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Magnus Carlsen is World Chess Champion

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Re: Magnus Carlsen is World Chess Champion

#201

Post by gosukiwi »

saraid216 wrote: post #122
gosukiwi wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty unrelated but you can try online strategy games, personally I've played League of Legends for about two years and I still can't reach Diamond tier. LoL does require some mechanical skill but once you get it down, it's 90% knowledge. Another alternative is Magic The Gathering :) or HearthStone.

The discussion around Carlsen has led me to instinctively make comparisons to Starcraft professional play. http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/How_to_Improve If you listen to commentators discussing matches, they can explain why certain decisions are gutsy, what the history of each player is (so-and-so is amazing at Medivac drops, so you expect that going into a game with him; so-and-so prefers the late game, so yo…

The best thing to do is play like you don't care, so you dont tremble nor doubt to make plays. I've been playing LoL for more than two years, sitting in Platinum right now, still have a lot to learn, the most interesting thing is that LoL is still 90% strategy and knowledge.

Re: Magnus Carlsen is World Chess Champion

#202

Post by phaus »

emidln wrote: post #186
phaus wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The publicity definitely helped the game grow, but at the same time, people who play tournaments rarely deviate from decks based on the ones that the pros are using.

The people who play tournament chess rarely deviate from proven opening sequences as well. As such, publishing move by move accounts of Chess tournaments for documentation and study hinders creativity. See what I did there?

For ranked players, you are absolutely correct. That being said, there is still quite a bit more variety in chess at any level than there is in any given T2 cycle of MTG.

With MTG, even if I went down to my local card shop for Friday Night Magic, there would be enough people there with netdecks to ensure that creative attempts at deck building don't succeed very often.

In a local chess tournament, the level of play isn't even close to being that standardized. Most of the local chess clubs I've been to don't even have more than one or two rated players.

The difference is pretty simple. In MTG, anyone with 200 bucks can buy a world class T2 deck and learn to play it reasonably well in just a few hours. On the other hand, highly standardized play in chess usually only occurs after years of intense study.

There is, however, an easy way to fix MTG's shortcomings. I just play casual/peasant/other unorthodox formats. It makes things more interesting and its cheaper.

Re: Magnus Carlsen is World Chess Champion

#203

Post by ghshephard »

sanoli wrote: post #195
primitivesuave wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't definitively say that a computer's move is best, the branching factor of chess means that searching the game tree until finding a checkmate is nearly impossible. It leads to the horizon effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_effect but recent advances in AI like in Deep Blue have introduced branch extension, where branches of the game tree with statistically similar rankings are searched further unti…

This applies in the earlier stages of the game. In the endgame, when there are fewer pieces, computers can find the best move. There are many instances where say, you reach and endgame with some nine pieces, and the computer will find a mate in 18 moves.

Apparently Carlsen (and presumably other Grandmasters) are also able to look ahead 15-20 moves as well.

http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1948809,00...

Re: Magnus Carlsen is World Chess Champion

#205

Post by birken »

ghshephard wrote: post #203
sanoli wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This applies in the earlier stages of the game. In the endgame, when there are fewer pieces, computers can find the best move. There are many instances where say, you reach and endgame with some nine pieces, and the computer will find a mate in 18 moves.

Apparently Carlsen (and presumably other Grandmasters) are also able to look ahead 15-20 moves as well. http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1948809,00...

One of the reasons computers are so much stronger than humans, especially in the endgame, is because they have incredibly large pre-calculated tablebases[1] of 3, 4, 5 and 6 piece positions. So, if a computer calculates ahead 15 moves, and reaches a 6 piece ending, it already knows the exact evaluation of this position. And in some of these cases, the number of moves from that position to the final position (forced draw or checkmate) can be 10-100 moves [2]. But it is already calculated, the computer doesn't have to go any further. So in effect, the computer calculating 15 or 20 moves ahead in a late stage position can actually be calculating 50 or 100 moves ahead.

This is why the second part of Carlsen's quote is so important:

"Sometimes 15 to 20 moves ahead. But the trick is evaluating the position at the end of those calculations."

A human sees a late game position and has to actually calculate it all the way to its conclusion or at least a key position where they are confident of the evaluation [3]. A computer doesn't have to, and believe me, some of those 6 piece endgame positions are really weird. You move a piece just one innocuous looking square and it can alter the outcome from a win to a draw. There in fact were many endgame positions throughout chess history which were considered solved, only for the evaluation to change after a brute force calculation.

I'm not particularly good at chess [4], but in slow games I will routinely calculate 10 moves ahead in some sharp positions. Now, I'm not comparing my calculating ability to a GM, which is obviously better in every way, but the fact that a GM calculates 15-20 moves ahead is not why they are good. It is that at every step of that calculation they are evaluating the position incredibly accurately and are deciding the right moves to calculate.

In fact, due to the horizon effect, the reason computers got a lot better than humans wasn't due to raw calculation speed, it was due to massive improvements in their evaluation ability (like endgame tablebases) allowing them to put that massive calculation advantage to good use.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endgame_tablebase

2: All of which are already in the tablebase by definition, because you can't add to the number of pieces on the chess board

3: For example, if I can calculate a position to where I have a rook and a king and you only have a king, I don't have to think any further, I know this is a win for me.

4: ~1300 rating

Re: Magnus Carlsen is World Chess Champion

#206

Post by lunaru »

KVFinn wrote: post #160
scott_s wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chess 2 ( http://ludemegames.com/chess2/ ). I'm not joking. USGamer has a good write-up on it: http://www.usgamer.net/articles/chess-2-the-sequel I agree there's a certain amount of hubris behind the endeavor. But I'm interested in the design of balanced games, and the ways in which some old games are not balanced or rigid.

>Chess 2 ( http://ludemegames.com/chess2/ ). I'm not joking. USGamer has a good write-up on it: http://www.usgamer.net/articles/chess-2-the-sequel >I agree there's a certain amount of hubris behind the endeavor. But I'm interested in the design of balanced games, and the ways in which some old games are not balanced or rigid. The creator's blog post is quite entertaining, thought it was a joke but the game is quite r…

Since you bring up Sirlin, I would recommend Yomi, which is a card game that is very balanced and very competitive. I don't think it's as deep as chess, but I certainly enjoy playing it.

Re: Magnus Carlsen is World Chess Champion

#207

Post by mayanksinghal »

KVFinn wrote: post #160
scott_s wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chess 2 ( http://ludemegames.com/chess2/ ). I'm not joking. USGamer has a good write-up on it: http://www.usgamer.net/articles/chess-2-the-sequel I agree there's a certain amount of hubris behind the endeavor. But I'm interested in the design of balanced games, and the ways in which some old games are not balanced or rigid.

>Chess 2 ( http://ludemegames.com/chess2/ ). I'm not joking. USGamer has a good write-up on it: http://www.usgamer.net/articles/chess-2-the-sequel >I agree there's a certain amount of hubris behind the endeavor. But I'm interested in the design of balanced games, and the ways in which some old games are not balanced or rigid. The creator's blog post is quite entertaining, thought it was a joke but the game is quite r…

> the ability to capitalize on reading your opponent is more limited than it could be

Shouldn't be a capitalizable entity in chess. I like chess (unfortunately I don't like it enough to practice it often) because of it's no make-a-poker-face-now requirement.

Re: Magnus Carlsen is World Chess Champion

#208

Post by robryan »

ramidarigaz wrote: post #158
edias wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be interesting to see if Chess, or other boardgames for the matter, will benefit from streaming services as much as video games have. I've seen the Chess-Network on twitch.tv break 1k viewers which is tiny compared to the 300k League of Lengends and Dota 2 tournaments but still a substantial amount regardless.

Chess Network broke 4.5k within the first two minutes of last night's game. I imagine it went higher but I accidentally fell asleep :(

Yeah, it got up to around 20k on at least one of the games.

Re: Magnus Carlsen is World Chess Champion

#209

Post by jamii »

kybernetikos wrote: post #56
sganesh wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you heard about Arimaa? http://arimaa.com/arimaa/

Arimaa is a good choice - it can be played on a chess board, has quite a bit of variety, and is deep as well.

It's also interesting for HN because there is a $11k prize for the first AI to win the annual mixed human-AI tournament.

Re: Magnus Carlsen is World Chess Champion

#210

Post by RRiccio »

flud43 wrote: post #192
RRiccio wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be a professional poker player, and although I agree that especially in the beginning -- while you're quickly evolving -- it's a lot of fun, after a while you do it for the money. It's very different from MTG, where me and my friends would play for the thrill of it, spending whatever little money we had to play. The easy test here is: would you play a poker tournament just for fun, if there was nothing at s…

If you aren't enjoying it anymore, you probably shouldn't be playing any longer. I didn't advocate playing only for the sake of making money. I suggested it because of how complex a game it is. How much time it takes to master. And because the potential rewards once you do are quite significant, which is a nice added bonus. And I'm not sure when you stopped playing (pre black friday?) but I don't think there's a sing…

There is always room for improving. What I'm saying is that going from level 2 to 3 isn't nearly as fun as going from level 9 to 10.

To put in another way: most MtG players I know are still in love with the game 10 years after they started playing competitively, while nearly none of my poker pro friends still play or enjoy poker 5 years after we started.

P.S. Played mostly on PP, pre-BF, diff alias.

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