When Grandmasters Blunder: Even the best make mistakes
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Re: When Grandmasters Blunder: Even the best make mistakes
#2[deleted]
Re: When Grandmasters Blunder: Even the best make mistakes
#3Hi guys, author here. I'll be monitoring this thread for the rest of the evening. Happy to answer any questions.
Re: When Grandmasters Blunder: Even the best make mistakes
#4Hi guys, author here. I'll be monitoring this thread for the rest of the evening. Happy to answer any questions.
Hi! Did you consider modeling the fact that a blunder in the first ten move-pairs seems far less likely in expert play, given that they're usually playing from book and there are fewer pieces in motion to consider?
(I'm wondering if blunders after move 15 are in fact far more common than your model suggests, and they're just being extremely diluted in your stats by correct opening play almost every game.)
Re: When Grandmasters Blunder: Even the best make mistakes
#5Hi guys, author here. I'll be monitoring this thread for the rest of the evening. Happy to answer any questions.
Hi! Did you consider modeling the fact that a blunder in the first ten move-pairs seems far less likely in expert play, given that they're usually playing from book and there are fewer pieces in motion to consider? (I'm wondering if blunders after move 15 are in fact far more common than your model suggests, and they're just being extremely diluted in your stats by correct opening play almost every game.)
You're totally right about this. In general the efficacy of engines is different for different parts of the game. In the beginning players (and engines) are mostly playing from books so there's a lot fewer mistakes and what the engine thinks of as a mistake is just someone going outside its pre defined book. Mid game the analysis is very effective. In end game the engine can actually completely solve the game, so it really just judges moves as winning or losing.
Spoiler: We're planning to address a lot of this in an upcoming followup I'm working on right now. We're going to take this in to account in our analysis as well as giving people the raw dataset with info about when the blunders occurred so that can learn from it themselves.
Re: When Grandmasters Blunder: Even the best make mistakes
#6Grandmasters blunder more often than this. I would venture to say that what correlates with blunders more so than rating is time. Error rate goes way up in Blitz and Rapid.
IMO the more interesting thing about chess skill at the top is how much way way better GMs are than everyone else.
To me, ratings at the top feel more like an exponential scale than a linear one. For example, I have beaten International Masters at chess lots of times but have never once beaten a GM.
If I studied or cared (which I don't), I think maybe it would be possible to squeeze out a lucky win once in awhile. Aspiring to be a punching bag isn't a very appealing notion though, so you can understand my lack of motivation. GMs are crazy good.
Re: When Grandmasters Blunder: Even the best make mistakes
#7Grandmasters blunder more often than this. I would venture to say that what correlates with blunders more so than rating is time. Error rate goes way up in Blitz and Rapid. IMO the more interesting thing about chess skill at the top is how much way way better GMs are than everyone else. To me, ratings at the top feel more like an exponential scale than a linear one. For example, I have beaten International Masters at…
Time definitely plays a huge roll in blunders. Actually if you look at the first graph there's a spike in blunders around 2800 which is entirely due to a single GM (Caruana) playing a string of blitz games this year in which he made several blunders.
Re: When Grandmasters Blunder: Even the best make mistakes
#8One thing I know from playing serious Bridge: An expert player makes far fewer mistakes than the average player. He does not make zero mistakes.
I read one tournament report, where an expert player revoked.
When an expert plays good or average players, he does not need to be brilliant to win. He just has to play competently, and wait for his opponents to make mistakes.
Re: When Grandmasters Blunder: Even the best make mistakes
#9Hi guys, author here. I'll be monitoring this thread for the rest of the evening. Happy to answer any questions.
« Assuming Anand and Carlsen’s blunders were independent events, what we saw was a 1 in 10,000 occurrence. »
Are they independent events though? In a game between mediocre players, if there is only one move to take advantage of a blunder, the computer analysis will repeatedly cry "blunder!" each turn until either that move is played or the initial blunderer defuses the opportunity. As for grandmaster play, I have no clue.
Re: When Grandmasters Blunder: Even the best make mistakes
#10See also the papers by IM & PhD Kenneth Regan on "Intrinsic Chess Ratings" such as
http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~regan/papers/pdf/ReHa11c.pdf .