221–230 of 461 posts
It might be worth mentioning a famous abdication which caused a lot of consternation, albeit in another game. I love this story but may have gotten some details wrong. Marion Tinsley was world checkers champion from 1955-1958, then took a break, then again from 1975-1991, when he resigned in protest (at age 64 ). He was utterly dominant; indeed it is hard to think of a competitor in all of history more dominant over…
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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."
I hope it doesn't apply to coding too.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing though because we’re always working with a simplified system whatever we’re doing in life, the question is just how much is it helping people. Chess provides entertainment and personal challenge, coding provides ridiculous productivity. All things in moderation though.
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What do you mean skip the first move? Like play a neutral move? Why would such a move exist?
You can play e.g. 1. e3 e5 2. e4 whatever And you effectively have a king's pawn opening with colours reversed
Does this strategy necessarily leads to provably losing position?
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Not sure if this was sarcasm, but that's like saying NP-hardness is no big deal because we only care about finite problems.
NP-hardness is indeed often not a big deal in practice because NP-hardness is a statement about asymptotic worst case complexity. In practice you have some finite size problems that are often of average difficulty, not of worst case difficulty. For example, we solve instances of SAT every day, some of them quite large. Even humans are able to solve many Sudoku puzzles, even though Sudoku is NP-hard. If you hang with…
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What do you mean skip the first move? Like play a neutral move? Why would such a move exist?
Skip your turn. Don't move anything at all. Zugzwang means that you would be better off not moving any piece on your turn letting your opponent make two moves in a row. There are a number of endgames that depend on getting your opponent into a position where he has only one legal move and by making it you can then play the winning move. If your opponent could instead skip his turn you have no ability to win the game.
Honest question: Would somebody at this "level" be better than good at something like StarCraft ? Noted that SC takes more than "just strategy" i.e micro comes to mind. Like I would pay good money to see Serral Vs Magnus, maybe after some coaching sessions with Harstem ? :D ? EDIT: Just out of curiosity will there be anything else that someone at this level is "exceptional" good at besides chess ?
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Chinook was obviously playing the long con. Knowing Tinsley's weakness was his humanity, so it continued to draw until his frail human body succumbed to the forces of nature, thus winning once and for all.
It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness, that is life.
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Chess' centre of gravity is increasingly online centred now. Carlson himself has a lot to do with it. So do other charismatic super GMs like Nakamura. A light hearted, unplanned and unadvertised naka-carlsen bullet match can attract a lot of viewers. They both stream, and lots of other chess streamers will switch to watching and doing commentary when these matches happen. They'll play silly openings like the double b…
> A light hearted, unplanned and unadvertised naka-carlsen bullet match can attract a lot of viewers. I'd bet a 20 game rapid series over 4 days between naka-carlsen would attract more viewers than the world championship.