451–460 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Both Jordan and Carlsen won championships. Many of Jordan's games were very tight, down to the last second. I can find another player who won more handsomely, that does not negate Jordan's achievements. That's the analogy.
This being said, I don't think anyone NEGATES Carlsen's achievements though. Certainly noone in the thread. So this looks like a textbook strawman to me
Earlier quoted context omitted.
His surname is 吳. Not only is it a different character from the one used to write 5, but it's also pronounced with a different tone in Chinese. Also, his given name contains the character 源, which is read "gen" in Japanese, not "gan". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Seigen
> 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…
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%BA%90
Some highlights:
* Different Chinese variations (Cantonese, Min, etc.) have different readings. Initials, vowels, and finals all differ.
* When borrowed into Japanese, the Chinese initial was ŋ, which isn't used as an initial in Japanese, and was substituted.
I also wouldn't assume that sounds that are grouped together are supposed to sound the same. en/yin/wen/yun use the same final in bopomofo, but sound different.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
thank you, this is pretty much what I was trying to say. Especially the narratives part. there are plenty of instances of humans finding winning moves in positions that the computer did not 'see' the advantage of until after it was played. That doesnt happen because the human saw more moves ahead than the computer. It happens based on work done building a generalized intuition about the game itself which i would argu…
The more likely outcome if the engine is 'correct' is that it sees the line but thinks an alternative one offers a much greater advantage.
The computer can't condition this information on what you or the opponent is likely to do though. For example, there are lines of play that an engine can generate where you can checkmate in 60+ (even examples where the number goes into the hundreds) moves but only if you play every move absolutely perfectly, this kind of strategy is very brittle, a human might make adjustments to preserve the general idea of the line of play but make it more robust to error. The engine might also generate lines of play that have one or two flaws, but the engine thinks it's very unlikely that the opponent will find those flaws, because the population of games in it's database tells it that very few opponents see them. As the human you might see that your opponent is taking a certain line of play to try and get some sort of positional advantage, and that they are more likely to see the flaw in the engines line of play because the goals are in direct opposition to each other, in this case you would not choose this line because the computer is unable to condition its lines of play on the quality of your opponent.
IMO this is the fundamental reason chess masters around the world don't feel threatened by the computers yet. The way computers play chess relies on past information, often this past information is generated by humans. Humans are also able to generalise the insights that engines can find creating more robust strategies that are hard for engines to beat, until the engine adds it to the database.
My view on this is that the current World Championship cycle achieves the opposite of what it should achieve: 1)There are many tournaments where the best player is not allowed to participate making them tournaments of second bests for no reason other than determining who plays in the Candidates 2)Other tournaments, even those with long tradition, are poisoned by the Candidates because many top players treat them as t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
thank you, this is pretty much what I was trying to say. Especially the narratives part. there are plenty of instances of humans finding winning moves in positions that the computer did not 'see' the advantage of until after it was played. That doesnt happen because the human saw more moves ahead than the computer. It happens based on work done building a generalized intuition about the game itself which i would argu…
I'd argue that if the human sees a line that the computer didn't see any advantage of at all, then the engine is just wrong. The more likely outcome if the engine is 'correct' is that it sees the line but thinks an alternative one offers a much greater advantage. The computer can't condition this information on what you or the opponent is likely to do though. For example, there are lines of play that an engine can ge…
No I mean it literally does not see the advantage until after the move is played and it runs depth on the new position. then if you "undo" the move, the engine will now assert it as the best move instead of its previous recommendation (thanks to its cache). It is a very rare occurrence, but Ive seen it happen watching analyses of top games.
another similar thing is that engines aren't that great at detecting "fortresses". So a position that is a draw might be evaluated as an advantage for the attacking side, even though there is no successful attack available. technically the attacking side does have the advantage / more powerful position.. but since it cant be won it should be evaluated to 0. by evaluating it to +1 or similar, that might make the engine favor it over a +0.5 position where attacking chances still exist.
>The engine might also generate lines of play that have one or two flaws, but the engine thinks it's very unlikely that the opponent will find those flaws
do engines do this? this seems much closer to human strategies. In general I totally agree with the larger point that a mix of human and machine is the best combo.
>chess masters around the world don't feel threatened by the computers yet
what do you mean by this? If any master needed to play against stockfish for their life, I think they would feel overwhelmingly threatened. Or do you mean this strictly in the context of human + engine being better than just engine alone?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and Tinsley was able to see the win 64 moves into the future. It's more likely that Tinsley was able to see a winning position much closer to the present than that, without bothering about the details of how exactly the winning position 6 turns in the future converted into an actual win 64 moves in the future.
the point is that his winning position was a 64 move convert and he was correct. Lots of players believe they will end up in a winning position, but overlook something while "not bothering with the details". it's less about how much he calculated in that moment and more about the accuracy of his confidence and the work he had to have put in alongside his talent prior to that moment to achieve that confidence and back…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have no knowledge of Kramnik, Anand or Carlsen?
I’ve heard of these guys. But I do not know which of them is/was a champion. But I can name the previous champions, and I think I can still remember the exact sequence: Steinitz, Lasker, Capablanka, Alekhin, Eiwe, Botwinnik, Tal… missed somebody? But I’ve lost interest after Deep Blue event. Alpha Zero plays were fun to watch though.