61–70 of 461 posts
But they need to make sure wins give you e.g. 3 points and draws only 0.5.
Even in the candidates this year Ian - having obtained a nice lead - played drawing lines with white to perfection.
I don't blame him, it was the right decision. The incentive structure needs to change.
Even after a draw, the concept of Armageddon games to give another half point would be interesting and useful.
Funny that they mention Arkady Dvorkovich, I would expect him to quietly retreat from managing current affairs in FIDE because of his high position in Russian civil service. How can one of the closest allies of Putin head an international organisation nowadays?
You can always say he should go further, that he's tainted by his past links to Putin, or point out that if he had really turned on Putin he would have found polonium in his tea by now, but it's misleading to describe him today as "one of the closest allies of Putin".
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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.
Chess on an infinite board is asymptotically difficult in the worst case. Chess on an 8x8 board can be solved in constant time.
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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?
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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 not a solved problem but our best players and best computers perform better with white. The edge isn't tiny either.
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's also funny how the only 3 World Champions who have refused to defend a title because of disagreements with FIDE are probably the 3 best chess players ever.
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> 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.
Antichess at least is a solved win for White
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…
True, but that doesn't mean that you can't treat chess like other sports and try to incentivize wins - for example giving win/loss/draw a 3:1:0 point ratio. The world championship is not a good format to decide "who's the best at chess", and anyway we already know who that is right now. Might as well treat it as a spectator sport and add some drama in my opinion.
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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?
Unless I missed something recent, it is not known whether any player has a winning strategy (or a drawing strategy, for that matter). It would be quite the discovery as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
This of course gets unwieldy very fast. 16^5 is already over a million different games.