71–80 of 461 posts
Russia is playing China in the world championship. I wonder if US is getting a serious heartburn
[0] add your own asterisks for how important it is, but all four moved from abroad, three when they were already world class players
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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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It's not a solved problem but our best players and best computers perform better with white. The edge isn't tiny either.
They don't anymore, at least not the computers. When you let them start from normal starting position and provide decent hardware and some time it's always a draw and has been for a few years now.
Not always. Almost always.
Props to MC for going out literally at the top of his game. As Kipling noted: "Once in a while / We can finish in style".
The candidates might as well be the world championship. 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…
Hopefully now he can dedicate more time to reaching 2900, a much more interesting accomplishment than winning 1, 2 or even 5 more world championships in their current format.
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…
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.
This is time that could be spent playing tournaments.
This would be okay if the world championships was every four years, but it's every two, so a large fraction of Carlsen's time is spent preparing for this one match that everybody knows he's going to win anyway.
It's similar to the way that many professional teams are reluctant to allow their players to play in the Olympics (in e.g. Basketball, Ice Hockey, and Olympic Football is completely neutered). Carlsen clearly feels that the World Championship is not important enough to sacrifice a large chunk of his career for.
(I personally think that Karpov would have beaten Fischer, and that's the biggest reason why Bobby ghosted on everyone.)
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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.
I guess swimmers have known that the performance of powered aquatic vehicles runs circles around them on many metrics for longer.
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 ?
Pitting him against a pro StarCraft player would be a joke tho. For reference, Nina is able to reach 4800 MMR worker rushing every game. The mechanics alone would take a couple years of dedicated practice