Dr. Sivaram Ambikarasan from the Department of Data Science and AI at IIT Madras, who holds a PhD. in computational and mathematical engineering, a master’s degree in statistics from Stanford University and is an accomplished chess player, delivered an inspiring and thought-provoking vision talk on technology that India needs to adopt to become a global chess powerhouse.
But why chess of all sports? To give a quick context, Dr. Sivaram explained how India is in a fairly good space in terms of chess. “We have four Indians among the top 10 players worldwide. We have a lot more youngsters playing chess. Chess ranks third in popularity among the sports viewed by Indians online, with cricket being the first, followed by football,” he said.
Elucidating the plan, he said, “The starting point could be building a one-stop digital destination for chess, which also includes having one India-specific chess server.” The digital destination will have cutting-edge tech features and a light and unplugged interface to facilitate players’ coming aboard and playing and allow fans to better engage with the game. According to him, the need of the hour is to build a robust tool to ensure power play, which ensures that players play a fair game and that there’s no scope for cheating. “We also plan on conducting online premium tournaments with enough safeguards to prevent cheating,” he added.
The next agenda aligns with the All India Chess Federation, which is to have an India-specific rating system because the existing rating system has a lot of flaws. “Our players are underrated because we don’t go overseas much, and then we don’t play much. Based on the rating system, we’d also like to have titles for Indian players,” he said.
The digital platform will also engage title players to generate chess content, such as commentary, puzzles, tactics, etc. and deliver chess courses online. He pointed out that “when you look at the number of books written on each sport, chess wins by a huge part. There are tons and tons of books written on chess.” He wants to use this vast resource and make all the content available online by offering chess courses via NPTEL or the Swayam platform. “We’d like to get the help of the grandmaster and other title players and involve them in developing a strong ecosystem and ensure that the financial benefit is shared with them, too,” he added.
He is keen to set up online academies for chess coaching to address the issues in a large country like ours where resources are always scarce. “Chess is ideally suited for online lectures and delivering content. We want to offer online video courses and an immersive digital environment by teaming up with Indian title players and providing certification. We are also working on automatic translation to various languages so that in the long term, we have these courses in various Indian languages,” he stated.
He envisions streaming all these premium tournaments worldwide. “We also want to offer a wide range of plugins and analytics tools so streamers can decide which is more appropriate for their needs. We have a tool to detect whether a person is cheating,” he explained. There’s a possibility of lots of analytics in chess, and all of these can be tweaked according to the player, the viewer, or the fan, depending on whether the player or viewer is a beginner, an expert player, or an intermediate player.
