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

What is Chess? What to think and for how long

alexcrompton.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 126 posts

Re: What is Chess? What to think and for how long

#111

Post by inimino »

vlovich123 wrote: post #18
armitron wrote: post #7

Precise thought patterns, acronyms, X seconds per move... This seems like a terrible, robotic way to play chess, at least when it comes to having fun. I've played in excess of 100k games on lichess (mostly 3 minutes, some 5 minute and bullet too, no increments) with my ELO rating being ~2100 and I don't consciously do any of these (whether these or approximations of such still take place unconsciously is a different…

> No masters are sitting there counting TSAW TISP on their claws! I think this is misguided. A rigorous thought pattern is not a cage, it is an x ray. It shows our lion's bones. Strong players don't notice their thought patterns - you only notice bones when they're broken. The goal is not to think TSAW TISP in t, the goal is for good thought patterns to become so internalised that they form the skeleton our muscles h…

The helpful advice is to just try to match your opponent's speed. This is 10 times more useful than the OP advice based on some formula.

Chess is about the ebb and flow of ideas between you and the opponent. If you're not calculating when your opponent is, you'll lose. This is why this the advice is the right advice. You have to develop awareness and "responsiveness" to what your opponent is doing.

Re: What is Chess? What to think and for how long

#112

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

fasterik wrote: post #101
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? Famously, Anna Karenina is about a woman who jumps in front of a train, why bother to read the other 863 pages. Anti-Oedipus [1] and especially A Thousand Plateaus [2] is about living in rarefied, futural spaces. Deleuze would be the first to be disgusted even at the faintest idea that his writing has any meaning whatsoever: you want meaning? go and live your life, don't read a book, especially not a philoso…

There's a word for that, it's called "obscurantism". Profound and true ideas can always be put in simple language. See Richard Feynman for one example. When someone uses a lot of complicated words and sentences to make a trivial point, that's a red flag for me.

Again, Deleuze would be offended if you thought any of his work has "profound and true ideas", for him (and Guattari), philosophy is simply not about "profound and true", he mocks endlessly all these people sick with "sign-ificance", every sign must mean some-thing.

Also, accusing Deleuze of obscurantism is absolutely unfair and ignorant: Deleuze was truly one of the great teachers, those who can be pedagogical while keeping and increasing your interest in the topic, much akin to Feynman, in his works which disentangle the works of previous philosophers: Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), Kant's Critical Philosophy (1963), Proust and Signs (1964), Bergsonism (1966), Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1981), Foucault (1986), The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988). The aforementioned What Is Philosophy? is also extremely clearly written, and it is one of the best books ever to tackle in such a direct manner such a question.

Also, accusing Deleuze of "complicated words for trivial points" is just ridiculously funny: it's like accusing Bach of composing too much music: couldn't he just sum up all the toccatas, fugues, partitas, and so on in one single massive beat drop.

Re: What is Chess? What to think and for how long

#113

Post by poulsbohemian »

fasterik wrote: post #99
DC-3 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mistranslation is unfair. It's a translation that best reflects the spirit of the original. It would be distracting to the modern reader to refer to a game which would be obscure and unfamiliar, when most likely the point of the original text is to invoke a board game which would be universally known among the audience. That said, you are right: https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/De_brevitate_vitae > XIII 1. Persequi sin…

>It would be distracting to the modern reader to refer to a game which would be obscure and unfamiliar I find it far more distracting to find a modern term in an ancient text that I know the author couldn't have known about. It's jarring and anachronistic. I would much rather see the original term. I can make a decision about whether to spend a minute to look it up (and learn something!) or skim over it if the meanin…

Agreed - a nice footnote would be appropriate.

Re: What is Chess? What to think and for how long

#114

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

humanizersequel wrote: post #105
ajkjk wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"florid" as a word means "excessively complicated", not just "complicated". I'd describe this writing as florid because it its fanciness and complexity is obnoxious and unnecessary. Of course it's my opinion, but yeah, I think it's just bad writing, written to sound pretentious on purpose, doing a shit job of communicating its point because it wants to be inaccessible. You could easily write the same thing more clear…

>You could easily write the same thing more clearly in no more space. I certainly couldn't, and I have spent a reasonable amount of time studying Nomadology (the text from which this passage is taken). Why don't you give it a shot? Put your money where your mouth is, let's say just the second paragraph, as that's the more serious offender in terms of jargon. I sincerely don't think you can rewrite it to be ~12 lines,…

Sure you could:

"In chess pieces have identity and thus differentiated functions, in go they don't. At the level of state/war machine there are also functionaries: the president, the general, but also interchangeable parts: soldiers, workers."

It just doesn't mean anything that you can summarize this or anything (Deleuze or not), you could even use a statistical learning tool to summarize it. You could summarize your deepest pain using just the words "it hurt", or your deepest pleasure with the banal, Owen-Wilson-esque interjection, "wow", so what?

These people have just been mesmerized by Marcus Hutter and the like that "compression is intelligence", or by Richard Feynman and the like that things must be simple and explainable to a child: yes, maybe, if you write equations; no, if you are expressing love: philo-sophia. I just imagine reading their love letters: "Dear beloved, Today, as previously told, I love you also, Signed".

Re: What is Chess? What to think and for how long

#115

Post by bsaul »

bzhang255 wrote: post #37
bsaul wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO the 1950s and 60s were the pinacle of intellectual life ( at least in france). Students were actually "fans" of philosophical figures like jean paul sartre. The trendiest place for youth wasn't a nightclub or a gym. It was the café de flore, close to "la sorbonne" university, were one could hope to see a famous writer have a coffee. Young people would spend their saturday skimming through books at "gilbert josep…

Were you one of those youths or are you just romanticizing someone else's past (which you know nothing about) so you can criticize a contemporary youth populace (whom you know nothing about)?

my parents lived that period as students, i got those stories from them. but it's nothing extraordinary, pretty much everyone knows about this period.

as for youth today, i use those apps and i talk to kids in my family. Once again pretty common knowledge.

Re: What is Chess? What to think and for how long

#116

Post by mcv »

keiferski wrote: post #4

I’ve always found Deleuze and Guattari’s comments on chess vs. go to be interesting. Some of the terminology might not make sense if you’re unfamiliar with their work, but I think you can get the general gist: Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the state apparatus in the context of the theory of games. Let us take chess and Go, from the standpoint of game pieces, the relations between the p…

Let me try to translate that a bit.

In chess, the pieces are intrinsically different. Their role in the game depends on the kind of piece they are, which doesn't change (unless a pawn promotes, I guess), instead of their position or relation with other pieces, which changes constantly. In go, all stones are identical, and their differences arise from their relationships with other stones around them.

In chess, you play to kill the opponent's pieces. In go, you play to claim territory. It's possible to win without ever taking an opposing stone. Although what's territory can be very fluid, because stones can be placed anywhere, and thereby kill a group that was thought to be alive, save a group that seemed dead, destroy or claim territory. But it all depends on the stone's relation to other stones. Chess depends much more on what a single piece is capable of. Even a poorly positioned queen is worth more than a very active bishop, because the queen can move to a better position, but the bishop can't turn into a queen.

I'm sure a missed a lot of nuance. I have no idea what they mean by nomos and polis, and parts of the second paragraph sound like I disagree with it. Maybe my translation is more my own opinion than a translation of theirs.

Re: What is Chess? What to think and for how long

#117

Post by mcv »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #89
ajkjk wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The florid writing is an elitist fad; you can express the same idea in much simpler language without losing any meaning.

So what? Famously, Anna Karenina is about a woman who jumps in front of a train, why bother to read the other 863 pages. Anti-Oedipus [1] and especially A Thousand Plateaus [2] is about living in rarefied, futural spaces. Deleuze would be the first to be disgusted even at the faintest idea that his writing has any meaning whatsoever: you want meaning? go and live your life, don't read a book, especially not a philoso…

> Anna Karenina is about a woman who jumps in front of a train, why bother to read the other 863 pages.

Spoilers! I hadn't read it yet.

Re: What is Chess? What to think and for how long

#118

Post by keiferski »

mcv wrote: post #116
keiferski wrote: post #4

I’ve always found Deleuze and Guattari’s comments on chess vs. go to be interesting. Some of the terminology might not make sense if you’re unfamiliar with their work, but I think you can get the general gist: Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the state apparatus in the context of the theory of games. Let us take chess and Go, from the standpoint of game pieces, the relations between the p…

Let me try to translate that a bit. In chess, the pieces are intrinsically different. Their role in the game depends on the kind of piece they are, which doesn't change (unless a pawn promotes, I guess), instead of their position or relation with other pieces, which changes constantly. In go, all stones are identical, and their differences arise from their relationships with other stones around them. In chess, you pl…

You’re more or less correct, but the terms like nomos and deterritorialization are technical terms used by D&G. This section on chess is situated in a larger text on politics and space in general.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterritorialization

Here’s a good 11-video series on their thought, for anyone curious:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCh5HOS_mbjLB4U_8IviyXTcO...

Re: What is Chess? What to think and for how long

#119

Post by humanizersequel »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #114
humanizersequel wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You could easily write the same thing more clearly in no more space. I certainly couldn't, and I have spent a reasonable amount of time studying Nomadology (the text from which this passage is taken). Why don't you give it a shot? Put your money where your mouth is, let's say just the second paragraph, as that's the more serious offender in terms of jargon. I sincerely don't think you can rewrite it to be ~12 lines,…

Sure you could: "In chess pieces have identity and thus differentiated functions, in go they don't. At the level of state/war machine there are also functionaries: the president, the general, but also interchangeable parts: soldiers, workers." It just doesn't mean anything that you can summarize this or anything (Deleuze or not), you could even use a statistical learning tool to summarize it. You could summarize your…

>"In chess pieces have identity and thus differentiated functions, in go they don't. At the level of state/war machine there are also functionaries: the president, the general, but also interchangeable parts: soldiers, workers."

I'm pretty sure you're agreeing with me in a roundabout way, but for posterity: this is clearly not a lossless compression.

Re: What is Chess? What to think and for how long

#120

Post by ycombinete »

fasterik wrote: post #99
DC-3 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mistranslation is unfair. It's a translation that best reflects the spirit of the original. It would be distracting to the modern reader to refer to a game which would be obscure and unfamiliar, when most likely the point of the original text is to invoke a board game which would be universally known among the audience. That said, you are right: https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/De_brevitate_vitae > XIII 1. Persequi sin…

>It would be distracting to the modern reader to refer to a game which would be obscure and unfamiliar I find it far more distracting to find a modern term in an ancient text that I know the author couldn't have known about. It's jarring and anachronistic. I would much rather see the original term. I can make a decision about whether to spend a minute to look it up (and learn something!) or skim over it if the meanin…

I have to agree. It was jarring to me to find this in my translation. I think either the original term with a footnote, or perhaps something more generic like “Boardgames”
Post reply on HN