Ukrainian ‘beats’ Rybka 4 blindfolded

We’ve tried hard to resist, but by now it’s impossible to avoid the story about Andrey Slyusarchuk, a Ukrainian neurosurgeon and showman who ‘beat’ Rybka 4 in a 2-game match, playing blindfold, which was shown on national TV. Several Ukrainian grandmasters have already expressed their doubts about the authenticity of this match.

As far as chess media are concerned, the Russian news site Chess News had the scoop, in fact already last Wednesday. They came with the story of Andrey Slyusarchuk, who had allegedly beaten Rybka 4, the latest and strongest version of the famous chess program, playing blindfold.

All of the most important TV channels in the Ukraine reported on the match, which lasted two games: Slyusarchuk won the first with White, and drew the second with Black. It was a sensational story, not because Rybka reportedly ran on strong hardware, thereby playing at a 3000+ rating level, but because her opponent is nowhere near a GM or IM title – in fact he only started studying chess eight months ago!

Chessbase picked up the story last Friday, adding some more details and citing Chinese and Vietnamese sources. The Hamburg based company is a market leader in chess software and publisher of the Rybka 4 program. Not hiding their disbelief, they invited Slyusarchuk to show his capabilities:

Andy, we offer you piece odds against Fritz 4 in our office, with full view of the board.

According to his Wikipedia page, Mr Slyusarchuk was born on May 10, 1971 in Vinnytsia, Ukraine. Apparently qualified as a doctor of medical sciences, he is most famous for performances in various shows, which ‘demonstrated’ his ability to reproduce large amounts of data, sequences of geometric shapes, words, text and other information, from his memory.

Slyusarchuk is nicknamed “Dr. Pi”. He became famous when in 2006, in one of his shows, he ‘demonstrated’ the ability to reproduce 1 million digits of Pi, and three years later he ‘proved’ that he’d memorised 30 million digits of Pi. This hit the “Ukrainian Book of Records”, but was not recognized by the Guinness Book of Records – the official world record is still at 67,890 digits.

So how did he do this? Since the oral transfer of 30 million digits of pi at a rate of one digit per second would take almost a year (347 days) for a continuous transfer of 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, a different approach was used to check the results: during the demonstrations Slyusarchuk asked auditors to randomly name sequences of digits of Pi, located at randomly selected locations of arbitrary pages of 20-volume print and grouped into an ordered table. In the show, he repeatedly passes this test.

The Ukrainian ‘genius’ claims to have memorized 20,000+ books, and says he read three thousand chess books over the past months. He claims to have used this knowledge, and his apparently phenomenal memory, to beat the strongest commercial chess engine 1.5-0.5. Click here to view the games.