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Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

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Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#41

Post by matharmin »

rawoke083600 wrote: post #23

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 ?

There is not that much overlap between skills required for chess and StarCraft. Being good at one may perhaps correlate with having some natural talent in the other, but experience in the specific game would matter a lot more.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#42

Post by kamaal »

matsemann wrote: post #32
taude wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know next to nothing about competitive chess, other than watching the Magnus documentary about a younger Magnus. What kinds of things are chess players doing to prepare for a match for 6 Months? Is there something they're memorizing, studying video (what would they be looking fro)? I'd have always just thought they were good to play at any time. This sounds super stressful.

In a normal tournament, you meet so many different people (and you often don't know in advance exactly who you will meet of all the participants), so it's hard to specifically prepare. For a match of this kind, however, you know your opponent will prepare specifically against you. So you kinda have to do the same. That entails analyzing all of their games and finding defenses and weaknesses. But also trying to find n…

Say a player just rote memorised moves from a chess engine and just played it. Would that be considered cheating?

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#44

Post by nhumrich »

fouronnes3 wrote: post #22
sgjohnson wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Chess, in theory, with absolutely perfect play, is a draw. While this is highly likely and essentially agreed upon by all experts on the matter, it's not proven yet.

Chess is still no-hard, so "proving this" will be near impossible. The closest we have is statistics. I remember watching a "bot battle." A chess tournament for bots only, algorithms playing eachother. Nearly 70% of these games ended in draw.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#45

Post by FartyMcFarter »

TomGullen wrote: post #17
sgjohnson wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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's possible, although it seems unlikely, that white is in zugzwang [1] on the starting position, in which case black would have a win with perfect play.

Chess is only solved for positions with 7 pieces or less (and some configurations of 8 pieces [2]), so we're far from knowing best play from the 32-piece starting position.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zugzwang

[2] https://www.chess.com/blog/Rocky64/eight-piece-tablebases-a-...

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#46

Post by Cass »

bfuller wrote: post #29
kamaal wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those of us who don't follow this closely, why is the format such a problem? Is it because its stressful, and demands too much work and prep from participants. Just asking as competitive sport at the top level be it chess, football, or even swimming for that matter demands lots of work and a kind of work ethic not easy for most of us.

No idea their reasoning, but if I were a top football, swimmer, or other athlete and knew that a computer could outperform me even at my highest level would be pretty disconcerting.

That's already true of most sports, though. There's plenty of mechanical constructs that can move faster than the fastest human. The challenge is to be the fastest human using nothing but a human body, not to outrun a car or a boat (or even a humanoid running robot, which I assume we could build at this point, if anyone was interested in putting enough money behind it.)

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#47

Post by qw »

matsemann wrote: post #25
sgjohnson wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I've found them entertaining to watch. But Norwegians are master of slow-TV, so I guess that's why. They have good experts that manage to explain it to normal people. Interesting guests in the studio between moves. Interact with audience through questions from chat etc. > Chess, in theory, with absolutely perfect play, is a draw. I don't think that's solved, actually.

> I've found them entertaining to watch. But Norwegians are master of slow-TV, so I guess that's why. They have good experts that manage to explain it to normal people. Interesting guests in the studio between moves. Interact with audience through questions from chat etc.

I usually don't follow chess, but I still end up watching the WC matches on Norwegian TV. They manage to make it interesting and exciting.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#48

Post by inkblotuniverse »

rawoke083600 wrote: post #23

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 ?

I'd love to see that.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#49

Post by ycombinete »

akyu wrote: post #40
kamaal wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those of us who don't follow this closely, why is the format such a problem? Is it because its stressful, and demands too much work and prep from participants. Just asking as competitive sport at the top level be it chess, football, or even swimming for that matter demands lots of work and a kind of work ethic not easy for most of us.

The format to the world championship in chess has historically always been a point of contention, and the current format is no exception. The Candidates tournament has some seemingly arbitrary qualifications that players must meet, and you could argue that the format doesn't necessarily produce the strongest player to challenge the world champion. The World Championship match itself is problematic because it gives th…

> The World Championship match itself is problematic because it gives the defending champion a fairly huge advantage, in that they retain the title if they can draw out the match.

This has not been the case for quite a while. All of Carlsen's matches (Anand, Anand, Karjakjn, Caruana, Nepomniatchchi) had tie breakers in the format, to determine a guaranteed clear winner. The Karjakin and Caruana matches were decided in this way.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#50

Post by franknstein »

TomGullen wrote: post #17
sgjohnson wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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?

There is a small chance that deep into the tree the first to play gets into zugzwang first, meaning position with no good moves. Is there any other scenario where playing black would give you theoretical edge?

So until proven otherwise it's still possible that its theoretical win for white, theoretical draw or theoretical win for black as i understand it.

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