Usually followed by teabagging.
8-Year-Old Refugee Wins New York State Championship
71–80 of 192 posts
Re: 8-Year-Old Refugee Wins New York State Championship
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. This isn't a contrived category, which is common in tournaments, to make them interesting. On chess.com and Lichess there are chess tournaments that are restricted to people with lower than, say, a 1500 rating. If a 1700 chess player plays worse on purpose to get the score down, that's called sandbagging. There is little room for sandbagging here. People can't just change their ages, or up and move to the…
What (if anything) stops people from cheating in online tournaments (by simply asking a computer for the best next move, given the current board arrangement)?
I believe that the site (popular chess sites anyway) can detect when someone is continually playing the best (or near-best?) move, and often it's hard to just use the chess engine for one move because they can play "strategically" too of course.
Re: 8-Year-Old Refugee Wins New York State Championship
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
What the hell is this supposed to be?
It's supposed to be clever, I imagine. It just comes across as churlish, though. EDIT: Even the fact that the comment was edited from some stupid pseudocode, into something that cries "wrongthink" plays thusly...
My definition of "wrongthink" is suggesting that facts support confirmation of a narrative, regardless of what the facts are, when that narrative has become socially unacceptable. For example, in Chinese society, to suggest that religious minorities are being mistreated by the government is "wrongthink" regardless of what the facts are.
If this kid had been from a Uyghur family in China and his father had been killed in a Chinese internment camp it would not be "wrongthink" for a western newspaper to say "8-year old fleeing from religious oppression in China wins New York State Championship", though it would be "wrongthink" to print this in a Chinese newspaper or even an Indonesian newspaper. A presidential candidate in Indonesia recently declined to comment on China's mistreatment of muslims for example.
Re: 8-Year-Old Refugee Wins New York State Championship
#74Re: 8-Year-Old Refugee Wins New York State Championship
#75A year after learning to play chess he has a USCF rating of 1473 and is #27 in America for eight-year-olds. Tani participated in the New York State Championship. He won the category for children of his age, kindergarten to third grade, with five wins and one draw[0]. "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and…
Presumably the message we should take from Dr. Gould is that the western world should shower more of its resources on the children of other peoples across the world and less on its own children, in the vague hope of finding that talent in a field or sweatshop.
It makes you wonder whether any other civilization would even consider such a policy, and what the long term prospects are of any civilization that has so little regard for its own success in competition with other civilizations that it would even think about it.
It also makes you wonder what could cause a civilization to adopt that kind of mindset. Surely such an idea would have been laughed at by the western world 300 years ago, or even 100 years ago. Now that kind of mentality seems totally within the normal range. What has changed?
Re: 8-Year-Old Refugee Wins New York State Championship
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. This isn't a contrived category, which is common in tournaments, to make them interesting. On chess.com and Lichess there are chess tournaments that are restricted to people with lower than, say, a 1500 rating. If a 1700 chess player plays worse on purpose to get the score down, that's called sandbagging. There is little room for sandbagging here. People can't just change their ages, or up and move to the…
What (if anything) stops people from cheating in online tournaments (by simply asking a computer for the best next move, given the current board arrangement)?
After game analysis. When someone picks the computer best most from a position you can ask how likely it is they came up with that on their own. Expert chess players recognize computer moves fairly accurately in a lot of situations (this is easy to test, just take a bunch of positions, show the last move and ask if it was human or computer). From there human judges look at the game and decide how likely it is someone cheated.
Of course if you only cheat once you get away with it as nobody will be sure. However cheating once isn't enough to change a game - in fact it will probably change it for the worse on your side (without knowing what the computer intended you follow a bad line after the otherwise good move). Thus you can look at a series of games and concluded if the player cheated or not. From there you take after the fact adjustments which mostly means recalculate everyone's score as if those games didn't happen.
Interestingly enough, chess masters generally will score alpha zero moves as human not computers. It will be interesting to see how online cheating progresses once better AI based chess computers become available.
Re: 8-Year-Old Refugee Wins New York State Championship
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaks to the fragility of the human mind. The human collective organism, as it were, instead of rising against the challenge from the machines, decides to shift focus elsewhere. Chess is nowhere close to being a solved game, yet we're already treating it as such.
Out of curiosity, when would you consider chess, or any game of similar complexity for that matter, "solved"?
When it's possible to predict the winner from an arbitrary board position, given optimal play by both players. Checkers, for example, is solved. Chess and Go are not (even though computers can outperform human players).
Re: 8-Year-Old Refugee Wins New York State Championship
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
minor correction: "sandbagging". the term is common in the scrabble tournament community too, and i'd always assumed it was metaphorically "ambush by hitting someone over the head with a sandbag", but apparently that's only the presumed etymology, and there is at least one other theory out there: https://ridemonkey.bikemag.com/threads/anybody-know-origins-...
just a typo :) thanks! I think chess.com is actually writing code to combat sandbagging. I don't know if they're using machine learning for it yet, but it would certainly be possible for a deep learning system to spot probable sandbaggers, if they have enough history of their games.
It is a hard problem. People have good and bad streaks. People sometimes play drunk, which isn't actually sandbagging but has the same effect. People sometimes play tired and miss moves that would be obvious if they were more awake.
Re: 8-Year-Old Refugee Wins New York State Championship
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaks to the fragility of the human mind. The human collective organism, as it were, instead of rising against the challenge from the machines, decides to shift focus elsewhere. Chess is nowhere close to being a solved game, yet we're already treating it as such.
Out of curiosity, when would you consider chess, or any game of similar complexity for that matter, "solved"?
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Re: 8-Year-Old Refugee Wins New York State Championship
#80Stephen Jay Gould was an ideologically driven liar (https://quillette.com/2019/03/19/the-mismeasurements-of-step...). He should not be regarded as someone worth quoting.