Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

chess24.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 461 posts

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#101

Post by jstx1 »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #98
jstx1 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like Kasparov because he remained active after the FIDE split. Still a bit different because Magnus isn't running a parallel WC of his own. It's also funny how the only 3 World Champions who have refused to defend a title because of disagreements with FIDE are probably the 3 best chess players ever.

Fischer is clearly the goat in my view. But it’s not so obvious to me that Kasparov and Carlsen are better than say Vishy or Morphy or Botvinnik or Capablanca…

For Anand it's really obvious that both Carlsen and Kasparov are better given that they've beaten him in World Championship matches (Kasparov once, Magnus twice), have positive head-to-head scores against him and have better other achievements like peak rating or time spent at number 1. There's no metric on which Anand comes out on top in comparison to Carlsen and Kasparov.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#102

Post by vishnugupta »

jmyeet wrote: post #21

Obviously this raised the issue of Bobby Fischer. The article mentions this but doesn't really go into the details. Fischer beat Spassky in Rejkyavik in 1972 for the World Championship. This took almost 3 months (July to September) and there was controversy, disagreement and negotiation about where and how it would take place. This had the backdrop of being a Cold War proxy too of course. Interestingly, Fischer didn'…

Speaking of Bobby Fisher I found the book End Game fascinating and engrossing.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#103

Post by simiones »

scaredginger wrote: post #63
adrianN wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chess on an infinite board is asymptotically difficult in the worst case. Chess on an 8x8 board can be solved in constant time.

I invite you to sit down and solve it then

A hundred billion years is still constant time. That doesn't mean it's doable.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#104

Post by matsemann »

kamaal wrote: post #91
zarzavat wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes months of preparation to prepare for the world championships, basically rote memorisation with a team of people. If he doesn't do that, he will lose. This is time that could be spent playing tournaments. This would be okay if the world championships was every four years, but it's every two, so a large fraction of Carlsen's time is spent preparing for this one match that everybody knows he's going to win anyw…

>>Carlsen clearly feels that the World Championship is not important enough to sacrifice a large chunk of his career for. Which other tournaments are considered like the top levels of Chess competition, and what are the criteria for being the top chess player in the world(If not winning the world championship )?

The criteria is probably their rating. Since they use the ELO system, each game gives or loses points. So the ratings are a good measure in how good you are over time and meeting multiple opponents.

And Carlsen absolutely dominates the others, and have been the top rated player continuously for a decade. So no questions about who is the best, WC title or not.

Carlsen is right now 98 points above Nepo, the challenger, which is an insane difference.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#105

Post by Enginerrrd »

taneq wrote: post #100
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And against Nepo it was a steamroll, understandably meeting him again isn't that exciting. The first half of the match wasn't even close to a steamroll. It's just Ian broke mentally after that famous 6th game. The candidate tournament showed that he had more than recovered from that loss and I think he would be in a much better shape to challenge Carlsen again. Also, with Carlsen's current attitude, it is quite pos…

Does it count as 'breaking' if you're just tired of the game and don't want to play any more? Surely it's OK to stop and do other things eventually?

Yes, that's what people mean, almost by definition. In highly competitive events, even a slight break in focus and drive toward winning are often really problematic. Once that wolf-like focus and readiness to fight is broken, a competitor is usually done.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#106

Post by PeterisP »

jmyeet wrote: post #21

Obviously this raised the issue of Bobby Fischer. The article mentions this but doesn't really go into the details. Fischer beat Spassky in Rejkyavik in 1972 for the World Championship. This took almost 3 months (July to September) and there was controversy, disagreement and negotiation about where and how it would take place. This had the backdrop of being a Cold War proxy too of course. Interestingly, Fischer didn'…

The quote by Paul Morphy, one of the great old chess masters, seems relevant here - "The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#107

Post by xiaodai »

meh. this will never happen in shogi or weiqi world. chess is a mess. the issue with top level chess is that draws are the most common result. it doesn't matter for mere mortals like us but it does get boring to follow top level chess vs go and shogi. xiangqi's got the same issue

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#108

Post by bawolff »

dskloet wrote: post #86
sweezyjeezy wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if this was sarcasm, but that's like saying NP-hardness is no big deal because we only care about finite problems.

Chess on an 8x8 board is not NP-hard. That doesn't mean it's easy but invoking NP-hardness is kind of meaningless.

Like parent was saying - that is true of all problems in practise since the earth has finite resources. That doesn't make complexity classes a useless concept.

In other news, no point in needing pi, because perfect circles dont actually exist in the real world.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#109

Post by epolanski »

fairity wrote: post #88

My read on the situation is that Magnus had two goals: 1) remain world champion 2) get to 2900 elo #1 got in the way of #2 because all the elite grandmasters constantly focus throughout the year on preparing for Magnus, which creates a headwind in the non-world champion tournaments where he must perform well to reach 2900. My guess is he will focus on 2900. Then, come back as world champion. Then, retire after 7 cham…

Isn't elo eventually inflated by the number of ranked players anyway?

The more people will be eventually fide rated and climb through the distribution the more the better players will drift at higher elos.

That's also a reason why in modern days we have more 2750+ ranked players than ever.

One common, wrong, argument is that modern players play better, while this is true this does not affect the elo ranking at all. The elo system merely tracks how did you do against opponents with a different ranking and assigns a score based on the win or loss, how well the players did is absolutely irrelevant to the distrubition.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#110

Post by Gehinnn »

rocqua wrote: post #95
TomGullen wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory, wouldn't the player who takes the first move have a tiny tiny edge? Or is the second mover always able to guarantee a draw if they play perfectly?

It isn't known theoretically whether perfect play is enough for black to force a draw. It is also an infinitesimal probability that white starts off in zugzwang (i.e. all possible moves are bad). However the consensus guess is that perfect play yields a draw.

Why is that the consensus guess? I could imagine that a perfect play completely contradicts common chess theory.

Just like we can efficiently find approximate solutions for the traveling salesman problem (that are at most 50% longer than the optimal solution), these heuristics have not much to do with the optimal solution.

Post reply on HN