Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Only programming is more difficult....". Programming is definitely easier for me. In chess, my ego gets in the way. I hate to lose.
Writing good prose can be similarly taxing.
way more imo
Gukesh becomes the youngest chess world champion in history
191–200 of 484 posts
Re: Gukesh becomes the youngest chess world champion in history
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
This really misses the key drama of what happened in the last game. Ding had a perfectly safe position where he could try to squeeze Gukesh pretty much endlessly with basically 0 risk. He then, completely inexplicably, went down a forced line which led to the final phase of the game. In this phase the position was drawn with perfect play, but that is completely irrelevant because it is really tough to play. And more…
Is there a metric I can look at in engine evaluations to determine when a situation is "risky" for white or black (e.g., the situation above) even if it looks equal with perfect play? I've always been interested in understanding situations where this is the case (and the opposite, where the engine favours one side but it seems to require a long, hard-to-find sequence of moves. Playing out the top lines helps if equal…
You can measure the sharpness of the position, as in this paper section 2.3 "Complexity of a position". They find their metric correlates with human performance.
Re: Gukesh becomes the youngest chess world champion in history
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
For someone who has complained a LOT about this information not being readily available, you haven't put it here for us either.
You bothered to comment but didn't bother to help either. Here, I'll do it, Gukesh is 18, Ding is 32.
Do didn’t reply to the OP so I had to look one thread deeper
Re: Gukesh becomes the youngest chess world champion in history
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
This really misses the key drama of what happened in the last game. Ding had a perfectly safe position where he could try to squeeze Gukesh pretty much endlessly with basically 0 risk. He then, completely inexplicably, went down a forced line which led to the final phase of the game. In this phase the position was drawn with perfect play, but that is completely irrelevant because it is really tough to play. And more…
Is there a metric I can look at in engine evaluations to determine when a situation is "risky" for white or black (e.g., the situation above) even if it looks equal with perfect play? I've always been interested in understanding situations where this is the case (and the opposite, where the engine favours one side but it seems to require a long, hard-to-find sequence of moves. Playing out the top lines helps if equal…
Maybe the difference between the eval of the best move vs the next one(s)? An "only move" situation would be more risky than when you have a choice between many good moves.
Re: Gukesh becomes the youngest chess world champion in history
#195That was a absolutely horrible finish to a really exciting championship if you ask me. For anyone who doesn't know, there was a lot of drama because Gukesh was playing amazingly coming into this (eg winning the gold medal on board 1 at the olympiad in crushing style) and Ding had been playing terribly. Then there were 13 games of back and forth with stalwart defending and imaginative computer preparation by both side…
If anyone’s interested in what a GM’s thought process on the game looks like there’s a really great recap here which was produced without engines [1] https://youtu.be/97RZHG2rcbc?si=O41BRi2EC8Ryu0v2 [1] With the intention of trying to as honestly as possible replicate the situation for the players where obviously they have to think for themselves and don’t have access to an engine while playing.
you can also take a look at anish giri's recaps: https://youtu.be/EQDpuPzps88?feature=shared
he streamed watching most of the openings, and kept his own eval bar on the side, occassionally checking his lines against strong engines
Re: Gukesh becomes the youngest chess world champion in history
#196I am not happy with this result (quite the blunder deciding this match) and in general who played for the crown here. Ding is not in the top for a while now and Gukesh has rarely played in Top GM tourns. The silent champ (Magnus) is still around, winning tournaments. "World champion" currently means "some lucky Top GM" and not "the undisputed number one".
Ok, admittedly, in blitz and rapid Ding is quite close to the top.
Re: Gukesh becomes the youngest chess world champion in history
#197For anyone that wants to test their mettle, the FEN of the key position in this game was:
B7/8/4b3/4kp2/5Rp1/6P1/1r6/6K1 w - - 16 55
Give yourself 10 minutes and 30 seconds increment as White and see if you can hold against Stockfish on maximum difficulty.
Re: Gukesh becomes the youngest chess world champion in history
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
... but you can infer from the HN post title that it's unusual.
Agreed. I think all the people who don't like my take i offer this. Blasting a headline like that typically implies like a 13-14 year old. This is impressive but its not some massive upset - 18 is a grown adult for all intents and purposes (brain still developing true…)
All intents and purposes not requiring the brain, then. Which one is chess?
The only people who consider 18 year olds fully grown adults are 18 year olds.
Re: Gukesh becomes the youngest chess world champion in history
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, they use chess engines to find interesting lines of play that the opponent presumably is not prepared for. Say, an odd move that looks weak, but a few moves later is back at even, and the player that pushed down this line is now prepared to play on from there (with perhaps further traps laid ahead), while the opponent is somewhat in the dark and has to analyze the situation correctly.
Has anyone tried playing one of these "chess engines" against a human? We may have an opportunity to cut out the middleman here (no pun intended).
i think theres something interesting for chess engines to cut out a middleman.
the players have "seconds" who are doing things like finding and picking prep for the players to memorize. currently, theyre GMs/super GMs who are somewhat playing against each other, but i think you could train an AI look at lines for ones that the opponent might miss, or that would trip them up
Re: Gukesh becomes the youngest chess world champion in history
#200That was a absolutely horrible finish to a really exciting championship if you ask me. For anyone who doesn't know, there was a lot of drama because Gukesh was playing amazingly coming into this (eg winning the gold medal on board 1 at the olympiad in crushing style) and Ding had been playing terribly. Then there were 13 games of back and forth with stalwart defending and imaginative computer preparation by both side…
Chess really baffles me Most of the more sophisticated people I know are completely disinterested in sports. Not that they dislike sports, it just never occupies their mind. Sports is a purposeless activity for kids Chess is different from sports in only one way: the loss of very intelligent capable people who could be helping to create the future. Chess is even more tragic than the olympics.
Honestly this sounds like a knock-on effect of the US's constant erosion of the glue of community. Church attendance down, sport attendance down, theater attendance with friends down, it's all the same.
Social norms can change this -- the Netherlands has a very similar culture to the US, But one thing people asked me while I was doing my M.Sc. there was just, "what is your sport?" ... and I got asked it enough that I eventually got one, and then for a good period of time I managed to completely kick my obesity, until I moved back to the American Midwest.
The introvert/extrovert axis also plays a role in what sort of "sport" is right for you, of course, and many of your sophisticated friends still hit the gym or jog etc. -- those are just sports for introverts in my view.
Sport time is not, time that could have been better spent elsewhere. It's like how cleaning the sink isn't time that could have been better spent elsewhere -- if you don't have a clean sink, you'll pay the interest in terms of "ugh what's that smell [...] oh it was the standing water in this bowl" and "crap I don't have a clean glass, hm, I wonder if I can just buy compostable cups on Amazon so that I don't have that problem..." etc. So as an extrovert, I can go once a week to play soccer with friends in a small league, or, just hear me out, I can get lonely and then do what I do when I get lonely, which is pop on Physics Stack Exchange and answer physics questions so that I can feel Of Use. You pay the interest either way.
Chess-time also is no great loss for the world. The top-level world chess community is something we have numbers for -- 17k titled players, 2k grandmasters, 4k international masters beneath that. They are pursuing something that exactly fits the nerdy way that their brain works -- memorize openings out to 20 moves deep, obsessively study and re-study their failed games to understand why the computer thinks they lost and how they might make better mistakes in the future, and for them it HAS to be competitive and they HAVE to have that immediate feedback of trying a new idea in the same narrow niche of ideas that they became a super-expert-in, against another top player who can punish their new mistakes.
It's just not a set of transferable world-changing skills. It's like, my brother became single-mindedly obsessed with pool in High School. This persists even though he now runs a small company operating a strip mall. This was just his thing, he loves that there is no upper bound to how much control he can have over the cue and the balls, using the spins of each to control the layout, and precisely planning a course through a 9-ball break and setting himself up for a clean sweep through the game. There was no world in which some "world-changing create-the-future" lifestyle, would have felt as much of a glove fitting his hand to him, as this did. And it is no great loss for the world that he found the glove that fits his hand. It's not like the strip mall would have become an American retail empire rivaling Amazon, if only he had spent his nighttime hours working on the mall instead of on his life passion.
For comparison, probably most of the people in the bottom 10% performance bracket at Google are being told and pressured "you need to do more, more, more, you're gonna get fired if you keep those low numbers up" and at 180k employees, that amounts to 18k people that, unlike top chess players, probably _could_ flourish and do better in some smaller scrappier company, but because America doesn't have a social safety net to speak of, they feel like "well I got the dream 6-figure job, I better hold onto that until my knuckles are white because if I got fired, Bay Area rent and cost-of-living could bankrupt me in 3 months." And that's literally just one megatech company, not even talking about the world of people Graeber argues are doing "bullshit jobs" etc. etc.