101–110 of 128 posts
I got out of chess before it consumed my life and I never regretted it. It's a game, not something to spend your life on. Doing anything well is a lesson in concentration, so from that point of view you could replace 'Playing chess' with a very large variety of other skills and it would all send the exact same message.
What did you replace it with?
Ultimately after several attempts at trying to like chess, I find its determinism bit boring. Games with random elements have gameplay elements like evaluation of risk and rewards, so I gravitated towards them(like Scrabble).
Eh... Yes, it requires concentration. But it also requires really good working memory and visuospatial skills. These don't have particularly broad applicability in real life.
This reminds me of a question posed by an online user of a message board I frequent: Will the likes of Deep Blue and Alpha Zero kill competitive chess? My initial thoughts were, "No, of course not! Cars and trains didn't kill track-and-field competitions!". But now that I think about it, I really do feel a slight aversion towards getting back into chess. Although practiced concentration is a side-benefit of playing c…
In a way it's led to more preparation requirements for serious tournaments. You can load up a board in any position and Stockfish will tell you the best possible move from that point.
Once you review your games in Stockfish/similar, it's honestly hard to think about how you would learn what you did wrong in the past, on your own at least. Unless you had a GM teacher, even your teacher may not be 100% all the time, but chess engines have gotten to the point where they essentially are 100% correct.
Once one has learned how to concentrate, the next thing to learn is to be able to concentrate on the right thing. Chess taught me to concentrate, but I've always had trouble concentrating on what I should be concentrating on, and instead wasted too much time concentrating on chess and other diversions. The real trick is being able to focus on something even when it gets frustrating, painful, or boring, and being able…
So how you do concentrate on things that are not chess and games which you find boring?
Another poster mentioned it, but seeking mastery over the whims and desires of your mind is paramount. My anecdote above was basically that. My mind never stopped fighting me, begging me to be lazy and go play video games. But the inner acknowledgement that I had to succeed and graduate let me fight against it.
I also changed my environment, working out of coffee shops and computer labs, surrounded by other people studying and working their asses off. I joined the ACM chapter at my school and expanded my social network to include people who were working as hard as I wanted to. This provided mental sustenance when my personal discipline would wane.
I suggest listening and reading all of John Cleese's talks on creativity. The painful level of effort he describes is fundamentally related to these challenges.
Also, caffeine, copious amounts of it.
Once one has learned how to concentrate, the next thing to learn is to be able to concentrate on the right thing. Chess taught me to concentrate, but I've always had trouble concentrating on what I should be concentrating on, and instead wasted too much time concentrating on chess and other diversions. The real trick is being able to focus on something even when it gets frustrating, painful, or boring, and being able…
That last point is the biggest lesson to be learned for a lot of kids, and a big reason kids quit a good number of difficult activities.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get this line of thinking at all . It seems like such a random goalpoast. Why does it matter if the computer is better? If you're an 1800 rated player, you're still so far behind the best humans that it's irrelevant. Or why care if a computer has examined some similar positions before? As an amateur the positions won't be novel in qny way anyway. No more human innovation is blatantly false. If anything, compu…
For me, AlphaZero was the overwhelming proof that a game with a fixed board and a limited set of rules is fundamentally an exercise in pattern recognition and response, not of actual innovation or creativity. This applies every bit as much to chess and go as it does to checkers. I realized that I really didn't want to try to be a better pattern recognizer (aka computer) than other humans, so I stopped playing and put…
Like a writer?[1] Or a photographer?[2] A graphic designer?[3]
Careful, the computers are beginning to horn in on everything :)
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/robot-...
We nerd types have made this mistake for the last 75 years or so. This mystique about chess has been completely misplaced in my humble opinion. At first the claim was that Smart people played chess, therefore if you made a computer that played chess well it would be Smart. That turned out to be hilariously untrue, but durable: nerds were finally relieved of their arrogance after about 5 decades only when it became cl…
A nerd should have understood that for a game with finite search space, a sufficiently fast brute-force solution will always beat (or not lose to) a smart person. It's the nature of brute-force solution.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A nerd should have understood that for a game with finite search space, a sufficiently fast brute-force solution will always beat (or not lose to) a smart person. It's the nature of brute-force solution.
All search spaces are finite for a sufficiently fast brute force solution.
We nerd types have made this mistake for the last 75 years or so. This mystique about chess has been completely misplaced in my humble opinion. At first the claim was that Smart people played chess, therefore if you made a computer that played chess well it would be Smart. That turned out to be hilariously untrue, but durable: nerds were finally relieved of their arrogance after about 5 decades only when it became cl…
What you are saying is true. You can get life lessons from everything. Nevertheless, in some cases implicitly we talk not about the average or best case but the minimum. A university degree means you meet some minimum requirements. Being a doctor means you meet some minimum requirements. Of course, you can diversify well above the minimum. Here, also, we are talking about the minimum. Sure, you can do gardening and t…
It is this minimum (or perceived minimum) that makes the difference."
UNLIKE the work of doctors and lawyers (at least in good standing here in the US), there is no clear "minimum" in chess (or other sports), you are free to not think and lose as much as you desire. Plenty of people do not take games seriously. I concede that in order to have a elo/fide/uscf rating above something I consider competitive, say 90% percentile, you likely need those qualities.
Also sad blitz chess noises