and the Claude agents never did.

One Claude team found that 55 of its 74 anti-air turrets had been loaded with copper instead of graphite, and fixed it the next game.

YC Labs

“Built is not the same as working in production”

Rachel Laycock, Thoughtworks CTO, says experienced developers are wary of agentic development for a reason. In a Thoughtworks experiment where agents wrote all the code, the team spent about two-thirds of its time at the whiteboard and a third on the feedback harness, and the build was still often red.

Lasm, a new Show HN, takes a similar stance from the other side. It compiles Lean 4 web apps to WebAssembly with 117 machine-checked proofs (authorisation, pagination, link safety), and the README lists exactly which parts are only tested: transport, DOM patching, the compiler and browsers.

martinfowler.com · Lasm

Sylphide OS: a 1980s home-computer feel for microcontrollers

Version 0.1 of a FreeRTOS-based OS with a windowed framebuffer desktop. It targets the Olimex ESP32-P4-PC, a bare RP2350 driving VGA, FabGL and a Linux emulator. Storage, networking and loading programs from SD card are still to come.

freehackers.org

Keplearn: equations from data, deterministically

A Rust symbolic-regression tool. It peels the target through chains of invertible steps, ranks candidate formulas on a 25% holdout, and only snaps constants to rationals or multiples of π, e and √2 after checking the fit. The README claims 75 of 116 Feynman equations recovered noise-free (AIFeynman: 55.8%), falling to 8.6% at noise 0.1.

GitHub: keplearn

Florilegium: procedural Delft-blue flowers in LaTeX margins

A LuaLaTeX package that grows watercolour flowers in the page margins at compile time: offset Bézier strokes, Catmull–Rom vines, noise-driven stem sway and OKLCH colour blending. The “grown” layout uses a 1998 SIGGRAPH method that repeatedly finds the largest empty disc and grows a branch into it. The same page number always gives the same garden.

GitHub: florilegium

Godot 4.8 beta 2: feature-complete

Godot 4.8 beta 2 has 144 fixes from 59 contributors since beta 1. They include multiply blending rendering too dark in the Compatibility renderer, debugging inside static functions, particle angle defaults and GDScript completion for loop variables. The .NET build now requires .NET 10.

Godot blog

Hydrogen airships that patrol pipelines on their own

HyLight, a French company, flies 12 m helium airships powered by hydrogen fuel cells. They follow pre-planned routes for up to 10 hours carrying lidar, cameras and a methane-sensing laser, while a pilot in Paris watches and can step in. They handle winds up to 45 km/h and have logged 750+ flight hours, and HyLight wants 15 flying at once in 2027. Plenty here for a balloon game: wind limits, route planning, long, slow, quiet flight.

IEEE Spectrum

Did young Earth make its own water?

A Nature Geoscience study (Garai & Sharp, University of New Mexico) heated silicate samples in hydrogen at 1,200–1,400 °C. Almost 80% of the iron oxide turned into metallic iron, releasing water vapour. Helium did nothing. The result suggests a hydrogen-rich early atmosphere could have made oceans without help from comets.

Universe Today

Seven Havens Book 1 score is out, and an Avatar Aang vinyl

Jeremy Zuckerman’s soundtrack for Seven Havens Book 1 (“Survival”) came out digitally on Friday, alongside the final episodes. Milan Records is also pressing the Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender film score as a 2-LP vinyl, due 11 December and open for pre-order. Book 2 is confirmed but has no date yet.

Film Music Reporter: Seven Havens · Film Music Reporter: vinyl

Les Mis at the Opera House: general sale opens Tuesday

General tickets for Cameron Mackintosh’s Les Misérables at the Joan Sutherland Theatre (from 27 August 2027) go on sale Tuesday 3 November. Priority pre-sale has been open since 27 October. It marks 40 years since the Australian premiere.

Also this weekend: My Fair Lady closes tonight and The Lion King on Sunday. Sunday has the RLWC triple-header at Parramatta (Australia v Wales women 3:40pm; ticket includes transport) and widespread trackwork with replacement buses, so check the Trip Planner. Melbourne Cup is Tuesday.

Limelight · Transport NSW: RLWC