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Gukesh becomes the youngest chess world champion in history

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Re: Gukesh becomes the youngest chess world champion in history

#321

Post by rieska »

tomatovole wrote: post #164
ANewFormation wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This really misses the key drama of what happened in the last game. Ding had a perfectly safe position where he could try to squeeze Gukesh pretty much endlessly with basically 0 risk. He then, completely inexplicably, went down a forced line which led to the final phase of the game. In this phase the position was drawn with perfect play, but that is completely irrelevant because it is really tough to play. And more…

Is there a metric I can look at in engine evaluations to determine when a situation is "risky" for white or black (e.g., the situation above) even if it looks equal with perfect play? I've always been interested in understanding situations where this is the case (and the opposite, where the engine favours one side but it seems to require a long, hard-to-find sequence of moves. Playing out the top lines helps if equal…

Yes, the Leela team has worked on a term they call Contempt. (Negative contempt in this case would make the engine seek out less sharp play from whites perspective) In the first link the authour talks about using contempt to seek out/avoid sharp lines. lc0 and nibbler are free, so feel free to try it out if curious.

https://github.com/LeelaChessZero/lc0/pull/1791#issuecomment... https://lczero.org/blog/2023/07/the-lc0-v0.30.0-wdl-rescale/...

Re: Gukesh becomes the youngest chess world champion in history

#322

Post by Spivak »

oconnor663 wrote: post #310
dorgo wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take the computer which beats Magnus and restrain it to never make the best move in a position. Expand this to N best moves as needed to reach 1300 rating.

I assume you could just give the computer a large set of 1300 rated games and train it to predict moves from that set :)

I think there's a real difference between "a computer"— in this context meaning an algorithm written by a human, possibly calibrated with a small number of parameters but not trained in any meaningful sense, and a "chess model" which works as you describe.

I think the chess model would be successful at producing the desired outcome but it's not as interesting. There's something to be said for being able to write down in precise terms how to play imperfectly in a manner that feels like a single cohesive intelligence strategizing against you.

Re: Gukesh becomes the youngest chess world champion in history

#323

Post by hyperliner »

ANewFormation wrote: post #158
seanhunter wrote: post #31

That was a absolutely horrible finish to a really exciting championship if you ask me. For anyone who doesn't know, there was a lot of drama because Gukesh was playing amazingly coming into this (eg winning the gold medal on board 1 at the olympiad in crushing style) and Ding had been playing terribly. Then there were 13 games of back and forth with stalwart defending and imaginative computer preparation by both side…

This really misses the key drama of what happened in the last game. Ding had a perfectly safe position where he could try to squeeze Gukesh pretty much endlessly with basically 0 risk. He then, completely inexplicably, went down a forced line which led to the final phase of the game. In this phase the position was drawn with perfect play, but that is completely irrelevant because it is really tough to play. And more…

[dead]

Re: Gukesh becomes the youngest chess world champion in history

#324

Post by mcmoor »

benatkin wrote: post #232
hilux wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree completely. In the eyes of some modern fans, the popularity of engines and eval bars has reduced chess to an intellectual and computational exercise. It's too easy to say "bad moves" and "blunder" when Stockfish is giving you all the answers! In reality, chess is a fighting contest between two flesh-and-blood humans. And that's what we see throughout this exciting match, and in this final game. Gukesh won…

That isn't how most appreciate sports. People are hoping for the contenders to be at the top of their game towards the end of the championships. Nobody says "Hey, at least this has a human touch! I'm sick of basketball video games." if the NBA finals are relatively boring one year. I think maybe "that was a absolutely horrible finish" got interpreted as saying that the win wasn't well earned. That's not how I saw it…

I've seen people leaving a game when it's locked in a shitty meta. An unsatisfying world championship is one of the indication for that

Re: Gukesh becomes the youngest chess world champion in history

#325

Post by kelipso »

xpe wrote: post #287
jedberg wrote: post #201

Since there seem to be a lot of chess nerds in here, I have a question. Why didn't Fischer chess ever take off? A lot of comments in here amount to "he went slightly off book and it was amazing!". Wouldn't Fischer chess take the game to a whole new level, making it so that all the opening books are useless and the midgame requires much more improv?

From the Wikipedia page on Chess960: > Hence, on average, a Chess960 starting position is actually 18.2% more balanced than the standard starting position. I'm also interested in the underlying distribution (not just the average). For each of the 960 starting positions, what is known about the first-player advantage? (I'm pretty sure these would just be estimates because a full solution is still infeasible.)

On average. Some starting positions are much less balanced than regular chess.

Re: Gukesh becomes the youngest chess world champion in history

#326

Post by binarymax »

seanhunter wrote: post #31

That was a absolutely horrible finish to a really exciting championship if you ask me. For anyone who doesn't know, there was a lot of drama because Gukesh was playing amazingly coming into this (eg winning the gold medal on board 1 at the olympiad in crushing style) and Ding had been playing terribly. Then there were 13 games of back and forth with stalwart defending and imaginative computer preparation by both side…

My best guess is he started feeling some time pressure and really wanted to trade for a clear draw, but crucially miscalculated the tempo and position of the K vs KP ending.

I'm not a grandmaster though, so I can only vaguely speculate since that's how I would have lost :)

Re: Gukesh becomes the youngest chess world champion in history

#327

Post by kelipso »

jedberg wrote: post #201

Since there seem to be a lot of chess nerds in here, I have a question. Why didn't Fischer chess ever take off? A lot of comments in here amount to "he went slightly off book and it was amazing!". Wouldn't Fischer chess take the game to a whole new level, making it so that all the opening books are useless and the midgame requires much more improv?

I don’t like it because you can get some starting position that’s not balanced, or that one of the players has memorized the openings for. So it feels much more luck based than regular chess, whereas luck is pretty much the antithesis of what chess is all about.

Re: Gukesh becomes the youngest chess world champion in history

#328

Post by kelipso »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #274

Just the World Champion. Youngest FIDE World Champion (the title Gukesh just won) was Ruslan Ponomaryov, at 6681 days old. Gukesh is currently 6772 days old. (And no, we shouldn't go arguing that Ponomaryov wasn't a real champion because the indisputably best player chose not to play sometimes earlier and created all that mess, because currently we're in exactly same situation.)

Undisputed world champion and disputed world champion are different things than someone choosing not to compete. If you can’t compete, doesn’t matter the reason or excuses you can come up with, you are just not the world champion.

Re: Gukesh becomes the youngest chess world champion in history

#329

Post by kelipso »

endorphine wrote: post #309
ceronman wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was. But he had 9 minutes vs more than an hour for Gukesh. The entire match has been Ding defending miraculously, I thought it was a matter of time before he eventually failed. The fact that it happened on the last moves of the last game, it's definitely hard for Ding, but fair for Gukesh IMO.

I don't get the "fair" argument. Would it be unfair if Ding did not blunder the rook? How so?

Presumably the classical world championship should be determined by classical chess games, and this was the last one before the shorter tiebreak games. Ding looked like he would’ve started losing more if there were more classical games, who knows though.

Re: Gukesh becomes the youngest chess world champion in history

#330

Post by bbconn »

kelipso wrote: post #327
jedberg wrote: post #201

Since there seem to be a lot of chess nerds in here, I have a question. Why didn't Fischer chess ever take off? A lot of comments in here amount to "he went slightly off book and it was amazing!". Wouldn't Fischer chess take the game to a whole new level, making it so that all the opening books are useless and the midgame requires much more improv?

I don’t like it because you can get some starting position that’s not balanced, or that one of the players has memorized the openings for. So it feels much more luck based than regular chess, whereas luck is pretty much the antithesis of what chess is all about.

Introducing: Balanced Fischer chess. Just randomly sample from the starting positions that are more balanced than regular chess.
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