I was struck by Ding's thoughtfulness, objectivity and humility when asked how he felt after the match (while clearly utterly dejected): > How do you feel? > I think I played my best tournament of the year. I think it was a fair tournament in the end. I have no regrets. > Any message for fans? > Thank you, I will continue to play, I hope I can show strength like this time. Gukesh was equally as objective, humble, and…
I think this mutual respect between players is what elevates chess beyond just a game
I was struck by Ding's thoughtfulness, objectivity and humility when asked how he felt after the match (while clearly utterly dejected): > How do you feel? > I think I played my best tournament of the year. I think it was a fair tournament in the end. I have no regrets. > Any message for fans? > Thank you, I will continue to play, I hope I can show strength like this time. Gukesh was equally as objective, humble, and…
Ding's was not objective neither thoughful, Ding was completely melted down after the interview and the interview was a reflection of that. Chess is a drawn game and the gist of playing chess is to be more resilient, blunder less and exploit as many of the chances you got in your game. Matches and games are won exactly because the opponent doesn't make the best of his chances. This is the cruel nature of the game. A player like Carlsen, Karpov , Kasparov, Kramnik, Anand, Topalov or any other world champion would have felt entitled to win the last game playing White after Gukesh missed a crucial chance to close the match the game before. But no, Ding played to draw and swap pieces even when he had the initiative in the 14th game. And he lost the game with a club player blunder because he still insisted on exchanging pieces when down a pawn. It's basic knowledge that pawn endgames are decisive and you have always to calculate them exactly when entering one, that when one is down material he has to exchange pawns but not pieces, and that in general rook endgames are slighly easier to play than pawn endgames. Any master would have insisted on shuffling the rook and would have never thinked of exchanging pieces in that situation. The fact that he exchanged the rook is a reflection of Ding's terrible form.
I was struck by Ding's thoughtfulness, objectivity and humility when asked how he felt after the match (while clearly utterly dejected): > How do you feel? > I think I played my best tournament of the year. I think it was a fair tournament in the end. I have no regrets. > Any message for fans? > Thank you, I will continue to play, I hope I can show strength like this time. Gukesh was equally as objective, humble, and…
Absolutely. Nepo and Magnus seem to be cut from a different cloth, although Magnus has never had a moment where he could demonstrate whether or not he can be humble, because he has always just crushed. Anish Giri kind of took a shot at Magnus (with respect to his retiring from classical chess) in his early commentary with Petr Leko a few days ago. People are funny, and one doesn't usually get to be where Ding and Guk…
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…
That said, Gukesh deserves credit for keeping the pressure on in a seemingly drawn position
Remarkable to watch the reactions in real-time, of both players and fans from India at the moment the decisive move is played. https://www.youtube.com/live/5-uuDuGQLQA?t=14497s . Only started following chess due to the covid shutdowns, much for fun from a fans point of view than I had imagined it would be. Having the computer evaluation at the side really helps novices like me to know what's going on, interestingly a…
Watching the live reactions from both players and fans is always such a powerful part of these events
Wow. What a match. Been watching with my son, a chess lover since we started watching the Magnus-Fabi match. Now, my son loves his chess club and has retired me from playing :-) Two thoughts: 1) Gukesh took Ding into the deep water the entire time. Few people realize how draining chess is, especially at that level for this time control. It's beyond gruelling. Only programming is more difficult ;-) 2) Gukesh had an ex…
That sense of gratitude and respect for the game and his opponent
> Personally, I'm on the side which thinks that this format is a total stagnation. I was with you until this WCC. In almost every game, Gukesh took Ding out of prep extremely early. It wasn't always a success for him either! Leaving the opening book typically means you accept an objectively-worse position, but one that your opponent has to spend a significant amount of time finding the right ideas in. Even in the cas…
This lacks some context. Gukesh took Ding out of prep bc Gukesh prepped for 7 months, while Ding prepped for 3 weeks and basically wanted to retire from chess. Ding would be out of prep by move 8 as white and be an hour down on time very consistently.
Gukesh repeatedly played opening lines that went out of book shockingly early. No amount of prep can prepare you adequately for someone willing to go off script on move 6.
> Stockfish is a level above even Magnus if given enough depth. "a level" and "if given enough depth" are both underselling it. Stockfish running on a cheap phone with equal time for each side will beat Magnus 100 games in a row.
I believe it’s something like 500 elo points difference at this point between Magnus and Stockfish running on cheap hardware. Computers are so strong the only way to measure their strength is against other, weaker computers, and so on until you get to engines that are mere “grandmaster” strength.
Bear in mind that, beyond the “top” elo ratings, that it’s purely an estimate of relative strength. The gap between a GM and me is far greater than the gap between a GM and Stockfish, even if the stated elo difference is the same.
By this I mean, you can give me a winning position against Magnus and I’ll still lose. Give a winning position to Magnus vs Stockfish and he might draw or even win.
Even 1300s sometimes make the best move. Sometimes the best move is really easy to see or even mandatory, like if you are in check and MUST take that checking piece. Sometimes the best move is only obvious if you can look 20 moves ahead. Sometimes the best move is only obvious if you can look 5 moves ahead, but the line is so forcing that even 1300s can look that far ahead. Despite decades of research, nobody has fou…
Then I can't refrain from asking: and what's the style of LLMs? For example the ChatGPT which is apparently rated around 1800? That should be completely different from that of a classic chess engine.
LLMs can be trained on chess games, but the tree of possible board states branches so fast that for any given position there is simply very little training data available. Even the billions of games played on chess.com and lichess are only a drop in the bucket compared to how many possible board states there are. This would have to be split further by rating range, so the amount of games for any given rating range would be even lower.
This means that the LLM does not actually have a lot of training data available to learn how a 1300 would play, and subsequently does a poor job at imitating it. There is a bunch of papers available online if you want more info.
I was struck by Ding's thoughtfulness, objectivity and humility when asked how he felt after the match (while clearly utterly dejected): > How do you feel? > I think I played my best tournament of the year. I think it was a fair tournament in the end. I have no regrets. > Any message for fans? > Thank you, I will continue to play, I hope I can show strength like this time. Gukesh was equally as objective, humble, and…
Ding's was not objective neither thoughful, Ding was completely melted down after the interview and the interview was a reflection of that. Chess is a drawn game and the gist of playing chess is to be more resilient, blunder less and exploit as many of the chances you got in your game. Matches and games are won exactly because the opponent doesn't make the best of his chances. This is the cruel nature of the game. A…