361–370 of 461 posts
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Isn’t very high-level chess kind of dead already? I mean - watching Karpov-Kasparov was watching two best players in the world. But nowadays a match between human players just clarifies which of the second-rate devices is better than another. Or is it just me?
Did the invention of artillery cause javelin throwing to be dead?
Time to change the format. It's understandable you don't want to spend your whole career preparing for these long matches all the time. For the challenger it's 6 months of preparing, but for Carlsen it would've been his 6th time of preparing for this in a few years. They have also become less entertaining. 12 matches is long (edit, 14 now), but no one dares to take any risks. Caruana was just defensive and all games…
> They have also become less entertaining. The classical World Championship matches have never been entertaining to watch live. In fact they used to take 2 days for one game. > No one dares to take any risks. Caruana was just defensive and all games ended in a draw. Chess, in theory, with absolutely perfect play, is a draw. It's not a game of "risk" in classical time format. You can take risks in blitz and rapid, but…
> In fact they used to take 2 days for one game.
Come now. The WCC matches were entertaining to watch for chess enthusiasts. Even when games took two days, people would sit and analyze each position, and that was without computers.
They still do that, of course. Although chess computers have taken some of the fun out of the analysis, I've been to several live viewings of the recent WCCs at chess clubs and bars, where a local GM would sit and comment on the position and take questions and suggestions from the crowd.
But the WCC matches have become less entertaining for chess enthusiasts, since there is so much defensive play. There isn't too much to analyze in yet another Berlin game.
It's entertaining when someone makes a horrible blunder, but not in the same way – there's little to analyze in a position that's blundered.
So I'd argue the classical WCC used to be entertaining to watch live for chess enthusiasts, but now they're less entertaining for chess enthusiasts. For "regular people", they've never been very entertaining, except when there's a spectacular blunder, which has never been very entertaining for chess enthusiasts.
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Eh, sometimes you aren’t ‘looking ahead’ that many moves, just that you can calculate the number of moves from a known-winning position. This is why chess programs usually say “mate in 24” but humans would more likely just be looking a few moves ahead to get in a ‘winning position’ which they know is an eventual checkmate. I’m not good at chess, and don’t calculate more than 5 moves ahead, but have ‘spotted’ a mate 2…
How does your comment differ from my comment?
You can just go 'this move is winning, and I can infer that because of these logical points'. This isn't really 'looking ahead x moves into the future', you can just know a position is winning and will cause a cascade of moves of a predictable-length that will end in an eventual checkmate.
If you call this 'looking ahead x moves' or not depends on the definition I guess, but I just mean they might not be actually evaluating / imagining all those positions (because you can either use logic or pattern-match to previous situations).
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> that he's tapping out against someone he's already beaten. Many observers overplay the importance of one match loss. More than one chess champion title was taken by a challenger who had lost in the previous attempt [1] - and considering there was just a handful of champions, it is a lot. [1]: Spassky and Kasparov have lost in their first attempts against Petrosyan and Karpov.
while true, it is still fair to say Carlsen views nepo as a waste of time. While it would be easy to dismiss this as hubris - i think the bigger point is that he doesnt gain anything from beating him again. It's not that Nepo has no chance of winning. Magnus specifically mentioned Firouzja as an opponent that he would consider playing the WCC against[1]. So while not the most important factor in his decision, the fac…
That is not how it works, and not how it is supposed to work. This is hubris and disrespect to all chess players in the world. For more than 100 years champions changed each other in title matches (well, before Kasparov's limitless ego created a decade of turmoil in Chess), with just one exception by Fischer, and now Carlsen 'doesnt feel any personal benefit'. :ThumbDown:
I wonder what Magnus' suggestions for the WC format are. It's very well known that current classical format has the issue of a lot of memorization/theory. To me the issue does not lie in the time format as a lot of people here suggest, but the format of the game. I would appreciate if a couple of chess 960 (Fischer variation) games were added to current format to determine world champion of classical chess.
Single elimination knock out format like some big sport events (football/soccer World Cup, major league sport playoffs etc.)
It can still be BO7/BO9 etc for example but it comes with more randomness (initial matchups)
He just hates the current everyone plays everyone league format then the best score takes on the reigning champion (who didn’t even take part in the first round aka the Candidate’s)
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> 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…
nepo at candidates was in my opinion favored to beat magnus...he dominated the candidates harder than anyone else has in the history of the candidate matches - and it was not an easy pool of candidates, either. Sure, there were a lot of sloppy games, but only a couple vs nepo - with one of them being after the 1st place spot had been guaranteed. If nepo plays like he did in the candidates, I would not be so quick to…
Personally I am not interested in this championship match at all.
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There’s also not really any metric where any of them are better than Fischer. Neither Carlsen nor Kasparov challenged Vishy’s title during the peak of his career. He’s also such a phenomenal player, that if he’d been the one to abdicate the FIDE title instead of Kasparov, you’d easily be able to make the same kind of “top 3” comments about him.
> There’s also not really any metric where any of them are better than Fischer. Off the top of my head - World Championships matches won, time spent as number 1, peak Elo. > Neither Carlsen nor Kasparov challenged Vishy’s title during the peak of his career. When was the peak? He was WC between 2007 and 2013, he wasn't even the top ranked player for most of that time and then he lost the WC to Magnus (then lost the r…
I meant to say that the other way around sorry. A lot of Fischer’s stats aren’t very impressive at all. He’s won less championships than say Kramnik or Petrosian, but not many people would argue that either of those two were greater players than Fischer.
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…
> He was utterly dominant; indeed it is hard to think of a competitor in all of history more dominant over his sport or game than Tinsley. Very interesting comment. This sentence about dominance in a field made me think of Stu Ungar, who dominated Gin Rummy so completely that he had to switch to Poker (where he became a 3-time world champion) to meet interesting adversaries. I couldn't find an exact reference for the…
- 35 World Championship titles (23 in three-cushion + 12 in other carom disciplines)
- 48 European titles (23 in three-cushion) and
- 61 national titles.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'…
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…
> He was utterly dominant; indeed it is hard to think of a competitor in all of history more dominant over his sport or game than Tinsley. Very interesting comment. This sentence about dominance in a field made me think of Stu Ungar, who dominated Gin Rummy so completely that he had to switch to Poker (where he became a 3-time world champion) to meet interesting adversaries. I couldn't find an exact reference for the…
An approximately optimal strategy for Limit Heads Up was determined: http://poker.srv.ualberta.ca/ is a Limit solution.
Machines don't play No Limit perfectly, but they're good enough to have beaten the best humans available when they last tried, so I expect if Stu had lived long enough they'd beat Stu too.
Interestingly Gin Rummy is not seen as a major AI research target. I found some undergraduates playing with relatively simple AI approaches for Gin Rummy as basically a getting your feet wet exercise, but this is apparently not in the context of "Here's what the grown-ups did" but rather "Nobody is exploring this, so whatever you do is actually novel". So there's a real opportunity if somebody is interested.