The Economist.
Professional sport is usually a feast for the ears, the roar of the crowd,
the thud of the tackle, the ping of ball on racket.
Chess is a slightly different story.
For the next four hours, it's just this.
I'm in a large white-walled ballroom in a Hilton hotel on the outskirts of Charlotte,
North Carolina.
In the room with me are some 250 elite players from around the world.
Here to compete in the 2025 US Chess Masters Championships,
which is organised by the Charlotte Chess Centre.
The players are crouched over boards, some of them occasionally getting up to stretch their legs.
None of them making a sound.
But I'm not here to make the world's worst audio diary.
I'm here because chess has already had decades to adapt to the idea of more intelligent machines.
It's almost 30 years since Gary Kasparov, the then world champion,
lost to Deep Blue, a machine built by IBM.
It's perhaps 20 years
since machines got so good that the idea of a human ever-beating one became completely preposterous.
Now, chess engines, programs that analyze games,
help elite players of every age to develop strategies and prepare for their next match.