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Strongest chess player, ever

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Re: Strongest chess player, ever

#11

Post by Bootvis »

ars wrote: post #8
_flag wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can watch Magnus Carlsen play a chess program on his phone here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNvVWeHZG00 As you can tell from his commentary, he thinks the machine is rather stupid (and he is winning after the opening) but the machine is a much better calculator than he is and when the situation becomes more concrete he has to force a draw. Of course, the computer on his phone is considerably worse than the b…

> but top chess players generally consider computers to be excellent calculators but dumb in terms of general strategy. Is computer assisted chess a thing? Perhaps with standardized hardware, but any software. In chess I'm good at strategy but terrible at calculating and I miss obvious stuff all the time in my fight for strategy. I always thought I'd do great with computer assistance to look for the obvious stuff, an…

It is. See Centaur chess[1] and correspondence chess. In correspondence chess people don't use standardized hardware (people will probably cheat anyway) but in Centaur chess this can be done.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Chess

Re: Strongest chess player, ever

#12

Post by [deleted] »

ars wrote: post #8
_flag wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can watch Magnus Carlsen play a chess program on his phone here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNvVWeHZG00 As you can tell from his commentary, he thinks the machine is rather stupid (and he is winning after the opening) but the machine is a much better calculator than he is and when the situation becomes more concrete he has to force a draw. Of course, the computer on his phone is considerably worse than the b…

> but top chess players generally consider computers to be excellent calculators but dumb in terms of general strategy. Is computer assisted chess a thing? Perhaps with standardized hardware, but any software. In chess I'm good at strategy but terrible at calculating and I miss obvious stuff all the time in my fight for strategy. I always thought I'd do great with computer assistance to look for the obvious stuff, an…

[deleted]

Re: Strongest chess player, ever

#13

Post by _flag »

ars wrote: post #8
_flag wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can watch Magnus Carlsen play a chess program on his phone here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNvVWeHZG00 As you can tell from his commentary, he thinks the machine is rather stupid (and he is winning after the opening) but the machine is a much better calculator than he is and when the situation becomes more concrete he has to force a draw. Of course, the computer on his phone is considerably worse than the b…

> but top chess players generally consider computers to be excellent calculators but dumb in terms of general strategy. Is computer assisted chess a thing? Perhaps with standardized hardware, but any software. In chess I'm good at strategy but terrible at calculating and I miss obvious stuff all the time in my fight for strategy. I always thought I'd do great with computer assistance to look for the obvious stuff, an…

> Is computer assisted chess a thing?

It was called Advanced Chess [1], now it's sometimes referred to as Centaur Chess. You can find online servers to play this kind of thing but it's mostly just a sort of curiosity. Computer-human pairs are well known to be better than just computers at chess though.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Chess

Re: Strongest chess player, ever

#14

Post by kristopolous »

note that it's just a chess "engine" and doesn't come with a human-usable front-end.

But it's not hard to get the thing to use xboard in linux.

This is what i use to invoke it: xboard -fUCI -fcp stockfish -sUCI -scp stockfish&

it's very challenging - and in my experience, will unfortunately peg a core unless you explicitly pause the front end (the "P" button in between the two arrows in the upper right)

Re: Strongest chess player, ever

#15

Post by NhanH »

Isofarro wrote: post #10
StavrosK wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have computers and software progressed that much since the Deep Blue days? I didn't realize that chess has pretty much been solved now. Are computers really that much better than people nowadays?

Stockfish has been available for quite a while, and over the last few years has been recognised as being the strongest open-source chess engine. It's fantastic to see it take on the best commercial engines toe-to-toe and come out on top. These ratings are computer ratings, and because they are playing very much isolates (computers vs other computers), without enough external human encounters, the ratings are consiste…

That's a surprise to me. I've always thought that the reason we stopped having computer vs grandmaster is that the computer will just beat the grandmaster absolutely.

Re: Strongest chess player, ever

#16

Post by maaaats »

_flag wrote: post #7
EGreg wrote: post #2

I bet it would be unnerving for someone like Kasparov or Magnus Carlsen to play this program, where it would have 1 minute on the clock and they could have the whole day. It would make many of the moves in under a second and they'd be better than the grandmasters' moves!

You can watch Magnus Carlsen play a chess program on his phone here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNvVWeHZG00 As you can tell from his commentary, he thinks the machine is rather stupid (and he is winning after the opening) but the machine is a much better calculator than he is and when the situation becomes more concrete he has to force a draw. Of course, the computer on his phone is considerably worse than the b…

Funny commentary:

> That either shows a profound understanding... or a profound lack of understanding. ... ROOK B6! He has NO SHAME

Re: Strongest chess player, ever

#17

Post by pakitan »

ars wrote: post #8
_flag wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can watch Magnus Carlsen play a chess program on his phone here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNvVWeHZG00 As you can tell from his commentary, he thinks the machine is rather stupid (and he is winning after the opening) but the machine is a much better calculator than he is and when the situation becomes more concrete he has to force a draw. Of course, the computer on his phone is considerably worse than the b…

> but top chess players generally consider computers to be excellent calculators but dumb in terms of general strategy. Is computer assisted chess a thing? Perhaps with standardized hardware, but any software. In chess I'm good at strategy but terrible at calculating and I miss obvious stuff all the time in my fight for strategy. I always thought I'd do great with computer assistance to look for the obvious stuff, an…

> In chess I'm good at strategy but terrible at calculating

Chess is 99% tactics/calculation. What we call "strategy" is just a set of heuristics that we use to avoid having to do endless calculations. However, a lot of those heuristics are already included in most chess playing software. So, if you're weak player as a whole, even if you have some strategy acumen, your contribution in an assisted chess setting will be negligible. The computer will be doing all the work anyway.

My rating is around 2000 and I have done some assisted chess playing and I can tell you that it's extremely hard to not just take computer's suggestion at every move. The chance that I'll come up with some brilliant move that the computer missed is very slim.

Re: Strongest chess player, ever

#18

Post by arek2 »

I don't think that the present situation, when the top chess playing program is free and open-source, is good for innovation.

I estimate that it would take me six months of work to get to the top-20 in the world, and I don't see how I can justify that work to myself.

Re: Strongest chess player, ever

#19

Post by modernerd »

EGreg wrote: post #2

I bet it would be unnerving for someone like Kasparov or Magnus Carlsen to play this program, where it would have 1 minute on the clock and they could have the whole day. It would make many of the moves in under a second and they'd be better than the grandmasters' moves!

“I find playing against computers depressing. I don’t like losing. I also think it's not so useful practise. Even though computers have become more human in their style ... it doesn't help you too much in preparation for playing humans (which are still my main opponents).”

— Magnus Carlsen, in an interview with Peter Thiel at the Churchill Club: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBnSU-LX1ss&t=23m51s

Re: Strongest chess player, ever

#20

Post by anatoly »

Can anyone comment on what makes stockfish different from other chess engines? If I'm curious about state of the art in computer chess, is it worthwhile to study its source? What interesting ideas should I expect to see there beyond what I vaguely know to be the standard approach from introductory AI courses, i.e. some sort of alpha-beta pruning search?
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