441–450 of 461 posts
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Does it count as 'breaking' if you're just tired of the game and don't want to play any more? Surely it's OK to stop and do other things eventually?
It is both okay to stop and do other things eventually and it also counts as ‘breaking’
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> Also, his given name contains the character 源, which is read "gen" in Japanese, not "gan". This may be way outside of your wheelhouse, but I have to ask - The Mandarin reading of 源 is yuán. The phonetics are something like [ʲyɛn]. A similar raising of the written vowel occurs in the pinyin syllable yan (e.g. 言, 严, 眼), which is [jɛn]. In other pinyin syllables, an "a" represents /a/, which is something sort of inter…
this smells exceptionally offtopic but if there's no phonemic -ja- then there's no reason to distinguish it from -jɛ- in a phonemic analysis, is there? although i believe mandarin can be analysed as a weird two vowel system if you take this approach too far though i don't have the paper handy
There is a separate /jɛ/, 也，耶.
Within-syllable -jɛ- exists in yan and its "compounds" tian, mian, lian, etc; changing the final consonant to -ŋ gives you the yang / niang / liang / xiang series of syllables, which have -ja-. This would suggest that, if the vowels are to be unified into one phoneme, the realization of that phoneme is driven more by the following consonant than the preceding vowel/glide.
There's something weird going on where -ɛ- in a complex syllable can appear with more onsets than -a- can. We see e.g. tie, tian, die, dian, mie, mian, bian, pian (with -ɛ-) where we don't see tia, tiang, dia, diang, mia, miang, piang (which would use -a-). xia, jia, qia are all fine, and so is niang. My working hypothesis for that would be "it's a coincidence".
I believe without being able to cite anything that one reason for the spelling of yuan and similar codas with "a" is local variation in how the vowel is pronounced.
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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…
> Magnus specifically mentioned Firouzja as an opponent that he would consider playing the WCC against[1]. 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, an…
So it isnt the most important reason, but nepo being the challenger didnt offer anything to change his mind like he was hoping the result of the candidates would.
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> yes the computer prunes, but fundamentally it is attempting to review all possible scenarios indiscriminately as opposed to a human who is trying to make some sort of sense of the position. No, pruning is by far the majority of the work the computer does. It is very much not trying to review all possible scenarios indiscriminately, because that can't be done, because there are too many possible scenarios. And "prun…
I think what many people in this thread are trying to stumble over is that the way a computer prunes moves and the way humans prune moves is qualitatively different. A computer prunes its moves from either an explicit or implicit (implicit when it's say a trained neural net) database of known positions, with some quantitative sense of strength (usually a probability to win or something like that). A human needs to as…
If a computer could assess every single move, it would. A human would still prefer to rely on narratives and game sense if it's good enough
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…
Not a "he", but Heather McKay won 16 consecutive British Open squash titles. Squash got a World Open only in 1976, and she won the first two editions. In a career spanning 1960-1981, she was only defeated twice and both times were early in her career.
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"Did Michael Jordan win all six championships convincingly? All series went 5 games or more."
While Karpov's opinion is debatable of course (although the man knows a thing or two about the subject), I frankly can't see how this analogy is applicable here? If anything, Carlsen's WC matches fell definitely on the short side (which is one of the reasons why 2 of them were only decided on rapid tiebreaks, which is kind of ridiculous in and of itself; not saying it's Carlsen's "fault", but still). And all but the…
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Well, applying "zugzwang" means you only win because the opponent has to do a move and cannot skip their turn. When black has a winning strategy, black already applies "zugzwang" for white's very first move: Black only wins because white has to make a move. If white could skip, black would not win. > Edit: it may be that the statement "without Zugzwang" implicitly (or perhaps by definition) means you are allowed to s…
Ahh okay I think I get it now, you are saying if chess is win for black, that immediately implies zugzwang for white from starting position. In the same way, chess being a win for white implies zugzwang for black starting position. So chess being a win for one side is equivalent to starting position being zugzwang for the other side. It's obvious now, but so interesting to me, I never thought about it that way! Thank…
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This is an inappropriate analogy. Chess at the highest levels is not drawish because the game is inherently drawish but because the meta of it is. The easiest way to illustrate this is with openings, though it applies throughout the game in different ways. Against e4 the Najdorf defense was once the opening of champions, being a major part of the repertoire of players like Kasparov and Fischer. In modern times it's a…
This reminds me of football analogy where goals scored at away matches count for two in competitions like Champions League. I am not good at chess but would it help if win as black was rewarded more than win as white?
One tie break system, armageddon, does break the symmetry by giving black draw odds (he wins if the game is drawn) but less time in a blitz game. But it's very poorly regarded and generally only used as a this-game-MUST-have-a-decisive-result last resort.
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But that's my point: elo distribution has nothing to do with how good players are, it merely tracks your win/lose status against opponents with a different elo. If you take, e.g. two unranked players that are very bad at chess or two unranked masters they are still going to end up with a +16 and -16 elo change. And you can keep adding great or bad players to the pool, and elo is still going to only look at the outcom…
>elo distribution has nothing to do with how good players are Nothing to do with it? That's a bit much. It's not a perfect system, nor is it a trivial problem to solve, but elo definitely highly correlates to how good the player is.
it only measure how good a player is compared to the other ranked players.
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this smells exceptionally offtopic but if there's no phonemic -ja- then there's no reason to distinguish it from -jɛ- in a phonemic analysis, is there? although i believe mandarin can be analysed as a weird two vowel system if you take this approach too far though i don't have the paper handy
There is a /ja/ syllable. 亚，丫，鸭，呀. There is a separate /jɛ/, 也，耶. Within-syllable -jɛ- exists in yan and its "compounds" tian, mian, lian, etc; changing the final consonant to -ŋ gives you the yang / niang / liang / xiang series of syllables, which have -ja-. This would suggest that, if the vowels are to be unified into one phoneme, the realization of that phoneme is driven more by the following consonant than the pr…
One distinction that some Chinese speakers fail to make, though, is between the r- onset and what I would prefer to think of as the j- onset. Thus, for these speakers, rang / yang or rou / you are the same sound.
Pinyin ran uses the standard /a/ vowel, but yan does not. I don't know whether, for speakers who don't distinguish r- from y-, a distinction remains in the vowel of ran/yan syllables.