Wednesday, 4 November 2026

Could Deep Blue’s year have been won on a Pentium Pro?

Nicholas Carlini put a tuned Stockfish port on a used 200 MHz Pentium Pro with 64 MB of RAM, booted from a floppy. It rated about 3109 Elo at 10 seconds a move and 3180 at 30, and he extrapolates to about 3300 at classical time controls. Kasparov in 1996 was just under 2800.

Against 1996 Crafty running on modern hardware, the old machine scored 78 wins, 17 draws and 5 losses. His conclusion is that software, not silicon, accounts for most of the gain since 1996. An LLM wrote the port, including a minimal OS.

Nicholas Carlini · HN discussion

Lazavik wins KazChess Almaty; a 14-year-old earns a GM norm

Denis Lazavik, 19, drew his last game with Hakobyan and won the ten-player round robin by half a point from Daniil Dubov, who led the event late but drew quickly in round 9. Mark Smirnov, 14, beat Makhnev and Mamedov in the last two rounds and shared third with Vokhidov. That earned him his first GM norm, with a performance of about 2666.

ChessBase (German)

Piastri: Lindblad “blocked my path very, very late”

Oscar Piastri gave his side of the lap-59 contact that cost him seventh place and six points in Mexico. He said both cars were going straight and he “tried to give up the position”. No new comment from McLaren yet.

Brazil this weekend is a standard format, with no sprint: 71 laps, and the race is at 4am Monday Sydney time. Verstappen leads Hamilton by just two points in the fight for second.

Speedweek · Rio Times

John Williams in chamber form, with a clarinet in the band

Urania Records will release Seven for Luck & Other Music for Film and the Concert Stage digitally on Tuesday 10 November, with the CD a couple of weeks later. It is the first complete recording of Seven for Luck, Williams’s only song cycle. It also has chamber arrangements from Schindler’s List, Sabrina, The Terminal, The Fabelmans, Stepmom and Memoirs of a Geisha, plus the solo-cello pieces and “Chet and Miles”. Pianist Simone Pedroni leads, and Fausto Ghiazza is the clarinettist.

Separately, La-La Land Records is releasing an expanded, remastered The Terminal with about 14 minutes of music never released before, limited to 3,000 copies.

Film Music Reporter · Film Music Reporter (The Terminal)

Carter Burwell back with Joel Coen; Spain’s Musimagen winners

Burwell will score Jack of Spades, a gothic mystery set in the Scottish Highlands, adapted from a 1901 novel. Patsy Ferran, Josh O’Connor and Lesley Manville star.

At Spain’s 9th Musimagen Awards, Alfonso de Vilallonga won for the feature Tres adioses, Joseba Beristain won documentary for Kantauri and short film for Natura Fugit, and Juan Barro won video game for Luto. That last one is worth a listen if you like horror-game ambience.

Film Music Reporter · SoundTrackFest

Rooting a car’s sat-nav to change the clock

Rasmus Moorats’s 2014 Renault TomTom unit showed the wrong time, and the official fix was a €60 DRM-locked SD card. Instead, he emulated the unit (Samsung S5P6440, Linux 2.6.28) in QEMU with a fake CAN bus and fuzzed its image decoders with Unicorn. He got root through a path-traversal bug in a logging command, writing to core_pattern and then crashing a process.

The fix in the end: one minutes-offset value in settings.dat, 180 changed to 120.

blog.nns.ee · HN discussion

Polyend opens the Tracker firmware

Polyend has published the firmware source for the Tracker, Tracker+ and Tracker Mini, along with Tracker Community Edition 1.0. It has a recovery system so a bad build can’t brick the device. There are SDKs for writing your own sample-editor plugins and synth engines, and new features include streaming long samples from SD, chance conditions, and two new synths, CHIP and DIRT. The announcement doesn’t say which licence it’s under.

Polyend · HN discussion

A fuzzer that runs random control flow on the GPU and checks every bit

themaister rewrote the 9,000-line control-flow structurizer in dxil-spirv, the tool that translates DirectX shaders to Vulkan in Proton. Rather than trust the rewrite, he built a fuzzer that generates random control-flow graphs, runs them on the GPU, and compares the results bit for bit against a CPU simulation. It also turned up bugs in Mesa drivers. Six years of collected game shaders then passed validation on the first try.

themaister.net · HN discussion

First letters read from Herculaneum scroll PHerc. 306B

The Vesuvius Challenge awarded a $50K First Letters Prize for the first readable text from a scroll carbonised in AD 79. The likely reading is “τὸ δι’ αὑτὸ αἱρετόν”, “something desirable for its own sake”. One winner is Nicola Bodill, a classics MA student at the University of Sydney. The other, Liam Warner, is a freelance software engineer.

Vesuvius Challenge · HN discussion

Burning pictures you can see onto CDs and DVDs

DiscImageStudio turns an image into disc data, so the picture shows up on the burned surface in the way the pits reflect light. For DVD, a constraint solver places data down to the channel-bit level. For CD, the image is encoded as audio-track data. You calibrate the track geometry by photographing a burned test disc.

GitHub · HN discussion

“LLMs can read and write weights”, and the fine print

An MIT CSAIL group reports that GPT-6 Astra can tell what small networks were trained to do from their raw weights, and can write game-playing nets from scratch that beat PPO trained for 100M steps. It also raised Qwen3.5-0.8B’s MATH-500 score from 7.9% to 48.1% by editing 0.016% of its weights.

Matthew Honnibal’s reply is a lesson in reading the methods section. The Qwen edit used a Python session and up to 50 forward passes on practice problems, so it wasn’t done by reading the weights alone. Only experiments 1, 2 and 4 were raw-weights-only. The same edit on Gemma 3 270M didn’t help. He still calls the Python-assisted work “not nothing”.

Takehi et al. · Honnibal · HN

“Egoless mathematics” on Tao’s blog

A second guest post in two days, this one by Karthik C. S., Amit Sahai and Jie Xue. They argue that AI threatens mathematics only if we value it for output and personal credit. If the value is understanding, and truths that don’t depend on who found them, it is something both camps can agree on. It’s an essay, not a result, and it credits the AI models used in drafting it.

What’s new (Tao)

Rubin finds two more hidden Milky Way companions

Rubin Observatory’s second early data preview turned up Aquarius IV, an ultra-faint satellite far out in the halo that is probably a dwarf galaxy. It also found Rubin-GC1, a very faint globular cluster hidden behind dust towards the bulge in Ophiuchus. That is two finds from a preview, and the 10-year survey hasn’t started.

Universe Today

Seven Havens Season 1 is coming on Blu-ray and SteelBook

Paramount is putting the first season out on Blu-ray, DVD and a limited SteelBook. Amazon lists them at US$39.99 and $44.99. No release date or extras have been announced yet.

HD Report

Cavayé’s Les Misérables passes a million in France

After a third weekend of about 207,000 admissions, the Studiocanal film has passed one million tickets in France. For Sydney’s 2027 stage production, opening 27 August at the Joan Sutherland Theatre, there’s no casting news yet.

Boxoffice Pro (French)

Bus work bans start today; Foo Fighters next Tuesday

Union work bans begin on some buses from today (Wed), with no end date. Buses should mostly run, but some may be delayed or cancelled in the Eastern Suburbs, Northern Beaches, lower North Shore and inner north-west, and on some CBD routes. Trains, ferries and light rail will be busier. Pyrmont routes aren’t named.

Rest of the week: World Business Forum at ICC Thu–Fri; Gallen fight at ICC and Sydney FC at Allianz on Fri; Guy Montgomery’s Spelling Bee at ICC on Sat, the same day Powerhouse Parramatta opens. The Saturday RLWC semi is in Newcastle, so Sydney only has Sunday’s double at Allianz. Then Tue 10: Foo Fighters at Accor Stadium, gates 4:30pm, and Greg Davies at ICC.

Transport NSW · Transport NSW events · ICC Sydney