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What is Chess? What to think and for how long

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Re: What is Chess? What to think and for how long

#91

Post by blackpill0w »

powersnail wrote: post #74
jmmcd wrote: post #69

That is a great title. For many people, chess is not interesting, now that computers are so good at it. But for me, chess is even more interesting now that we have developed (narrow) AI programs that instantiate more and more parts of what humans do when playing. (I know, humans don't play like computers, but we do things like heuristic board evaluation and heuristic game tree pruning.) So in a game, the player is no…

> For many people, chess is not interesting, now that computers are so good at it. But why? I can understand that for a small number of people who has the ambition to become the best player, having an unbeatable figure looming over you is disheartening. Most players are never going to become even close to that, and they know it. The fact that AI has beaten the best of human players should be, theoretically, irrelevan…

>Most players are never going to become even close to that, and they know it. The fact that AI has beaten the best of human players should be, theoretically, irrelevant to their interest in chess, other than having a novel teacher to learn from.

That is exactly what's happening, players learn from engines and try to understand why they play this move and not that move, and as a result, there are a lot of competing players in top level chess, except that players started memorizing lines and the opening phase of the game became a bit dull and boring, however, this was only another obstacle for players, they simply needed to adapt and they did. Magnus Carlsen is well known for winning endgames that seem to be a dead draw, he keeps pushing and pressing until his opponents make a mistake and this is why he has been the world champion since 2013 (e.g. game 6 from the 2021 World Championship [0]).

>So I’m genuinely curious, does the chess community see a large number of discouraged average players?

No, the Queen's Gambit [1] made chess very popular, online chess is at its peak, it's pretty interesting to have world champions streaming and seeing them play variations that they wouldn't play in real life since they involve too much risk, or simply lead to losing positions, but they also make for exciting and amusing games.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmQs1KhB948

[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10048342

Re: What is Chess? What to think and for how long

#92

Post by standardly »

jrumbut wrote: post #40
vlovich123 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No masters are sitting there counting TSAW TISP on their claws! I think this is misguided. A rigorous thought pattern is not a cage, it is an x ray. It shows our lion's bones. Strong players don't notice their thought patterns - you only notice bones when they're broken. The goal is not to think TSAW TISP in t, the goal is for good thought patterns to become so internalised that they form the skeleton our muscles h…

I think I just don't enjoy chess, so maybe all advice is wasted on me and I should give up on it for this lifetime but I appreciate your sentiment. Periodically I try to learn, and I know some openings out to a handful of moves and have done a bunch of end game puzzles and read about some concepts, but that middle area feels like a dark forest with no obvious path. I either make the blunder that sets me up to lose, w…

Tactics! Study tactics.

Opening/end game is easier to study since there are less possible moves. At mid-game, it helps to apply more general concepts. So look for forks, skewers, advantageous trades, etc

Re: What is Chess? What to think and for how long

#93

Post by humanizersequel »

bzhang255 wrote: post #37
bsaul wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO the 1950s and 60s were the pinacle of intellectual life ( at least in france). Students were actually "fans" of philosophical figures like jean paul sartre. The trendiest place for youth wasn't a nightclub or a gym. It was the café de flore, close to "la sorbonne" university, were one could hope to see a famous writer have a coffee. Young people would spend their saturday skimming through books at "gilbert josep…

Were you one of those youths or are you just romanticizing someone else's past (which you know nothing about) so you can criticize a contemporary youth populace (whom you know nothing about)?

I am one of the "contemporary youth populace" and will second his comment.

Re: What is Chess? What to think and for how long

#94

Post by humanizersequel »

ajkjk wrote: post #70
akuro wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading this has made me realise that I am nowhere near as literate as I think I am.

The florid writing is an elitist fad; you can express the same idea in much simpler language without losing any meaning.

People love to say this, but this is extremely dense writing riddled with technical language, written for people trained in reading it. You could perhaps eliminate some of the jargon, but in doing so you'd have to substitute a book's worth of less "florid" writing to get the same point across.

Re: What is Chess? What to think and for how long

#95

Post by tstrimple »

plasticeagle wrote: post #90
jmmcd wrote: post #69

That is a great title. For many people, chess is not interesting, now that computers are so good at it. But for me, chess is even more interesting now that we have developed (narrow) AI programs that instantiate more and more parts of what humans do when playing. (I know, humans don't play like computers, but we do things like heuristic board evaluation and heuristic game tree pruning.) So in a game, the player is no…

People spend time running in races against each other, despite the existence of cars. People spend time lifting heavy weights, despite the existence of forklifts. People spend time climbing mountains, despite the existence of helicopters. That a machine can do something better than a human, is no reason to pretend that human to human competition is no longer worthwhile. A pleasant game of chess against a friend is as…

I honestly think it's amazing the level of dedication people can have to things others think are a complete waste of time. Somewhere someone is the best in the world at building rice sculptures with chop sticks or shooting a bow and arrow with their feet or some other weird combination and I love it. The chess guy who spends his life dedicated to finding strategies which only really work against AI is awesome. There are still folks who can beat AI opponents in very time constrained games.

Re: What is Chess? What to think and for how long

#96

Post by gjm11 »

amalcon wrote: post #84
fferen wrote: post #79

Something I wonder: are computers better at chess because they can think faster? What if we give a team of top grandmasters 1 day per move, versus like 1 hour for Stockfish. Will they at least consistently draw? To my knowledge, top human vs computer matches these days only use piece odds, not time odds.

An easier way to do this would be to limit the hardware resources available to Stockfish. You can get the 24x time ratio just by giving Stockfish 1/24th of the compute cycles. That said, 24x is not even close to enough advantage there -- that probably removes less than one ply of depth. Stockfish can read far deeper than any human; you'd need a dramatically larger reduction to compensate for this. You could probably…

24x is more than 1 ply. Typical branching factor isn't so far from 24, and with alpha-beta the effective branching factor is more like sqrt(nominal branching factor), and I think modern engines are pretty good at pruning and extending the tree to make the scaling even better than that.

Re: What is Chess? What to think and for how long

#97

Post by gjm11 »

317070 wrote: post #81
fferen wrote: post #79

Something I wonder: are computers better at chess because they can think faster? What if we give a team of top grandmasters 1 day per move, versus like 1 hour for Stockfish. Will they at least consistently draw? To my knowledge, top human vs computer matches these days only use piece odds, not time odds.

No, on long time controls, humans cannot see enough of the tree in some positions. They might be able to push the game sometimes into a position where they can hold if the engine is not set up to prefer complicated positions. But This is one of my favorites. On extreme short time controls, humans can handle some really good engines some of the time! Here you have Andrew Tang beating Leela in hyperbullet: https://yout…

It's a little debatable whether Andrew Tang counts as "human" when playing hyperbullet chess.

Re: What is Chess? What to think and for how long

#98

Post by ajkjk »

humanizersequel wrote: post #94
ajkjk wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The florid writing is an elitist fad; you can express the same idea in much simpler language without losing any meaning.

People love to say this, but this is extremely dense writing riddled with technical language, written for people trained in reading it. You could perhaps eliminate some of the jargon, but in doing so you'd have to substitute a book's worth of less "florid" writing to get the same point across.

"florid" as a word means "excessively complicated", not just "complicated". I'd describe this writing as florid because it its fanciness and complexity is obnoxious and unnecessary. Of course it's my opinion, but yeah, I think it's just bad writing, written to sound pretentious on purpose, doing a shit job of communicating its point because it wants to be inaccessible. You could easily write the same thing more clearly in no more space.

I'm not arguing against beautiful writing or technical writing; I'm arguing against this thing that was pasted above, which is obnoxious, full-of-itself, not-at-all-beautiful writing.

Re: What is Chess? What to think and for how long

#99

Post by fasterik »

DC-3 wrote: post #36
TechBro8615 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's weird, since chess didn't exist when Seneca was alive. Perhaps that's a mistranslation and he was referring to Ludus latrunculorum? [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludus_latrunculorum

Mistranslation is unfair. It's a translation that best reflects the spirit of the original. It would be distracting to the modern reader to refer to a game which would be obscure and unfamiliar, when most likely the point of the original text is to invoke a board game which would be universally known among the audience. That said, you are right: https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/De_brevitate_vitae > XIII 1. Persequi sin…

>It would be distracting to the modern reader to refer to a game which would be obscure and unfamiliar

I find it far more distracting to find a modern term in an ancient text that I know the author couldn't have known about. It's jarring and anachronistic. I would much rather see the original term. I can make a decision about whether to spend a minute to look it up (and learn something!) or skim over it if the meaning is clear enough.

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