Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title(chess24.com) |
Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title(chess24.com) |
[0] add your own asterisks for how important it is, but all four moved from abroad, three when they were already world class players
Also, Caruana was born in Miami to Italian parents and lived in the US and played for the US until he was 12.
Love always trumps hate but the arms industry of US will keep pushing for arms inside and outside of US at all times even if the people being murdered are it's own kids.
How can one of the closest allies of Putin head an international organisation nowadays?
You can always say he should go further, that he's tainted by his past links to Putin, or point out that if he had really turned on Putin he would have found polonium in his tea by now, but it's misleading to describe him today as "one of the closest allies of Putin".
So it's simply not easy "just to replace a president". You need to follow organization regulations and rules. Large international organizations normally have a lot of institutional inertia and rarely even have unified vision and position on many aspects, unfortunately.
That's the most disingenuous justification that I've heard.
(I personally think that Karpov would have beaten Fischer, and that's the biggest reason why Bobby ghosted on everyone.)
Good on him to call it quits, shouldn't impact his standing in the world any less.
Other two claims are hard to substantiate either. Why has the tournamnet not been great at choosing opponents? They've all won fairly and they've all been among the strongest players in the world.
1. Make it so that repeating a position is not a legal move 2. Remove castling as a legal move
Or, if the rules of the game stay the same, change the tournament format radically:
3. Force specific openings like they do in the computer chess tournaments. Both players play as white and black. Select positions that are far from equal.
> I feel, the FTX Crypto Cup, which is going to be awesome
"However, one cannot say that he has beaten Caruana or Karjakin convincingly. [Both matches were decided on tiebreaks]. There were questions in his match against Anand too. If he had beaten all three of them as clearly as he won against Nepomniachtchi, I would understand Carlsen. But is he already tired of winning after winning one match clearly?" (Karpov)
If anything, Carlsen's WC matches fell definitely on the short side (which is one of the reasons why 2 of them were only decided on rapid tiebreaks, which is kind of ridiculous in and of itself; not saying it's Carlsen's "fault", but still). And all but the last one - where Nepo self-destructed anyway - were 12 games long.
Back in the dya of Kasparov vs. Karpov a WC match was at least 24 games long - so for example Carlsen's both wins against Anand in 2013 and then 2014 combined were only as long as a single match before his era. And the (in)famous aborted match of 1984-85 lasted for 48 games. The struggle used to be much greater.
How does the analogy with Jordan fit here exactly?
https://ar2020.rzd.ru/en/corporate-governance/board-director...
As you can see, he was sticking around until the war actually started. Did he precipitate the war by lending his name and skills to Putin? IMO, definitely yes.
Should he resign from FIDE? Russians do not resign, they cling to positions of power indefinitely.
Should FIDE fire him? Definitely yes, its rules are made for respectable gentlemen.
This being said, I don't think anyone NEGATES Carlsen's achievements though. Certainly noone in the thread. So this looks like a textbook strawman to me
Marion Tinsley was world checkers champion from 1955-1958, then took a break, then again from 1975-1991, when he resigned in protest (at age 64). He was utterly dominant; indeed it is hard to think of a competitor in all of history more dominant over his sport or game than Tinsley.
In 1990 Tinsley decided to play Chinook, the best checkers computer program in the world. Chinook had placed second at the US Nationals so it had the right to enter the world championships, but the US and British checkers federations refused to allow it.
So Tinsley resigned his title. Tinsley then played Chinook in an unofficial match (which he won).
This power play really stuck it to the federations: nobody wanted to be named the new world champion knowing Tinsley was fully capable of crushing them. Eventually everyone came to an agreement to let Tinsley be the "champion emeritus".
Tinsley played Chinook four years later, at age 68, still probably the best player in the world. But in the middle of the match he complained of stomach pains and withdrew after only six games (of 20), all drawn. Tinsley's pains were real: he later died of pancreatic cancer.
> We [Chinook and the lead programmer] played an exhibition match against Marion Tinsley in 1991. And the computer told me to make this one particular move. When I made it, Tinsley immediately said, "You're going to regret that."
> Not being a checkers player, I thought, "what does he know, my computer is looking 20 moves ahead." But a few moves later, the computer said that Tinsley had the advantage and a few moves after that I resigned.
More details on this epic match from Wikipedia:
> The lead programmer Jonathan Schaeffer looked back into the database and discovered that Tinsley picked the only strategy that could have defeated Chinook from that point and Tinsley was able to see the win 64 moves into the future.
---
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/science/short-history-ai-sc...
You are welcome.
It's more likely that Tinsley was able to see a winning position much closer to the present than that, without bothering about the details of how exactly the winning position 6 turns in the future converted into an actual win 64 moves in the future.
...and self-replicating so it ensures its own survival long term of course, but that's a problem yet to be solved.
It's hard to overstate how incredibly dominant Tinsley was. In his entire career, he never lost a match, and only ever lost 7 games (two to Chinook). That is out of maybe tens of thousands of games. He was a mathematician by training and taught at a historically black university. He was also deeply religious and a lay minister at a black church. He famously described the difference between chess and checkers like this: “Chess is like looking out over a vast open ocean; checkers is like looking into a bottomless well.”
I could just quote the entire article, but I'll just leave it at this passage:
> The two men sat in his office and began the matches, Schaeffer moving for Chinook and entering changes in the game into the system. The first nine games were all draws. In the tenth game, Chinook was cruising along, searching 16 to 17 moves deep into the future. And it made a move where it thought it had a small advantage. “Tinsley immediately said, ‘You’re gonna regret that.’” Schaeffer said. “And at the time, I was thinking, what the heck does he know, what could possibly go wrong?” But, in fact, from that point forward, Tinsley began to pull ahead...
> The computer scientist became fixated on that moment. After the match, he ran simulations to examine what had gone wrong. And he discovered that, in fact, from that move to the end of the game, if both sides played perfectly, he would lose every time. But what he discovered next blew his mind. To see that, a computer or a human would have to look 64 moves ahead.
Tinsley was simply one of the most remarkable human minds of the 20th century. I'm happy he finally got a challenger that was worthy of him (as no other humans could even come close), but it also seems fitting that he was never officially defeated in a real checkers match. Rest in peace.
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/07/mario...
I wonder how much more resistance he would have had in draughts.
Very interesting comment. This sentence about dominance in a field made me think of Stu Ungar, who dominated Gin Rummy so completely that he had to switch to Poker (where he became a 3-time world champion) to meet interesting adversaries.
I couldn't find an exact reference for the following quote, but still: "Some day, I suppose it's possible for someone to be a better No Limit Hold'em player than me. I doubt it, but it could happen. But, I swear to you, I don't see how anyone could ever play gin better than me."
Sounds like he was very skilled and continuously getting better -- which is of course impressive. At the same time, his overall life story turns out to be tragic. Two choice quotes from the article really jumped out for me:
> Ungar told ESPN TV... that the 1980 WSOP was the first time he had ever played a Texas hold'em tournament. Poker legend Doyle Brunson remarked that it was the first time he had seen a player improve as the tournament went on.
> Ungar is regarded by many poker analysts and insiders as one of the greatest pure-talent players ever to play the game. But on the topic of his life, Stu’s long term friend Mike Sexton said “In the game of life, Stu Ungar was a loser.”
An approximately optimal strategy for Limit Heads Up was determined: http://poker.srv.ualberta.ca/ is a Limit solution.
Machines don't play No Limit perfectly, but they're good enough to have beaten the best humans available when they last tried, so I expect if Stu had lived long enough they'd beat Stu too.
Interestingly Gin Rummy is not seen as a major AI research target. I found some undergraduates playing with relatively simple AI approaches for Gin Rummy as basically a getting your feet wet exercise, but this is apparently not in the context of "Here's what the grown-ups did" but rather "Nobody is exploring this, so whatever you do is actually novel". So there's a real opportunity if somebody is interested.
- 35 World Championship titles (23 in three-cushion + 12 in other carom disciplines)
- 48 European titles (23 in three-cushion) and
- 61 national titles.https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~chinook/publications/solving...
[0] https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-387-76576-1
For an even shorter, and lighter, read on checkers engine, I recommend Blondie24[0].
I've got another one: famous hold 'em poker player Stu Ungar never lost a game of gin rummy. Utterly dominant.
Not a "he", but Heather McKay won 16 consecutive British Open squash titles. Squash got a World Open only in 1976, and she won the first two editions. In a career spanning 1960-1981, she was only defeated twice and both times were early in her career.
No -> Fact checkers
Yes -> Checker facts
They have also become less entertaining. 12 matches is long (edit, 14 now), but no one dares to take any risks. Caruana was just defensive and all games ended in a draw. Karjakin they both at least won each their game, but still had to go to rapid tie-breaks. And against Nepo it was a steamroll, understandably meeting him again isn't that exciting.
It's also almost impossible for a new person to get a chance. Even Carlsen didn't like the format and didn't participate in the Candidates for a few years, and when he first did he almost didn't win it to be allowed to play the WC match. Even though he clearly was the best player at the time.
I wonder how this will affect the status of the title, when it's in practice is now a title-fight between the second best players.
Also what will happen to the hype in Norway? Each WC match has so far been live streamed on all big news pages, biggest TV channels etc. It will still be a Christmas tradition to watch the rapid WC tournament I guess, but I'm afraid this will lead to less coverage. But just to tell how big Carlsen is in Norway: This is the top news on all outlets at the moment.
Fischer beat Spassky in Rejkyavik in 1972 for the World Championship. This took almost 3 months (July to September) and there was controversy, disagreement and negotiation about where and how it would take place. This had the backdrop of being a Cold War proxy too of course.
Interestingly, Fischer didn't play competitive Chess after this. He was set to defend the title against the eventual challenger, Anatoly Karpov, in 1975. Fischer too didn't like the tendency for draws and proposed a format of first to 10 wins (with Fischer retaining the title in case of a 9-9). This was rejected and Fischer ultimately abdicated and never played competitive Chess again. He also became a semi-nomadic recluse too.
But it also wasn't Fischer's first hiatus from the game. There was the 1972-1975 gap but also anotehr in the 1960s. He clearly seemed like a troubled guy.
I've always found it fascinating the level of commitment required to play Chess at this level. I certainly have never had any interest in that (nor the ability, to be clear). No one really seems to know how to solve this without going to a more blitz like format.
Chess at the highest level seems to revolve around memorizing a whole book of openings and defenses while being able to take advantage of mistakes but also finding novel approaches in standard openings and defenses but now it seems you have to go fairly deep into a game before you go off-book.
That's assuming that's even his goal, he really just seems to be doing whatever he enjoys. And in the long run, FIDE will also be fine. There will be new talents, and as even Magnus admitted, it's hard to rival the 'official' world champion title in terms of global attention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_in_China
On the other hand, this may be an inflection point toward online chess and faster time formats taking over for deciding who the "real" chess champion is. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, especially with the battle between chess.com and lichess.org for online mindshare.
Play the kind of chess that makes you happy, be it globetrotting super-GM invite-only tournaments or 500 games of back-to-back bullet on Lichess.
https://www.chessdom.com/firouzja-prepares-for-nepo-with-the...
On a related note, my suggestion for an updated WCC format:
We should move away from all classical chess. Yes, that's the tradition that's been going for 150 years, but today so many of the biggest events are rapid and blitz (online tour events, Grand Chess Tour Rapid & Blitz events, World Rapid & Blitz Championships, not to mention two of the last three world championship matches being decided in rapid tiebreaks and many of the biggest classical events decided in rapid or blitz tiebreaks). So I believe the "World Chess Champion" should be the person who demonstrates mastery in a blended format of all three, to represent the importance of all three.
The rapid, blitz, and classical portions all have equal weights (18 points)by following in the footsteps of the Grand Chess Tour Rapid and Blitz events where rapid games are worth 2 times as much as blitz. I suggest 6 classical games, worth 3 points each (1.5 for a draw); 9 rapid games, worth 2 points each (1 for a draw); and 18 blitz games, worth the traditional 1 point each (0.5 for a draw), with the cumulative score determining the winner.
1) remain world champion
2) get to 2900 elo
#1 got in the way of #2 because all the elite grandmasters constantly focus throughout the year on preparing for Magnus, which creates a headwind in the non-world champion tournaments where he must perform well to reach 2900.
My guess is he will focus on 2900. Then, come back as world champion. Then, retire after 7 championships or his performance deteriorates.
But they need to make sure wins give you e.g. 3 points and draws only 0.5.
Even in the candidates this year Ian - having obtained a nice lead - played drawing lines with white to perfection.
I don't blame him, it was the right decision. The incentive structure needs to change.
Even after a draw, the concept of Armageddon games to give another half point would be interesting and useful.
Also a boxing match is a maximum of 12 rounds over 47 minutes (since 1982), not 12 games over 3 weeks.
International tournaments tend to be shootouts with everybody playing from the first round.
You can get a picture of how they are set up by looking at the tournament tables at https://www.go4go.net/go/tournaments/news
1)There are many tournaments where the best player is not allowed to participate making them tournaments of second bests for no reason other than determining who plays in the Candidates
2)Other tournaments, even those with long tradition, are poisoned by the Candidates because many top players treat them as training ground for the Candidates (hiding preparation or not playing very seriously) or skip them altogether because the Candidates is more important
3) Candidates tournament itself is hyped as the most important event but it by design excludes the strongest player. If you told someone outside of chess about it they would rightly think only a complete moron could have come up with such system
4)Some tournaments with a lot of potential to be fun and competitive (Grand Swiss, The World Cup) cause a lot of controversy because some dinosaurs in the chess world think the strongest player shouldn't be allowed to play. Fortunately saner minds prevailed for now.
What you end up with is a calendar full of events for the second best players which influence all other tournaments in negative way.
Additionally tournaments with a lot of potential (Rapid World Championship for example) are treated as an afterthought by FIDE. 3 day very random event even though rapid chess if widely more popular than classical among casual chess fans.
FIDE does everything to prevent fans from having fun following the game. Imagine half the tennis calendar excluding current number 1 player from participating. It's so ridiculous and obvious watching from the sidelines. Unfortunately a lot of chess insiders literally don't care about the game popularity and think the money they earn grow on trees (or come from the ground as the only serious sponsors FIDE could attract are oligarchs and they oil/gas companies).
I am so happy Magnus is not interested in participating in this shit show any further. His reasons might be personal but it's a great chance more fun formats and tournaments take place and we can all have way more interesting game to follow.
Like I would pay good money to see Serral Vs Magnus, maybe after some coaching sessions with Harstem ? :D ?
EDIT: Just out of curiosity will there be anything else that someone at this level is "exceptional" good at besides chess ?
I do like do slowly read through Chess games, especially old historic games. I do the same with the game of Go: I like the several hundred year old Shogun Palace games. I did take online lessons from a Korean Go master a few years ago, and once a month play a long game against CSPro Go program, let it spend an hour after the game analyzing my moves, then I look at what moves I should have played in critical parts of the game.
I guess what I am saying here is that different people enjoy games differently, and I respect Magnus optimizing playing Chess for his own fun and lifestyle.
With that being said, match between Ian and Ding would also be incredibly entertaining. I look forward to it.
Just seems like the format is draining and the games aren't interesting/fun for Magnus.
In WC it's zero sum, so there's less pressure to find wins
Like whoever wins, the title will have an an asterisk that says, "Only because Magnus bowed out."
Nepo really crushed it in the candidates, and frankly had a couple of good games against Magnus last time before he collapsed. If he wins I feel that there is some good merit as well.
Obviously a lot of it is subjective. Mainly, I think the champion would have to beat Magnus in some future games or matches in other tournaments before truly gaining everybody's respect.
As Kipling noted: "Once in a while / We can finish in style".
Single elimination knock out format like some big sport events (football/soccer World Cup, major league sport playoffs etc.)
It can still be BO7/BO9 etc for example but it comes with more randomness (initial matchups)
He just hates the current everyone plays everyone league format then the best score takes on the reigning champion (who didn’t even take part in the first round aka the Candidate’s)
In the end this might be the beginning of the end for the “world chess champion.” The game is moving online, and moving to rapid or blitz.
Nonetheless, this will, for sure, be disappointing for many chess fans.
A light hearted, unplanned and unadvertised naka-carlsen bullet match can attract a lot of viewers. They both stream, and lots of other chess streamers will switch to watching and doing commentary when these matches happen.
They'll play silly openings like the double bong cloud and have fun.
Carlson's into this new egaming vibe. He's good at it, and it's good for chess. Meanwhile, high-level classical is brutal. The level is so high that the game is hard to follow. It takes forever and is draining. Most games end in a draw.
I feel like Fide should focus more on rapid, and get more involved in the online scene. Maybe this is the opportunity.
I suspect the most anticipated, spectator matches of the future will be rapid matches and alt formats like team tournies (go Norway gnomes). They're just more fun for everyone but your cranky old chess instructor, and even she loves it in secret.
I'd bet a 20 game rapid series over 4 days between naka-carlsen would attract more viewers than the world championship.
It's kinda fun to see this referenced recently in a television quiz show:
This cheapens the tradition and the prestige of the discipline. Chess has attained a revered status over the years. It's not perceived as a game like any other. That's why it's able to attract luxury sponsors, if nothing else. Shifting the focus onto the "double bong cloud drunk banter blitz" territory destroys this legacy. This casual, fun aspect exists and does very well independently of the official, suited up aspect. They are complementary. But I'd really think twice before trying to remove one of the pillars. Chess is the most known, researched and commented mind game on the globe, it doesn't suffer from niche viewership. There's no need to try and fix a problem that doesn't exist. Tradition and legacy is something no amount of online clicks could ever buy.
The first half of the match wasn't even close to a steamroll. It's just Ian broke mentally after that famous 6th game. The candidate tournament showed that he had more than recovered from that loss and I think he would be in a much better shape to challenge Carlsen again. Also, with Carlsen's current attitude, it is quite possible that he would be closer to breaking first. (One may assume he already broke since he gives up the title without a fight)
If nepo plays like he did in the candidates, I would not be so quick to favor magnus.
The classical World Championship matches have never been entertaining to watch live.
In fact they used to take 2 days for one game.
> No one dares to take any risks. Caruana was just defensive and all games ended in a draw.
Chess, in theory, with absolutely perfect play, is a draw. It's not a game of "risk" in classical time format. You can take risks in blitz and rapid, but in classical you have (almost) all the time in the world to calculate the line you're playing.
> Chess, in theory, with absolutely perfect play, is a draw.
I don't think that's solved, actually.
While this is highly likely and essentially agreed upon by all experts on the matter, it's not proven yet.
> In fact they used to take 2 days for one game.
Come now. The WCC matches were entertaining to watch for chess enthusiasts. Even when games took two days, people would sit and analyze each position, and that was without computers.
They still do that, of course. Although chess computers have taken some of the fun out of the analysis, I've been to several live viewings of the recent WCCs at chess clubs and bars, where a local GM would sit and comment on the position and take questions and suggestions from the crowd.
But the WCC matches have become less entertaining for chess enthusiasts, since there is so much defensive play. There isn't too much to analyze in yet another Berlin game.
It's entertaining when someone makes a horrible blunder, but not in the same way – there's little to analyze in a position that's blundered.
So I'd argue the classical WCC used to be entertaining to watch live for chess enthusiasts, but now they're less entertaining for chess enthusiasts. For "regular people", they've never been very entertaining, except when there's a spectacular blunder, which has never been very entertaining for chess enthusiasts.
True, but that doesn't mean that you can't treat chess like other sports and try to incentivize wins - for example giving win/loss/draw a 3:1:0 point ratio. The world championship is not a good format to decide "who's the best at chess", and anyway we already know who that is right now. Might as well treat it as a spectator sport and add some drama in my opinion.
Even the best human players are nowhere near perfect play.
Chess engines have proven that even players that are 1000 Elo stronger than the best players alive today can lose. Just look at how each new version of Stockfish absolutely trounces the previous version.
Stockfish 7, released 6 years ago, is nearly 500 Elo weaker than the newest version, Stockfish 15.[0] That's the difference between Carlsen and the weakest grandmasters.
0. https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/64992190/179047597...
All three formats are thriving with some superstars playing all three formats and official World Championships being played in all three formats
(For those who don’t know cricket: if your opponent is outscoring you heavily, there’s no way to win the game, but by playing defensively, there still is the possibility of “not losing” the game (called a draw. That’s different from a tie, where both teams score the same number of runs. Ties are extremely rare (about 1:1000 matches. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tied_Test), draws fairly common (about ⅓ of all test matches)). Part of the charm of test cricket is that trying harder to win a game also increases the risk of losing it, so teams have to make educated guesses as to whether to pursue that)
This eventually happened in ODI's as well. It just all reduced to batsmen playing purely for records. Competition dried out.
T20 suffers from the same problems, and is a big reason why people are so burned out. I have barely watched any cricket in years.
In matches where is there is a good pitch, and something for the bowlers, the test matches are super interesting to watch.
That entails analyzing all of their games and finding defenses and weaknesses. But also trying to find new novelties in the openings etc. And since the opponent will do the same, you yourself have to prepare defenses for lots of potential new openings 16 moves deep or so. It's an insane amount of studying.
Of course, that pays off for future games outside the match as well. But when you know your challenger will spend half a year on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to beat you, you probably have to do the same. So have to say no to everything else.
Yes. Their upcoming opponent's past games (including analyzing them for strengths and weaknesses), and engine lines mostly.
It sounded sort of like a side mind game that Carlsen plays on his opponents. It made it clear that Carlsen really studies his opponents and not just their past games.
These changes increase the stakes, incentivize offensive chess, allow the sitting WC to play all the best players rather than one, reduces the time commitment to a single event for the challengers, and allows the WC to partake in the most prestigious tournament.
Is it because its stressful, and demands too much work and prep from participants.
Just asking as competitive sport at the top level be it chess, football, or even swimming for that matter demands lots of work and a kind of work ethic not easy for most of us.
The Candidates tournament has some seemingly arbitrary qualifications that players must meet, and you could argue that the format doesn't necessarily produce the strongest player to challenge the world champion.
The World Championship match itself is problematic because it gives the defending champion a fairly huge advantage, in that they retain the title if they can draw out the match, although more recently it goes to rapid chess tie breaker rounds. So in practice the Championship is decided by these tie breaker rounds, which doesn't really seem appropriate.
Given the prep time players have and the engines available, players go into these matches extremely well prepared and draws over the board are quite a typical outcome unless someone makes a mistake.
I believe Magnus wants the Championship to become a knockout tournament to reduce the advantage that so much prep time can give. There is a big difference between prepping for a field of 12 players versus prepping for a single opponent.
An athlete can spend all day in the gym and then grab a shower and roll into bed. They may be sore as hell from head to toe but they will be so exhausted they can just pass out and get a great night's sleep. They also get the benefit of endorphins which make them feel good and rewarded for doing their exercise.
On the other hand, a chess player spending all day going over variations and practicing is going to have a difficult time sleeping with all of those lines and positions flying around in their head. They will be mentally exhausted but still active and alert. It is an absolutely miserable experience. So to prevent it you need to cut back on the hours which means spreading out the preparation over many days/weeks/months. It can also get very boring because you don't get the same rewards you get from playing and winning games. The only reward comes when you finally get to the WC match and then you actually have to win or it's utterly heartbreaking.
This is time that could be spent playing tournaments.
This would be okay if the world championships was every four years, but it's every two, so a large fraction of Carlsen's time is spent preparing for this one match that everybody knows he's going to win anyway.
It's similar to the way that many professional teams are reluctant to allow their players to play in the Olympics (in e.g. Basketball, Ice Hockey, and Olympic Football is completely neutered). Carlsen clearly feels that the World Championship is not important enough to sacrifice a large chunk of his career for.
The problem is that the world champion is out of play for 6 months out of every two years, preparing for just one game.
It's boring for him as well as the fans to spend that much time in isolation just trying to memorize everything about one particular opponent.
It would be better to have him out and about playing tournaments and beating lots of different opponents.
That way the match is the same but the half year of prep is gone.
If Magnus doesn't want to play this sport anymore, it's his decision, and totaly understandable. But don't try to change like a century of tradition (much like the rules of chess).
EDIT: fix typo
> when [Carlsen] first did he almost didn't win it to be allowed to play the WC match.
These complaints are in opposition to each other! You can have an open process which gives an outsider a chance to qualify, or you can teleport the incumbent best player straight to the final, but you can't have both.
The current Candidates structure balances it pretty well, in my view. Most of the 10 players who have a realistic chance in a match reach the final 8, but it often features one great-but-not-elite grandmaster who had a good tournament, and it's theoretically open to even the worst amateur who shows up to his Continental Championship and performs well in that followed by the World Cup.
Economically speaking, that won't be enough time for advertising, setting the venue or getting sponsor up either. It matters who plays in the WCC match before you can do either of those things. We still don't know when or where the match for this cycle will happen even now.
Most rounds would finish in around 2 hours, just like several e-sports games. Have 2 rounds a day and finish it in 8 rounds. With a more e-sport like approach, chess could bring in even more viewers and hence more sponsorships.
The format has been changing way too often, if anything.
> 12 matches is long (edit, 14 now), but no one dares to take any risks.
Not really: 12 or even 14 games is short, which is exactly why players aren't particularly willing to take risks - short format makes it hard to catch up should they fall behind. The format used to be 24 games in Kasparov times, and some WC matches were decided by the "first to X wins" rule, which could last very long, given that draws wouldn't push things forward (and for example Alekhine beated Capablanca after 34 games).
> And against Nepo it was a steamroll, understandably meeting him again isn't that exciting.
It wasn't such a steamroll, the score doesn't tell a full story. Nepo's play quality was excellent and he arguably had more winning chances throughout the first half of the match. His first loss was in the longest WC game ever played (136 moves, and theoretically drawish almost until the very end when Nepo finally slipped). He collapsed psychologically right after, starting to make errors that - in his own words - were "simple things you would never overlook in a blitz game".
In part due to that gruelling, exhausting loss, for sure, but some have theorized he may also have folded due to realizing how many good chances he had missed before that.
GM Sam Shankland (US champion of 2018, for those not up to date with the who-is-who of chess world) went as far as to say Ian was two different players in the match: Nepo A and Nepo B.
Subverting people's expectations, Nepo won the Candidates now so convincingly (some suspected he might not recover, and certainly not to such an extent) that I see no reason why one would expect a landslide Carlsen's victory in the upcoming match.
Especially since there's an enormous difference between having NEVER played a WC match (which was Ian's situation the last time), and having already played one.
To quote Kramnik reminiscing on his first WC match: "it was still a very unfamiliar situation, like playing all your life for Lokomotiv and then coming out to play for Real Madrid in the final of the Champions League. Of course, you have to get used to the new situation, kick the ball a couple of times so they don't laugh at you."
> Even Carlsen didn't like the format
Yeah, well - he didn't like it, isn't that a bummer :) But come on, it's not like Carlsen has no say in the matter of the format, especially now that he already is a 5x world champion. He could have negotiated a different one with FIDE - or at least try. Obviously it's too late for that once the challenger has already been revealed, the time for that was before the cycle started. The format isn't set in stone though, far from it, and the #1 player, the reigning WC, has a lot of weight to throw around.
Carlsen may have not liked the format from an objective point of view, but the format was certainly very convenient for him. He excels in rapid chess, so if his winning chances are, say, around 80% in the classical portion of the match, they probably reach something like 95% once it comes to rapid tiebreaks. And the shorter the format, the larger the likelihood of getting to the tiebreaks.
> I wonder how this will affect the status of the title, when it's in practice is now a title-fight between the second best players.
This isn't something new. Kasparov was still the world's #1 for years after he lost the title to Kramnik. (He had actually hoped for a rematch, but they couldn't work the conditions out, and since age was catching up with him, he finally retired.)
That seems to put the quote in a different context.
It's also funny how the only 3 World Champions who have refused to defend a title because of disagreements with FIDE are probably the 3 best chess players ever.
For anyone that likes the weird, wacko and genius (all the same thing ?) there are few excellent short documentaries on YouTube about Bobby Fischer. Well worth a watch!
There's several intellectuals I could name which were headed towards world class status like Demis Habbasis & Aleister Crowley decided to give up the game and later became remarkable men in their own right. I think of Paul Morphy who is probably the player furthest above his peers in history who decided to quit and be a lawyer and got annoyed whenever people would try to bring up the game.
I find it interesting to think of these men who are great enough to become the worlds best at chess, and some decide it's not worth it, some achieve that greatness and then require, and some seemingly are in it for life.
The more people will be eventually fide rated and climb through the distribution the more the better players will drift at higher elos.
That's also a reason why in modern days we have more 2750+ ranked players than ever.
One common, wrong, argument is that modern players play better, while this is true this does not affect the elo ranking at all. The elo system merely tracks how did you do against opponents with a different ranking and assigns a score based on the win or loss, how well the players did is absolutely irrelevant to the distrubition.
An analysis here: https://en.chessbase.com/post/the-elo-ratings-inflation-or-d...
It claims that a 2500 player now is better than a 2500 player in 2000. So in that sense it's actually been a deflation.
Also https://www.playmagnus.com/en/news/post/rating-inflation-myt...
... also focus on grabbing draws. Draws against lower rated players (that is, everyone for Magnus) drop your elo. Winning the world championship may very well drop Mangus' elo score if it involves only a handful of wins and lots of draws.
Winning against Anand in 2013 gave him 2 points. I think he got 1 point for beating Nepo in 2021.
With that, reaching 2900 seems almost impossible. He was at 2882 two times, but when you need almost perfect score to achieve it it's hard.
And I think pretty much everyone predicted that had Naka won Magnus would play.
As black under such a system I might be more strongly incentivized to go for the draw than under the current system. I'm already starting at a disadvantage by having black, so pressing for the win is extra risky, and if I do go for it and lose my opponent gains 3 points on me.
If you want to reduce draws by playing with points you probably should included something that takes into accounts white's advantage. You want to make sure white has a strong incentive to push for the win, which in turn also increases the chances white will go too far, giving black a good chance to also push for the win.
For example, asymmetric scoring such as black gets 3 points for a win, 1 point for a draw, and white gets 2 points for a win, 0 points for a draw. That system was tried in a couple or so tournaments around 2005 or so.
As far as the format goes, I wonder if a small tournament coupled with something like the promotion/relegation system used in many soccer leagues would be good?
Have a Champions Tournament that consists of 4 players that play a double round robin (or maybe a quadruple round robin?) for the World Championship. The participants are the current Champion, the runner-up from the prior Champions Tournament, and the top two from the Candidates Tournament.
The Candidates Tournament would include the 3rd and 4th place players from the prior Champions Tournament, the 3rd and 4th place players from the prior Candidates Tournament, and some players who are invited based on rating, World Cup, and Grand Prix results.
Maybe also make the Candidates bigger than it is now, say 10 or 12 players. That would be too long to hold as a single event, so split it. Play some of the games as part of the World Cup event and some as part of the Grand Prix events.
Good enough to challenge a pro? You're seriously underestimating how much hard work the pros are putting in to play at their level - on top of the insane mechanical skill, game knowledge, and experience. Part of the skillset is obviously transferrable to other RTS games (big chunk of the AoE4 ladder was dominated by SC2 GMs early after launch), but playing (and staying) at pro level in SC2 requires much more - it requires consistency.
Serral has 7.5K MMR not because he's been taking 20 MMR off a 7.4K player (because there are no 7.4K players), he has 7.5K MMR because he took 1 MMR from 6K players a couple thousand times. 6K is like what, top 50 GM?
My bet in Serral v Magnus would be X:0 in a best of (X*2)+1, for any X the players would be willing to suffer through.
(Sorry if my numbers are a bit inexact, the new season just started and GM is not open yet.)
I've played Starcraft off and on, mostly through the Brood War days, and never super competitively. My friends and I had a standing Friday night game we'd play. We were ok.
My brother-in-law came to stay with us for a while and he had never played Starcraft before but wanted to try it out. So I said, sure, we can 2v2 the computer so you can get a handle on things. We'll play Terran since it's the most like Warcraft. He told me he's played Age of Empires, he knows what RTSs are like. He'll be fine, he wanted to 1v1. I asked him if he was sure because Starcraft was a much faster game than AoE. He said he was sure, it would be fine.
So we played. I played a pretty standard build order, sent out my 10th/11th worker as a scout, found his base, saw he was still on his initial set of workers and building a barracks with one of them. So I built my second base on his expansion spot, got it up to speed, built a couple of barracks, and a couple of machine shops, cranked out some marines, medics, and siege tanks, and to top it off, I build a starport and some drop ships. Loaded up the squad and dropped them behind his mineral line, obliterated his economy, then rolled through his base.
Pitting him against a pro StarCraft player would be a joke tho. For reference, Nina is able to reach 4800 MMR worker rushing every game. The mechanics alone would take a couple years of dedicated practice
SC has a sane dose of reflexes and micro management.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Nepomniachtchi#Video_gam...
Within a bullet game though https://lichess.org/forum/general-chess-discussion/most-move... looks like 100apm isn't far off, and that includes having the opponent make moves inbetween
I think a better choice would be something like Magic the Gathering or other card games. I have no doubt he would end up dominating those if he became dedicated.
when the show Billions did a poker game they used a famous Stu Ungar hand https://somuchpoker.com/calling-with-ten-high-stu-ungar-vs-m...
(but OMG that game was so cringey for so many reasons, you don't get to call time and go talk to your therapist in the middle of a hand)
But China's Tianyuan is still champion/challenger (from 2022): https://www.go4go.net/go/tournaments/news/16
I didn't check the others.
Not enough monetary incentive either, it doesn't pay as well as T20.
Second problem is bowling doesn't pay as well as batting. And that brings only batsmen centric view to the game, which is boring to watch after a while, even in T20.
This has not been the case for quite a while. All of Carlsen's matches (Anand, Anand, Karjakjn, Caruana, Nepomniatchchi) had tie breakers in the format, to determine a guaranteed clear winner. The Karjakin and Caruana matches were decided in this way.
As for prestige and tradition... we shall see, I suppose. Prestige follows the prestigious. We are now entering terrify, with Magnus at least, where the best players don't want to compete in traditional matches and the chess watching public doesn't want to follow it anyway.
If you think FIDE involvement in rapid/online cheapens chess... then you'll eventually be in a world that has tradition & prestige on one side and popularity and the best players in the other.
[Citation needed] :) Says who? What exactly indicates the best players "don't want to compete in traditional matches"? What implies that Magnus forfeiting his title (having collected five) is a result of such general trend?
Either it's "best players", or only Magnus, in this specific situation, having already built a remarkable legacy.
> and the chess watching public doesn't want to follow it anyway.
[Citation needed] again : ) Because I'm not sure if the chess watching public KNOWS that it "doesn't want to follow" traditional matches. Regarding the previous world championship match:
"Total viewership for the event exceeded 12.6 million hours watched with a record peak streaming viewership for chess of 613,000 concurrent viewers making the FIDE World Championship in Dubai one of the most watched events in streaming globally."
https://kommunikasjon.ntb.no/announcement?publisherId=168238...
> In total, viewers of the World Championship spent more than 12.6M hours on broadcasts, which is twice as much as at the World Championship 2018. The average audience of the World Championship 2021 was 239.7K viewers, which is almost 2.5 times more than at the previous iteration of the tournament
https://escharts.com/news/fide-world-chess-championship-2021...
Guess the chess watching public didn't get that memo. Viewership can grow substantially, despite this era of shortening attention spans. I can't see a problem in need of fixing here, much less a trend going in the opposite direction that these numbers show.
> If you think FIDE involvement in rapid/online cheapens chess...
Involvement in and of itself, no. It has its place. And they're involved already. There are World Rapid and World Blitz championships. But these titles don't hold the same value as "the" World championship. Ask Abdusattorov ("who"? Exactly :)) if he wouldn't prefer to be the classic world champion.
What I'm saying is that this involvement should be kept in proportion, and pushing towards rapid/online, with the goal of attracting more publicity (which is already larger than ever before, the internet takes care of itself without the need for any official blessing), steers towards diminishing returns, while the long-term costs would tend to increase.
Which other tournaments are considered like the top levels of Chess competition, and what are the criteria for being the top chess player in the world(If not winning the world championship)?
And Carlsen absolutely dominates the others, and have been the top rated player continuously for a decade. So no questions about who is the best, WC title or not.
Carlsen is right now 98 points above Nepo, the challenger, which is an insane difference.
This would not happen with Serral. He does lose against other pros, but not against joes. When you face an opponent 1.5K MMR below you, you're putting something like -200MMR on the table if you lose. You can't stay 200-300 MMR above the #2 spot if you ever drop a game like that.
There's a guy, Stanislav Cifka, who plays (or maybe played at this point, I haven't kept up) competitive Magic: the Gathering who was ranked fairly high in chess at some point (or maybe still is). He wasn't ever the best chess player or best Magic player, but he was pretty good in both.
So Magnus could probably eventually do well, but there's a learning curve.
His reasoning was that he and Carlsen are the two most widely known and followed active chess players at the moment, and Carlsen is not going to allow a world where Nakamura is Champion instead of him.
Nakamura doesn't seem upset or anything over not coming in second at the Candidates, which up until the last game it looked like he almost had a lock on.
The person he said is probably the most upset by Carlsen's decision is Caruana. Caruana collapsed in the second half of the tournament, which Nakamura thinks is because Caruana thought that only 1st mattered and so had to play for wins to try to catch Nepo. If Caruana had played for top 2 instead of 1st, Nakamura thinks he would have had no trouble achieving that.
Perhaps, just maybe, Nakamura doesn't quite understand what Magnus thinks, being different humans and all. So far it seems Magnus has been more accurate at predicting what Magnus will do.
1. Classical game, win = 5 points.
2. Rapid game, win = 2 points
3. Blitz game, win = 1 point.
4. Armageddon game, win = 0.5 points.
This point layout might backfire and make the classical games even less interesting because the huge edge for winning is probably going to motivate extreme do-not-lose style play, which trends towards draws. But, nonetheless, wins in classical should be weighted well above the tie-breaks.
Antichess at least is a solved win for White
I usually don't follow chess, but I still end up watching the WC matches on Norwegian TV. They manage to make it interesting and exciting.
The guests will typically join in on the discussion of the positions, and as such often serves as a proxy for the viewers by asking questions like "but why doesn't he just do X now" and similar.
It doesn't always work but overall I think it's been a positive addition to their broadcasts.
86 wins in a row against one of the best opponents at the time has to indicate that skill can overcome much of the luck involved.
I agree on fast chess being more fun, but hey now :)
The WarGames "the only winning move is not to play" quote is about mutually assured destruction; a rather different lesson than the one Data learns in 'Peak Performance'.
What about Fischer? The format was a little different then, but here was his route to the Championship.
1. Won the Interzonal tournament 18.5/23 (+15-1=7). The top 8 from the Interzonal then played a knockout series of matches using a bracket system.
2. In his quarter-final match of that he beat Taimanov 6-0.
3. In his semi-final match against Larsen he also won 6-0.
4. In his final match against former world champion Tigran Petrosian, he won 6.5-2.5 (+5-1=3).
In the 21 games total that his candidates matches lasted, he won 17 games, lost 1, and drew 3. If we include the Interzonal it is 32 wins, 2 loses, 10 draws. In the combined Interzonal and knockout matches he had a streak of 20 consecutive wins against the world's top players.
And then in the Championship against Spassky he won 12.5-8.5 (+7-3=11) (and one of those loses was a forfeit when he skipped the game over some complaint about the playing conditions).
Nepo's performance in this Candidates was pretty dominating, but doesn't come anywhere near Fischer's level of dominance.
TBH in that match Fischer started his shenanigans about demanding all sorts of things which most likely unbalanced Spassky - who was known to be somewhat lazy - so with all the political pressure and mind games he likely decided that he doesn't care enough.
The match was actually not that top-level chess as it is presented in chess mythology. Reshevsky [1] said the following things about it:
"True, there were several excellent games, but the match as a whole was disappointing. It was marked by blunders by both players. The blunders committed by Spassky were incredible. In two games, for example, Spassky overlooked a one-move combination. In the first, he was compelled to resign immediately, and, in the other, he threw away all chances for a win. Fischer was also not in his best form. He made errors in a number of games."
... and he is also very critical of how Spassky was prepareding for the match. So a well-prepared Karpov would likely have been able to dethrone Bobby, and I think Fischer knew it, and it played a big part in why he had forfeited the defence.
[1]: http://billwall.phpwebhosting.com/collections/The%20Fischer-...
granted it becomes more clear that fischer dominated in the quarterfinals forward, but it still is worht pointing out that his opponents weren't nearly as strong as nepo's opponents, relatively speaking
I imagine nepo's score would've been MUCH stronger if he was playing 100-200 ELO points weaker opponents all candidates. Instead nepo had 3 opponents with higher ELO and his weakest opponents ELO was only 19 points lower than his own...
in summary, I think you're correct and I was wrong, but I'm not so sure it's quite so clear-cut when you factor in other variables
Personally I am not interested in this championship match at all.
A fresh match with a new score could be very interesting.
If you take, e.g. two unranked players that are very bad at chess or two unranked masters they are still going to end up with a +16 and -16 elo change. And you can keep adding great or bad players to the pool, and elo is still going to only look at the outcome not how players play.
The point with elo is that if there's only 2 players it is basically impossible to reach a 2000 elo, because even if one consistently wins at some point he's not gaining any point by beating the same opponent, thus to go from 1700 to 1800 he'll need to face an opponent that has a similar elo.
The more people slightly below his skill the more he'll rise in the elo distribution, this trickles down all the way up and down.
Of course it is very likely that modern 2500 players are better as they have better tools than players of 20 years ago, but the same applies to people lower and higher in rating.
Thus, at the end of the day, the only factor that matters in an elo distribution and how wide it is, is the number of games and players.
If tomorrow there will be an influx of another million ranked players the distribution will get a bit wider and this would also inflate in the long run ratings of the highest rated players.
Nothing to do with it? That's a bit much.
It's not a perfect system, nor is it a trivial problem to solve, but elo definitely highly correlates to how good the player is.
it only measure how good a player is compared to the other ranked players.
Remember for the best players in the world chess is their full time job. They spend 12 hours a day on the game. They are earning enough from tournaments to support life.
This of course gets unwieldy very fast. 16^5 is already over a million different games.
This is balanced by the fact that the sheer number of possible lines is huge. Too big for any human to "remember" them all.
It's also not enough to memorize "good" moves from an engine perspective. "Good" engine moves and "good" human moves are different things.
An engine might see a move as "good", because it calculated 50 moves down the line and found an advantage. This means that you'd have to play the next 49 moves in a very precise manner to reach this advantage. One way to think about it, is that there are multiple positions that are analyzed as "draw" by en engine, but 9 grandmasters out of 10 will see one side winning. That's because one side would need to play perfectly, while the other side has much higher tolerance for mistakes (engine assume perfect play on both sides).
TLDR: engine is fair game, during preparation. It's a big deal, it transformed high level chess, but it didn't break the game, and is unlikely to do so.
They need hundreds such ideas for a match.
The ideal at top level is to get to move 20 or so with a slightly better position, essentially all of your time (because you've been playing memorized moves), and your opponent already having used most of their time.
It's just funny that this same argument structure repeats in radically different fields with (often) very different people.
Personally I've never gotten too invested in any of these arguments because they're ultimately unknowable but, more importantly, they're kind of pointless. You can't separate someone from the time they existed in. I was only ever at best average at Chess but even I could recognize that the grats of 100-200 years ago would get wiped out by the modern greats but obviously we know more now, we have better tools now and so on. And you can never really say how a historic great would do in the modern times with modern ideas, knowledge and tools because they're a product of their time.
So for example Fischer said Capablanca and Morphy, under the same circumstances, could beat anyone (if they were born in the same era, using the same tools, etc.)
Off the top of my head - World Championships matches won, time spent as number 1, peak Elo.
> Neither Carlsen nor Kasparov challenged Vishy’s title during the peak of his career.
When was the peak? He was WC between 2007 and 2013, he wasn't even the top ranked player for most of that time and then he lost the WC to Magnus (then lost the rematch too).
it's less about how much he calculated in that moment and more about the accuracy of his confidence and the work he had to have put in alongside his talent prior to that moment to achieve that confidence and back it up.
Like, if you're in a chess midgame, there might still 6 major pieces and 4 or 6 minor pieces and tons of pawns on the board. It's tricky to calculate far into the future. At each node, there's easily dozens of possible moves, and 4-8 viable or not-horrible ones. That's becoming a lot of possibilities to consider very quickly.
In an endgame, there's like, 2 kings, 2 pieces and 4 pawns or a similar constellation. There's 6 possible moves, 3 of them immediately lose and 3 are worth thinking about. 2 of them probably only have one possible answer. Suddenly even an utter beginner like me can calculate 4-8 moves. A master-level player probably knows the endgame entirely, or can see 10 - 20 moves into it easily, because the branching factor is a lot lower now.
That is a matter of opinion. Looking a certain number of "moves ahead" is an important metric in game engines and also something that human players will tell you that (1) they are consciously doing and that (2) is important to them. So it's worth discussing on its own terms.
This is why chess programs usually say “mate in 24” but humans would more likely just be looking a few moves ahead to get in a ‘winning position’ which they know is an eventual checkmate.
I’m not good at chess, and don’t calculate more than 5 moves ahead, but have ‘spotted’ a mate 20 moves ahead just because you recognise that a certain position is winning even if you don’t know every single possible move and response.
we look ahead in ways like "doing this leaves this area weak, and the opponent has resources that can take advantage of that, and i cannot intervene on those resources in time" or "if i create a strong threat then the opponent will be forced to react to it, here are the ways they can react that make any sort of sense, here is what i can do in each of those situations"
they are not doing things like "let me simulate moving every one of my pieces right now, and then every one of my opponents pieces in response to each of those moves, and then my options again, and review 10,000 possible scenarios in my mind individually for the best min/max situation" like a classical computer engine does.
so i always find the "X moves ahead" phrase misleading at best. but as i originally stated, it is useful to know how many moves of perfect play are necessary for someone to convert a winning position when reviewing the players confidence going into that position. and even then you dont know if they got lucky or earned that confidence by looking at just the one game alone. Over the course of their career the amount of time that their confidence pays off or not tells the story there
Note that the first quote agrees with me:
> Not being a checkers player, I thought, "what does he know, my computer is looking 20 moves ahead." But a few moves later, the computer said that Tinsley had the advantage and a few moves after that I resigned.
We know as a matter of literal truth that the computer is looking 20 moves ahead, but it doesn't need 44 moves to realize that it's losing, even though the other guy says that recognizing the win would require looking 64 moves ahead. That guy was wrong; recognizing the win didn't require looking 64 moves ahead. He just had trouble imagining other methods of recognizing a win.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing though because we’re always working with a simplified system whatever we’re doing in life, the question is just how much is it helping people. Chess provides entertainment and personal challenge, coding provides ridiculous productivity. All things in moderation though.
Absolutely yes.
There is a big difference between inventing solutions to novel problems, and being 75,386th person to solve a problem on a website. The latter just makes you a sophisticated newspaper daily puzzle solver.
how many programmers/software developers can claim to inventing solutions to novel problems though? 0.01%? less?
The easiest way to illustrate this is with openings, though it applies throughout the game in different ways. Against e4 the Najdorf defense was once the opening of champions, being a major part of the repertoire of players like Kasparov and Fischer. In modern times it's an increasingly rare guest at the highest level. It's not because it's considered unsound or even slightly dubious - it's a rock solid opening that gives black real winning chances. But the problem is it also gives him real losing chances. It's complex, difficult to play, and if you get outprepared by your opponent you may lose without him even having to make a single move himself, which is really one of the worst feelings in the world.
So instead the meta has largely shifted to openings that are more about minimizing risk where black, more or less, aims for a draw - and usually gets it. Changing the risk:reward ratios in a sufficiently extreme way is most certainly capable of changing the meta.
I am not good at chess but would it help if win as black was rewarded more than win as white?
One tie break system, armageddon, does break the symmetry by giving black draw odds (he wins if the game is drawn) but less time in a blitz game. But it's very poorly regarded and generally only used as a this-game-MUST-have-a-decisive-result last resort.
I understand that Magnus glory hunting fans are everywhere and they love to pretend that once he had someone beaten, he'll repeat the feat with certainty, but have some more sense than that. More than one world champion has won the crown not on his first attempt, including one of the all-time greats, Kasparov.
(If they had to bet, I think all experts would bet on “it’s a draw”, but some experts won’t be wanting to bet, even if they think that’s almost certain)
> if offered a quick draw, black will almost certainly take it
[citation needed], and 1200 elo games on lichess aren’t a valid citation
While Alpha Zero is good, this is not very good proof. Alpha Zero is not perfect, so if there are tiny ways to win that Alpha Zero misses, it will miss it on both sides (being the same engine), so would never explore that path.
It's like claiming inbreeding will result in perfection :)
Can you cite this?
I can't see anything on this.
It's not something a chess champion would know on their own for instance.
Basically you have to get a good understanding that the advantage of being white can't be leveraged enough to win.
Obviously it can't be proved, but to even get an idea will be very mathematical or computational.
70% draws is a very small number, really. Not conclusive at all.
Though, like you said, the vast majority of those moves will be somewhat nonsensical though.
That would look even worse for him, and be unsatisfying for his opponent and the public. In this case, he realizes he doesn't have the passion for this event any more, so he's doing the best thing for the sport and just letting two people who are still passionate about it compete instead of doing the mental-sports version of playing injured.
By resources i mean things like going into a position that gives your opponent an incredibly small advantage but is hard for them to play. It's one of the best ways to win games. it's hard work to find those lines, and he's been doing it for so long at WCC level it's not surprising that he's tapping out against someone he's already beaten. if you use a line in the WCC, it becomes very risky to use it again - because if your opponent studied it and plays it correctly then all you've done is make it even harder for you to win the game.
to reach 2900 he has to win games, not tie
It’s a mix of having a new perspective, dealing with stress, and having time to heal etc. This is one of the reasons most sports have an off season. Even if basketball could easily be played year round, the game would suffer.
He's just not playing in the FIDE World Championship because he dislikes the process.
Surely, if one can quit without it being considered breaking, resigning while on top is how.
Yes, every championship title eventually goes to someone else.
I meant to say that the other way around sorry. A lot of Fischer’s stats aren’t very impressive at all. He’s won less championships than say Kramnik or Petrosian, but not many people would argue that either of those two were greater players than Fischer.
But I’ve lost interest after Deep Blue event. Alpha Zero plays were fun to watch though.
I also stopped watching red sox games once they won the world series. Fandom is weird.
You can just go 'this move is winning, and I can infer that because of these logical points'. This isn't really 'looking ahead x moves into the future', you can just know a position is winning and will cause a cascade of moves of a predictable-length that will end in an eventual checkmate.
If you call this 'looking ahead x moves' or not depends on the definition I guess, but I just mean they might not be actually evaluating / imagining all those positions (because you can either use logic or pattern-match to previous situations).
> You can just go 'this move is winning, and I can infer that because of these logical points'. This isn't really 'looking ahead x moves into the future', you can just know a position is winning
Yes, that's exactly what I said in my original comment.
IMO, it's less the intent that you have when you quit - the intent is almost always at that point that you don't want to be there any more doing the thing. The more important part is the intent that led up to the moment where you quit.
In some ways, it's similar to quitting any job. If you just have a bad day or week at work and put in your resignation with no other plan because you just can't stand coming in to work again, you "broke". If you're still working, but interviewing elsewhere, get another job, put in your notice and walk away with something else lined up, it's a bit different.
Even 52! comes pretty close to it, and that’s just one deck of cards.
Saying there are merely “more” states is almost insulting to the depth of a chess game :)
His opponents who played him were sometimes mystified, though the reason often becomes clear many moves down the road. He was not afraid of starting complex fights, even ko fights, and the games often have huge swings in territory. He played in a way with great freedom. Opponents would play thinking they played a forcing move, only for Go Seigan to tenuki (play elsewhere on a board, often at strategically vital points). People have tried to replicate his style, but it is difficult to put into practice without Go Seigan’s reading skills.
Also, his given name contains the character 源, which is read "gen" in Japanese, not "gan".
This may be way outside of your wheelhouse, but I have to ask -
The Mandarin reading of 源 is yuán. The phonetics are something like [ʲyɛn]. A similar raising of the written vowel occurs in the pinyin syllable yan (e.g. 言, 严, 眼), which is [jɛn]. In other pinyin syllables, an "a" represents /a/, which is something sort of intermediate between the English PALM and TRAP vowels.
It makes perfect theoretical sense that /a/ might be realized as [ɛ] when following a high vowel. But I've always wondered whether yuan and yan really do have a phonemic /a/ there or whether there might be an /ɛ/ phoneme. And it's interesting to me that the Japanese reading of 源, presumably taken from a much older Chinese, uses /e/ there instead of /a/. Can you provide any insight?
I mean, that's just plain wrong on both counts. You need to do work to do a good job at looking ahead. You don't need to do work just to be able to imagine what the board might look like after a particular move is made.
> they are not doing things like "let me simulate moving every one of my pieces right now, and then every one of my opponents pieces in response to each of those moves, and then my options again, and review 10,000 possible scenarios in my mind individually for the best min/max situation" like a classical computer engine does.
You don't understand what the computer is doing. Pruning its options is just as important for the computer as it is for the humans.
so im not sure why you think i was trying to say humans cant move pieces around in their mind.
you also completely ignored that i was mainly addressing the scope difference of positions analyzed by a human player vs a computer, and that the talking point was someone looking "64 moves ahead" and trying to explain that no this guy did not literally see all variations 64 moves out - but that through (arguably more impressive) reasonable human ability he was able to to be accurate and confident in a decision that he had won while there was still 64 moves of depth left in the game
No, pruning is by far the majority of the work the computer does. It is very much not trying to review all possible scenarios indiscriminately, because that can't be done, because there are too many possible scenarios.
And "pruning" and "making sense of the position" refer to the same thing. Interpreting the position is how you prune.
As for computers, they've certainly changed the landscape tremendously, but it doesn't mean that players simply play like chess engines. You don't just get to transfer the chess engine heuristics to a human mind. Chess engines help players find ideas, refutations etc., and they're certainly significant when it comes to opening theory. The role of memorization in opening theory (at the highest level) predates computers though.
Computers have also levelled the playing field, improving (buzzword alert) inclusiveness. Players from countries with flourishing chess tradition, such as Russia, don't have the inherent advantage anymore. That's why the current top 2 (on the rating list) are from Norway and China, which would be rather unlikely a few decades ago.
That doesn't exist anymore, any game Carlsen plays is studied in depth by the world immediately, and especially by his opponents. Same for other top grandmasters.
Many observers overplay the importance of one match loss. More than one chess champion title was taken by a challenger who had lost in the previous attempt [1] - and considering there was just a handful of champions, it is a lot.
[1]: Spassky and Kasparov have lost in their first attempts against Petrosyan and Karpov.
Magnus specifically mentioned Firouzja as an opponent that he would consider playing the WCC against[1]. So while not the most important factor in his decision, the fact that Nepo won the candidates again and was the last challenger before Magnus made the Firouzja statement seems relevant. Also relevant is that the candidates tournament concluded on July 5th and Magnus released his withdrawal now in the same month.
It seems to me like the challenger being Nepo was the last significant piece of information towards his decision. How specific it is to Nepo or a more general feeling of Nepo being one of many people he doesnt feel any personal benefit from playing against, who knows.
[1] https://chess24.com/en/read/news/magnus-carlsen-unlikely-i-w...
That is not how it works, and not how it is supposed to work. This is hubris and disrespect to all chess players in the world. For more than 100 years champions changed each other in title matches (well, before Kasparov's limitless ego created a decade of turmoil in Chess), with just one exception by Fischer, and now Carlsen 'doesnt feel any personal benefit'. :ThumbDown:
So it isnt the most important reason, but nepo being the challenger didnt offer anything to change his mind like he was hoping the result of the candidates would.
Chess is only solved for positions with 7 pieces or less (and some configurations of 8 pieces [2]), so we're far from knowing best play from the 32-piece starting position.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zugzwang
[2] https://www.chess.com/blog/Rocky64/eight-piece-tablebases-a-...
White cannot have a tiny tiny edge against perfect play.
Either it is possible to force a win against perfect play, or it's not. So white is either winning or the game is a draw (or black is able to force a win against white's perfect play, but that's a whole different level of unlikely).
When talking about perfect play, terms like "tiny edge" lose their meaning.
However the consensus guess is that perfect play yields a draw.
Just like we can efficiently find approximate solutions for the traveling salesman problem (that are at most 50% longer than the optimal solution), these heuristics have not much to do with the optimal solution.
> I could imagine that a perfect play completely contradicts common chess theory.
So can anyone. Nobody knows what perfect chess play is. Our best guess though is that whatever your opponent plays you can always force a draw before they can win.
Unfortunately it leaves us in the position of not having much to go by, if expert experience doesn't help analyze the game.
I wonder how different a chess engine and optimal play look for the reduced sized boards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connect_Four#Mathematical_solu...
In general, there’s no guarantee of first mover’s advantage. For example, Hexapawn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexapawn) is a win for black on some boards (https://web.archive.org/web/20050330222720/http://www.chessv...). Versions that are more complex than chess and are a win for black may exist.
So until proven otherwise it's still possible that its theoretical win for white, theoretical draw or theoretical win for black as i understand it.
Unlike tic-tac-toe we're not certain if it is a win or a draw for perfect players.
The chess analogue to this would be that there is a single opening move for white that a perfect player can guarantee a win from, or maybe a limited set of opening moves.
In fact, there is a variant of chess where this the case, namely "pawns-only chess", where 1.b4, 1.c4, 1.f4, and 1.g4 are winning for white, whereas all other first moves are a win for black with perfect play.
https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/8755/is-the-result...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%BA%90
Some highlights:
* Different Chinese variations (Cantonese, Min, etc.) have different readings. Initials, vowels, and finals all differ.
* When borrowed into Japanese, the Chinese initial was ŋ, which isn't used as an initial in Japanese, and was substituted.
I also wouldn't assume that sounds that are grouped together are supposed to sound the same. en/yin/wen/yun use the same final in bopomofo, but sound different.
There is a separate /jɛ/, 也，耶.
Within-syllable -jɛ- exists in yan and its "compounds" tian, mian, lian, etc; changing the final consonant to -ŋ gives you the yang / niang / liang / xiang series of syllables, which have -ja-. This would suggest that, if the vowels are to be unified into one phoneme, the realization of that phoneme is driven more by the following consonant than the preceding vowel/glide.
There's something weird going on where -ɛ- in a complex syllable can appear with more onsets than -a- can. We see e.g. tie, tian, die, dian, mie, mian, bian, pian (with -ɛ-) where we don't see tia, tiang, dia, diang, mia, miang, piang (which would use -a-). xia, jia, qia are all fine, and so is niang. My working hypothesis for that would be "it's a coincidence".
I believe without being able to cite anything that one reason for the spelling of yuan and similar codas with "a" is local variation in how the vowel is pronounced.
One distinction that some Chinese speakers fail to make, though, is between the r- onset and what I would prefer to think of as the j- onset. Thus, for these speakers, rang / yang or rou / you are the same sound.
Pinyin ran uses the standard /a/ vowel, but yan does not. I don't know whether, for speakers who don't distinguish r- from y-, a distinction remains in the vowel of ran/yan syllables.
If you hang with the right crowds (for example people into software correctness), PSPACE completeness is easy and you even solve undecidable problems every day.
It can simultaneously be true both that NP-hardness matters, and that constant-sized problems can be hard.
In other news, no point in needing pi, because perfect circles dont actually exist in the real world.
A computer prunes its moves from either an explicit or implicit (implicit when it's say a trained neural net) database of known positions, with some quantitative sense of strength (usually a probability to win or something like that).
A human needs to assign a narrative to particular branching pathways. These are qualitative instead of quantitative assessments.
A human isn't saying, if I make a certain move there is an 85% chance of winning, and so that makes it my best bet. They're assigning arbitrary structures and narratives to positions, hence why many positions, tactics, and strategies in chess and other games are given colourful names.
The two approaches are very different and have different strengths and weaknesses. Which is why the best play outcome is to combine the computer generated moves with the human generated moves.
The human approach is very good at generalising new information very quickly. Assigning unusual or unfamiliar information in a broader qualitative framework about what good play looks like, think about players who are trying to create certain structures, shapes and patterns on the board.
The computer is very good at applying knowledge about individual moves at great depths. But cannot combine it with any external information. All information about the success rates of moves are determined from the database of all past moves. The computer can't condition those probabilities on things like, does my opponent need to win, or only draw. Do they have a tendency to be aggressive or defensive. Probabilities of success only make sense when taking a population view of the computers input data (a literally impossible task if your talking about the kinds of neural nets used in chess).
So a hybrid approach lets good players condition computer generated moves based on external information. Maybe the computer generates a line of play with 80% confidence of winning, but the human can see that because of certain qualitative structures on the board, the opposing player is more likely to see the solution than the computers population, and so can recondition the lines of play on this new information, even if the human has no idea why the line of play should work 80% of the time. Lines of play that would otherwise have very similar success rates (differing by only a few percentage points say) can be re-ordered based on human judgement.
Both the computer and the human can tell obviously bad from obviously good moves. But their approach is very different when nuance is required.
If a computer could assess every single move, it would. A human would still prefer to rely on narratives and game sense if it's good enough
The more likely outcome if the engine is 'correct' is that it sees the line but thinks an alternative one offers a much greater advantage.
The computer can't condition this information on what you or the opponent is likely to do though. For example, there are lines of play that an engine can generate where you can checkmate in 60+ (even examples where the number goes into the hundreds) moves but only if you play every move absolutely perfectly, this kind of strategy is very brittle, a human might make adjustments to preserve the general idea of the line of play but make it more robust to error. The engine might also generate lines of play that have one or two flaws, but the engine thinks it's very unlikely that the opponent will find those flaws, because the population of games in it's database tells it that very few opponents see them. As the human you might see that your opponent is taking a certain line of play to try and get some sort of positional advantage, and that they are more likely to see the flaw in the engines line of play because the goals are in direct opposition to each other, in this case you would not choose this line because the computer is unable to condition its lines of play on the quality of your opponent.
IMO this is the fundamental reason chess masters around the world don't feel threatened by the computers yet. The way computers play chess relies on past information, often this past information is generated by humans. Humans are also able to generalise the insights that engines can find creating more robust strategies that are hard for engines to beat, until the engine adds it to the database.
No I mean it literally does not see the advantage until after the move is played and it runs depth on the new position. then if you "undo" the move, the engine will now assert it as the best move instead of its previous recommendation (thanks to its cache). It is a very rare occurrence, but Ive seen it happen watching analyses of top games.
another similar thing is that engines aren't that great at detecting "fortresses". So a position that is a draw might be evaluated as an advantage for the attacking side, even though there is no successful attack available. technically the attacking side does have the advantage / more powerful position.. but since it cant be won it should be evaluated to 0. by evaluating it to +1 or similar, that might make the engine favor it over a +0.5 position where attacking chances still exist.
>The engine might also generate lines of play that have one or two flaws, but the engine thinks it's very unlikely that the opponent will find those flaws
do engines do this? this seems much closer to human strategies. In general I totally agree with the larger point that a mix of human and machine is the best combo.
>chess masters around the world don't feel threatened by the computers yet
what do you mean by this? If any master needed to play against stockfish for their life, I think they would feel overwhelmingly threatened. Or do you mean this strictly in the context of human + engine being better than just engine alone?
Generating a full game tree would be a truly daunting undertaking, and I can't even fathom how much memory would it take.
The scenario we're positing is that perhaps, in fully-solved chess, white is actually in zugzwang, where every initial move is actually bad for them.
If there were some way for white to hand the first move to black, then clearly this would be the best solution.
But all the take-back solutions (e.g. move the knight forward and back again) actually give black two moves, which is a different situation.
And the stutter-step solution of white moving a pawn only one space instead of two doesn't work because that's simply refuting the premise that white is in zugzwang.
Zugzwang means that you would be better off not moving any piece on your turn letting your opponent make two moves in a row. There are a number of endgames that depend on getting your opponent into a position where he has only one legal move and by making it you can then play the winning move. If your opponent could instead skip his turn you have no ability to win the game.
I would say no by contradiction. Let's assume black could win without zugzwang. Then white would win (and in particular not lose) by skipping the very first move and then playing blacks strategy (because now black has to make the first move and by white skipping the first move, the colors swapped).
If white would not skip the very first move and play an arbitrary move instead, white loses and black wins.
But this is the very definition of zugzwang! Thus, black can only win because of white's initial zugzwang, which contradicts our assumption.
1. e3 e5 2. e4 whatever
And you effectively have a king's pawn opening with colours reversed
Does this strategy necessarily leads to provably losing position?
> Then white would win (and in particular not lose) by skipping the very first move and then playing blacks strategy
I understand the other comment, that there do exist setups in which colors can be effectively switched by e.g. 1. e3 e5 2. e4, but that requires cooperation on black's part. How does white "skip" the first move? Thanks in advance.
Edit: it may be that the statement "without Zugzwang" implicitly (or perhaps by definition) means you are allowed to skip moves? If so, that clarifies my confusion.
When black has a winning strategy, black already applies "zugzwang" for white's very first move: Black only wins because white has to make a move. If white could skip, black would not win.
> Edit: it may be that the statement "without Zugzwang" implicitly (or perhaps by definition) means you are allowed to skip moves?
Yes. It's not well defined, but I'd say a non-zugzwang win is a win (or rather a winning position) where you would also win when your opponent can skip their turn. A zugzwang win is a win that is not a non-zugzwang win.
So chess being a win for one side is equivalent to starting position being zugzwang for the other side.
It's obvious now, but so interesting to me, I never thought about it that way! Thanks for taking time for explaining yourself.
