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Notes on Puzzles

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Re: Notes on Puzzles

#41

Post by Thoeu388 »

Recursing wrote: post #22
Thoeu388 wrote: post #3

Interesting observations, I would add my own: - during long game, chess grand masters have physiology comparable to marathon runner, while he runs. Deep thinking for several hours, takes huge load on body. All the logic and critical thinking, is not going to save you, if you are not fit, and your brain does not work correctly. - real life is not about solving puzzles. Real life is a rigged game where rules are not en…

> during long game, chess grand masters have physiology comparable to marathon runner, while he runs. That is obviously not true https://old.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/s0tqcd/chess_grandma...

I traced my source back to Sapolsky, so I guess you are right.

But I still maintain my claim, health really matters for proper deep thinking.

Re: Notes on Puzzles

#42

Post by ajkjk »

jvanderbot wrote: post #17

The article is fine, inspirational, interesting, and all that, but one quibble: reporting ratios is potentially misleading. If grandmasters spend 4 minutes falsifying for every minute ideating, and amateurs spend .5 / 1, that's great. But what if amateurs spend 30 minutes coming up with a move vs 1 for masters? Could be the grandmaster is faster at ideation by a larger fraction than he is faster at falsification. Tha…

To an extent it depends what ELO you're talking about, but I'm an amateur (~1950 rated on lichess) and I find, when I watch GM videos, that I have about the same move ideation as them, at least in the midgame. Sometimes better, depending on the GM, since everyone has different strengths. But the GMs consistently better than me by a lot, of course, especially in overall calculation and in knowing openings and endgame theory.

Re: Notes on Puzzles

#43

Post by WoodenChair »

A test of chess puzzles can reliably predict a player's ELO rating and what kinds of game elements they struggle with. My late dad did work on this in the 1980s to assess machine and human chess performance which culminated in the Bratko-Kopec Test[0], which eventually became a part of a standard suite for assessing the performance of new chess programs. He also ended up running the test on hundreds of human players to test its calibration.

He created several subsequent tests and wrote a book about it [1]. I make a version of a few of the tests for iPhone if you're so inclined [2].

0: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B97800... 1: https://amzn.to/3PVOne9 2: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/test-your-chess/id362448420

Re: Notes on Puzzles

#45

Post by robinbobbin »

nicpottier wrote: post #40

Hah, what a great article. I play chess (poorly for the time spent on it) and I'm also a reasonably successful founder of a couple software companies. I find my struggle with chess is that I want to act intuitively, something that has served me well all my life in other avenues. But the board doesn't lie and if you don't think thoroughly you will get punished. I have the capacity for it, I can think thoroughly in puz…

> I find my struggle with chess is that I want to act intuitively, something that has served me well all my life in other avenues. But the board doesn't lie and if you don't think thoroughly you will get punished.

I believe strong players do act intuitively when playing chess (especially fast chess), it's just that they've developed their intuition through lots of practice and thorough thinking in the past. For some reason our intuition about life seems to be more developed, or perhaps the game of life is incredibly complex and most people are roughly at the same skill level.

Re: Notes on Puzzles

#46

Post by blueyes »

deepzn wrote: post #32
blueyes wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not quite true, because poker is fundamentally adversarial, while startups are mostly not adversarial, at least not directly. Startups are a beauty contest where each player focuses on maximizing the things about them that appeal most to a panel of judges (customers). Similar to the scramble competition that Benenson cites here, rather than an arm-wrestling contest. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31400660/

Startups are competition. You're fighting with others to put up the best product in market. It's a race against time as well.

Right, but my argument is that there are many niches in the market where there is no competition, and startups should try to find that and then creates moats with IP, data, etc. There are many situations where startups don't have direct competition, because they are inventing something radically new. Often true in life sciences, for example. You're right that in those cases they are in a race against time, since someone will eventually come along, but they can go for years without a direct adversary.

Re: Notes on Puzzles

#47

Post by alostpuppy »

dfxm12 wrote: post #39
csours wrote: post #23

> "What stops you, I think, is a combination of not really believing you’ll get it and not really caring. Is that too harsh – or is it somewhere close to the truth?" This reminds me of the curse of working with really good senior engineers. They already know the answers, they've already solved the puzzles. It can be very easy to just defer to them all the time. If you are a senior engineer who really understands a sy…

In my experience, people underestimate their abilities and are so afraid to mess things up, even in a preprod environment, that they don't even try. I try to encourage people and let them know they can't mess anything up, but like the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink. Some people get it faster than others. There's also the pressure from above to fix things quickly, meaning som…

100%

Re: Notes on Puzzles

#48

Post by Yen »

The examples of Dropbox and iPod being criticized on tech sites, but going on to become very successful, seems practically a part of the mythology at this point - but it seems to be _always_ those two examples.

Are there legitimately multiple good examples of "Criticized on HN pre-launch, yet became surprisingly successful"? I'm curious if the lesson to learn from Dropbox & iPod is more of "believe in a product, despite the criticism" or "sometimes, even accurate predictions are wrong"

Re: Notes on Puzzles

#49

Post by karmakaze »

> It’s not as simple as “founders are optimists, scientists are skeptics”, though.

It's not much deeper either. There's having a skeptical yet positive mindset which is somewhere in-between. I once made a complex toolkit of runtime query optimizations that was a hodge-podge of kludgy things, which worked out well in practice. Someone asked me how I ever came up with the whole thing. I said I just started out and made one new improvement after another. They said that it was so fraught with obstacles (listing them off) that they'd be daunted to even start. I said I wished I'd talked to you sooner, you just gave me a roadmap that I didn't have while I was figuring out the pieces. Note that he was a high-level chess player (unlike no-rank me), but perhaps not as much of an optimist or risk-taker.

If I had to say what a good founder mentality is, I'd say that they have experience navigating uncharted territories and finding success, whether on small or large scales. That kind of practice makes them good at sizing up risks and rewards. Related to this might be of a kinesthetic learner type--learn by interacting.

Re: Notes on Puzzles

#50

Post by matheusmoreira »

Recursing wrote: post #22
Thoeu388 wrote: post #3

Interesting observations, I would add my own: - during long game, chess grand masters have physiology comparable to marathon runner, while he runs. Deep thinking for several hours, takes huge load on body. All the logic and critical thinking, is not going to save you, if you are not fit, and your brain does not work correctly. - real life is not about solving puzzles. Real life is a rigged game where rules are not en…

> during long game, chess grand masters have physiology comparable to marathon runner, while he runs. That is obviously not true https://old.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/s0tqcd/chess_grandma...

I don't think that statement is meant to be taken literally. Playing chess takes ridiculous amounts of mental effort and that's still subjectively significant even though the brain isn't consuming more glucose. We aren't machines, our attention is limited and chess consumes vast amounts of it.
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