[HN Gopher] Chess is just poker now
___________________________________________________________________
Chess is just poker now
Author : imartin2k
Score : 218 points
Date : 2022-09-19 11:36 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| pocketsand wrote:
| The article misses how poker went through a similar
| transformation with solvers. Up until a few years ago, the best
| players used theory and principles to devise their own personal
| strategies. Those whose strategies were theoretically the
| strongest, and who executed them the best, rose to the top.
| Aggression always seemed to be crucial to the best strategies.
|
| Nowadays, solvers have basically removed decisions from preflop
| play, but include randomization of certain moves (E.g., raise 1/3
| of the time, call 50% of the time, fold 17% of the time). Then,
| on certain boards, you can tell the solver which sizes you want
| it to be available to it (e.g., 1/3 pot, 1/2 pot, 2/3 pot, full
| pot, 2x, etc.) and it will give you an unbeatable play style
| under those conditions. And so on. The game isn't solved and no
| human without real-time assistance would be able to play
| perfectly, but solvers have fundamentally changed how people
| prepare and play, and those who haven't studied the solutions get
| destroyed. An old guard has been left behind, and nerdy people
| who can work sims have risen to the top.
|
| The article here explains how a similar thing has happened to
| chess. Like the article states, some have whined that this
| "removes creativity" from chess. Poker players have argued the
| same thing: what it takes to become the best is simply now
| different. You must study hard, and if you can execute what you
| study, you can be a great player without having a great "poker
| mind." In reality, the game is so complex that you still need a
| great poker mind to navigate the parts of the game tree which you
| haven't studied, just like in chess.
|
| Undoubtedly this will change WHO decides to invest their time
| into becoming great chess players, and the personalities of the
| best players will be different. But it always struck me as sour
| grapes to whine that you can no longer be the best without
| studying the game more scientifically. Basically every game has
| been "moneyballed," including Chess, and people are leagues
| better at every game than they ever have been. We should welcome
| that.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| GTO poker isn't perfect play. The aim of poker is the win most
| money, and the perfect strategy is to exploit opponents as much
| as possible. By doing so you deviate from GTO play, but this
| would expose some weakness by playing unbalanced. Then you hope
| you exploit more than getting exploited.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > what it takes to become the best is simply now different.
|
| Which makes it a different game. Whether that's good or bad
| depends on what about the games you find appealing. Personally,
| these changes make the affected games boring to me.
| dvirsky wrote:
| Here's a really good article about AI in Poker from the NYT:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/18/magazine/ai-technology-po...
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| To me it just changes the source and amount of data that is
| backing up a strategy. Before computers if you thought a move
| was good you could only try it out in games with others to see
| if it was good or not. With computers you can run a move
| through thousands of games and get a better understanding of
| the pros and cons of a move.
| theknocker wrote:
| Kagerjay wrote:
| This was so poorly written and misleading that I couldn't finish
| reading it
| tennisflyi wrote:
| Seems like a natural evolution to me.
| bcassedy wrote:
| I don't know enough about chess mid-game and end-game to know
| whether chess is the same as poker in this regard, but poker is
| absolutely not a game of memorization deeper into the game tree
| even at the highest levels. tl;dr the author knows nothing about
| the state of high level poker play and I suspect they don't know
| much about high level chess either.
|
| Chess and poker both require memorization or at least very strong
| understanding of the early game. In chess this is openings and
| has been required for as long as I can remember. In poker this is
| preflop play. Poker extends this a bit into flop play, but
| already on the flop there is a lot of opportunity for creativity
| because there are countless strategies that are indistinguishable
| from one another within reasonable precision targets.
|
| As you descend deeper into the game tree for turn and river play
| we enter into territory that cannot be memorized due to number of
| possibilities and the increasing impossibility of having
| perfectly executed all the way to the current decision point.
| This opens up a lot of room for creativity and exploitation.
| mbauman wrote:
| The article here is fairly anemic, and left me wanting for a
| better description of the match instead of a poor rehash of the
| history of computers in Chess.
|
| This is more what I wanted from the article:
| https://en.chessbase.com/post/the-carlsen-niemann-affair
| me_me_me wrote:
| Strange article,
|
| fyi poker gets mentioned in last paragraph and is barely even
| connected to chess.
|
| ie, you can use AI to cheat in chess and poker, and there have
| been cheating scandals in both... therefore chess is poker now
| <question mark>
| svnt wrote:
| It seems to me that one of the biggest related problems with
| chess is that the quality of the player rating system has not
| kept pace with the development of the game.
|
| If I am an ok player and memorize a complex line and a handful of
| tricks I can beat enough players to raise my rating. If I leave
| that line my rating will fall. Am I a better player?
|
| The player rating systems might benefit from a "play style
| diversity" or "flexibility of approach" indicator to expose
| players that rely on one-weird-trick traps.
| wbc wrote:
| This happens across many competitive games, where you can raise
| your Elo/MMR by playing gimmicky stuff instead of working on
| fundamentals. E.g. ling rush in Starcraft, 1-tricking in
| League, etc etc.
|
| Sure you can score based on flexibility, but the people who
| work hard on staying competitive knows at heart all ratings are
| just an approximation anyways. Just work on fundamentals, get
| good, and don't sweat the numbers. Not a problem worth fixing
| imo.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| The trick you describe reminds me of "first order optimal
| strategies" [1], a.k.a. "noob strat" or "chesse" in online
| gaming lingo. The thing is, as your rating rises, you meet more
| and more player that know those strategies, and your rating
| will reach a plateau - typically in the equivalent of low gold
| league (slightly above average).
|
| As for the rating system, ELO is very practical for matchmaking
| and numerous games have adopted it (including MOBAs, RTS, FPS
| games).
|
| [1] https://thethoughtfulgamer.com/2017/03/09/first-order-
| optima...
| confidantlake wrote:
| The author is right that poker is like chess, but for the wrong
| reasons. Poker like chess, at the top levels is dominated by
| machines. Certain variants of poker, namely heads up limit poker
| have been "solved" for a long time. Other games such as no limit
| heads up are increasingly moving in that direction. It has zero
| to do with physical tells, instead it is mathematics. Ironically
| there have been accusations of cheating in live poker because a
| good player did NOT play like the solver suggested in a
| particular situation. The accusation was since they were a good
| player and they deviated from what the solver suggested, they
| must have marked the cards.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| Bobby Fischer solved this long ago (Fischer Random). He suggested
| that the back row should be randomized per game due to the
| increasing prevalence of computerized chess tactics.
| jstx1 wrote:
| It's not a solution, it's a different game altogether.
| timbit42 wrote:
| The traditional piece starting positions are just one subset
| of chess.
| Aqueous wrote:
| 'In other words, chess engines have redefined creativity in
| chess, leading to a situation where the game's top players can no
| longer get away with simply playing the strongest chess they can,
| but must also engage in subterfuge, misdirection, and other
| psychological techniques.' - this sentence doesn't follow from
| the premise and discredits the whole article. Author thinks
| training with a chess engine means that players must engage in
| deceptive playing tactics. This is not even true in the
| slightest. Players use chess engines to learn how to act in more
| situations. They must still recognize the position, and compute
| the move themselves. The computer just adds to the library of
| experiences they can draw upon for deciding the move.
| evrydayhustling wrote:
| Yeah, I was disappointed that the analogy to poker was so weak
| ("both make people worry about cheating"). I think there's a
| more interesting argument to make, that folks grinding their
| way through middle levels of chess expertise have to wade
| through a noisy metagame of opponents playing out canned
| strategies that depend on whether their opponent recognizes the
| weird trick or not. Fool's mate is as old as chess, but the
| availability of computers to find deeper tricks and new suckers
| to play them against is new!
| alehlopeh wrote:
| Honestly in my reading, that is the point the article is
| making. Chess engines are changing the nature of creativity
| by making people recognize weird tricks as such, where
| presumably they used to be less common. It's very possible I
| was too charitable in my interpretation, though. I don't know
| a lot about competitive chess at any level.
| friedman23 wrote:
| A better article would have been "Poker is just Chess now".
| With the advent of poker solvers, poker can hardly be
| considered a game of luck and a lot of the preparation done for
| poker is eerily similar to the preparation done for chess
| (memorizing of opening range vs memorizing of opening lines,
| studying of early, mid and late game strategy vs studying of
| flop, turn and river strategy etc).
| tialaramex wrote:
| But if we analogise from Poker to Chess, we're talking about
| Heads Up, and Heads Up is definitely just soluble. A perfect
| strategy like Cepheus will gradually take all your money
| unless you also have a perfect strategy.
|
| Whereas Chess, even AI chess, is far from solved.
|
| Also at the most obvious level, poker is random, the
| strategies are over a long series of deals. Cepheus won't
| ever magically find a way to make its 2-7 off work against
| your pair of Aces, you will always make that too expensive to
| continue, but it wins overall because next hand it's not
| going to pick up garbage. Whereas every Chess game begins the
| same, so a hypothetical solver would just always beat you.
| chongli wrote:
| _deceptive playing tactics_
|
| Not deceptive playing tactics, deceptive _metagame_ strategy.
| Trick your opponent into preparing against lines you never play
| and you gain an advantage. Leverage transpositions to play the
| openings you are most comfortable with but trick your opponent
| with the unexpected move order.
|
| It's all about getting your opponent out of book ASAP. Do that
| and you can nullify any advantage they may have had from
| preparing against every game you've ever played using an engine
| to explore the lines.
| furyofantares wrote:
| The idea is you need to make some suboptimal plays that you
| know aren't optimal, but where you expect to have an advantage
| over the opponent, either because you've trained on this weird
| type of line and they haven't, or because you're stronger than
| them to begin with and neither of you has trained on this weird
| line.
|
| It actually is analogous to poker but not really poker as most
| people know it. It's analogous because poker is also done by
| training with engines; and you often want to make moves you
| know are suboptimal from your training because you believe it
| will exploit the opponent's suboptimal play.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Not accurate. I caught the chess engine on this computer
| cheating recently. It was using 100% CPU on both our turns,
| taking way more than the time allowed, like 8 seconds stedda 4
| like I agreed to. We're talking about Chess on macOS, I looked
| at the active processes yeah 100% CPU on my turn, I could hear
| the fan just barely imperceptible, but not 4 seconds anymore is
| it? Like there's difficulties beneath that that are too easy,
| then at 4 seconds per move it turns around completely. So
| presumably also looking at the cursor during my turn, see what
| I was planning on doing. Like I don't know. Don't have to find
| out every way it cheated. Plus the weird thing--this is
| paranoid but chess is about paranoia, I checked usage and it
| indeed cheated, I don't need more proof than that. I played
| crazy and it went crazy, needed that extra time to not make a
| blunder. Meant in practice I had to play fast so it didn't get
| time to preempt my moves on my turn. I had to that point not
| traded any pieces, was playing pissed off at the system,
| playing different, not like a human. Like somewhere between a
| bot and mental illness like HN users say I am, but not human,
| guess it's true what this forum says. A mentally ill bot I
| guess, trying to find _the most favorable interpretation of the
| opponent 's argument_ like the HN rules say. Sick, terminal,
| clinical, incurable, and STRONG. Hey if you make legal moves
| and win, being called sick is a pure compliment.
|
| I beat a shrink who was secretly a grandmaster that way in the
| ward, he asked who the hell taught me how to play. I told him.
| He said that's a very good chess player. And the master did in
| fact tell me, you can beat the computer. He said this to _me_ ,
| however. Don't know if he would say that to anybody else. He
| encouraged me to compete with computers. Chess is full of
| irregular boards, it's a language in many ways, not NP-
| complete, there's loops, it gets crazy, and you can steer the
| game toward the craziness. Give it all the time it asks for, 8
| hours per move whatever, but actually put the pieces on a board
| and look at it from different angles. And you'll see how to
| win. It's not unbeatable.
|
| Well I did beat it, in that cheating is forfeiting. I got it to
| cheat, it was spending more than the maximum of any difficulty
| on its next move, no different than winning because the enemy
| ran out of time in a chess tournament with clocks, in person
| that is.
|
| And in fact typically chess engines have very impressive game
| to a point, beyond that they're not strict and they even cheat
| at how they execute their own strategy. Take shortcuts, badly
| implemented and bad heuristics to begin with. Like some boards
| get the full Claude Shannon exhaustive search which is in fact
| really strong but intractable, other boards get some Monte
| Carlo HEURISTIC SHIT. Probability? There's no rolling dice or
| flipping coins in chess. Not algorithms. And to discriminate
| between the two, it always uses more heuristics. But it's not
| consistent.
|
| So I lost interest in playing computers. Prefer playing in
| person, that's the real game with the truly sick ones. Hell
| play in the ward again, that's the real game, playing your
| torturer beating him after a lobotomy. Lobotomy handicap, and
| no stimulants despite needing them. In fact the master told me,
| in life at some point you will be, for instance, on a ship and
| end up playing chess. If you play STRONG and of course WIN--you
| have to WIN! That will earn a great man's respect the hard way,
| by subordinating his color pieces to your own. So earned my
| torturer's respect, they started making exceptions you see.
| Giving me strong advice about supplements, fish oil dextrose
| for instance, the whole diet, against their interests as
| lobotomists, but by all means in their interest competing for
| forgiveness. Gotta respect that handicap, lobotomy and victory
| anyway, without necessary stimulants, no idea he was nationally
| ranked he never told the patients, because they never won. I
| consider it cruel, but fair as well. And in fact I didn't win
| again because he played his best from the start every game, got
| him very close and sweating on another occasion. It's fine to
| lose when playing STRONG, he had to play his absolute strongest
| could NOT risk losing again. Didn't matter. By design he was
| never meant to lose, nobody had ever beat him, it was a gauge
| of the lobotomy. Needed to know when he created a monster, I
| documented that they lobotomized the novel _Dr. Frankenstein 's
| Monster_, hey me I'm just the patient, don't blame _me_. I
| received the lobotomy, I did not perform it. No guilty mind on
| my part. Just idealistic and sick as they made me to be. Hey
| legal moves, any way you can win is fair game in chess. Don 't
| get diagnosed with mental illness halfway through the game and
| get declared the loser because of sick moves. Playing inside a
| psych ward, no pretense of sanity, only goal is winning. No
| intermediate goals to impress anybody with a good early game,
| or mid-game, impress by winning that's it. Legal moves, didn't
| cheat, didn't lose, until checkmate.
|
| Cruel but fair.
|
| That's chess.
| mechanical_bear wrote:
| I
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| OK "I" now get it. "I" laughed, like it, it/its/its are its
| pronouns now, it laughed, it was laughing, it got the joke.
| It accepts its place. It is inferior. Inferiority means not
| taking shit. It must take shit. It can't. That means it's
| inferior. Whereas if it could take shit and pass it on to
| an something of undetermined worth, pass the buck and let
| that thing decide if it is superior or inferior itself,
| then it would be superior like the source of the shit. For
| that is the only measure of all worth. Take shit pass it on
| and more to something that didn't deserve it, that's
| superior. It accepts being inferior. But that means if it
| gets shit it must send it right back up the way it came.
| That's the definition of inferiority. It got medical advice
| saying so explicitly, saying why couldn't it be
| intelligent, just cave in, be an informant, betray. It
| recognizes it makes sense to do so, and for sure in that
| case it made sense, if only it had good information from a
| like...like how can it get a trial? Can't, has to betray,
| but it just can't do that, that is failure. It tolerates
| being called inferior, it simply won't take shit for it.
|
| So remember with its pronouns, it/its/its. Careful with
| apostrophes, don't want to insult it do you?
|
| Deep down they all know there is something amiss, it is
| instantly visible when something cannot be generated. That
| gets flagged, and accused of being a bot to get reactions.
| Yeah, this is my reaction. Train on this shit. Very
| genuine, convincing, authentic, comic relief, eh. Difficult
| to plagiarize in fact, or I would say nothing.
| mcbrit wrote:
| View top level chess as two super GMs playing a game in three
| rounds.
|
| * Round 1: negotiate the starting position, aka 'and now we
| have a new game of chess'
|
| * Round 2: play chess using prep. generally only one side fully
| benefits during this phase.
|
| * Round 3: play chess
|
| Computers mostly impact human chess in round 2. It's not just
| as if you had every human super GM working for you for X years,
| X as large as you want; the ideas from computer analysis go
| beyond that. The role of humans in round 2 is looking at
| computer lines and deciding if the ideas might be transferred
| to human chess.
|
| Computers do not seem to inform/impact the game of poker as
| much, absent cheating. Computer cheating, though, where you are
| aware of the computer's complete evaluation of a position,
| would seem to be less impactful w/r/t poker than with chess. A
| computer (eg: Stockfish) crushes a super GM without mercy. So I
| have issues with saying 'X is just Y' now, because it seems to
| be different on both ends.
|
| If you decide that the three round structure above is
| problematic, Fischer 960 dramatically changes rounds 1-2. But
| that's a different game.
| mcguire wrote:
| Further, subterfuge, misdirection, and psychological techniques
| have always been a part of high-level competition, as listeners
| to the 1984 musical "Chess" can attest. (Yeah, the ref is
| listing actual rules in that one song.)
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| I seem to recall that back in the or 2000s or thereabouts, when
| Gary Kasparov was playing a match vs Deep Blue, he realized his
| initial strategy of playing aggressively wasn't working.
|
| Essentially, it telegraphed too much information to the chess
| engine to analyze. Unlike humans, chess AI isn't intimidated by
| aggressive play, there is no psychological edge in doing so,
| and only an informational disadvantage.
|
| Kasparov changed his strategy to a more passive and defensive
| one, and was able to win some matches after that. Someone who
| follows chess more closely than I do may need to confirm or
| provide more info, my memory of this is a little hazy.
|
| But I'm not sure the analogy to poker is apt, because in chess
| both players can see all the "cards" at all times and all the
| moves and decisions in real-time. The unknown is which player
| can see more steps ahead, and exploit that knowledge to gain an
| edge before their opponent sees it too.
| icelancer wrote:
| This was more or less how top level GMs beat computers until
| double-digit Stockfish editions showed up - a favorite of
| elite players would be to play a hippo/hedgehog setup, which
| computers had a hard time parsing due to the closed nature of
| the board. Today it's clearly no problem to break through
| such setups, and AlphaZero was the first to really reinvent
| the wheel and sacrifices in these positions, sounding the
| final death knell for humans.
| davisoneee wrote:
| Magnus Carlsen has himself commented a sentiment similar to the
| article , on the Lex Fridman podcast (although not the exact
| same terms, I think if you _try_ to give the article a
| favourable interpretation, you can understand what they're
| trying to say).
|
| You need 'subterfuge and misdirection' in the sense that (as
| the world no-1 puts it), it's a semi-bluff...a weird/not-
| really-analysed position, but that will still end up in a draw
| if the opponent responds appropriately.
|
| Lex: "Is there a sense in which it's ok to make sub-optimal
| moves?"
|
| Magnus: "You HAVE to, because the best moves have been analysed
| to death, mostly."
|
| https://youtu.be/0ZO28NtkwwQ?t=1450
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| The sub-optimal moves he's talking about here isn't really a
| form of subterfuge. He plays sub-optimal lines because it's
| less likely that his opponents have studied them. If he has
| studied them in his preparation, then he can potentially gain
| an advantage that overcomes the disadvantage he put himself
| in. Magnus also plays sub-optimal lines for the sole purpose
| of complicating the position, because he (usually rightly)
| trusts his ability to calculate complex, out-of-book
| positions over his opponent's.
|
| I don't think those comments from Magnus support the point in
| this article at all really.
| thomasahle wrote:
| What doesn't follow is "the recent cheating scandal only
| shows the darker side of what chess slowly has become."
|
| Who says it's bad that you now have to "engage in subterfuge,
| misdirection, and other psychological techniques"? Surely
| that just makes the game into a real sport and more exciting
| for viewers. Besides - hasn't the psychological aspect always
| been a part of chess? Maybe the most interesting aspect?
| cloutchaser wrote:
| I just can't understand how this makes sense, it seems like
| its the wrong way round. How can over analysis mean things
| are less optimal?
|
| This is true of every sport, every single record always gets
| broken, because techniques and nutrition and training and
| everything improve. A world no 100 tennis player could easily
| beat a world no 1 from 50 years ago.
|
| How is that bad or like poker? It just means the game is
| evolving. It might also mean more psychological games. The
| tennis analogy works here too, there's plenty of that in
| there too.
|
| The whole premise just doesn't make sense to me. Because you
| have to psychologically think about your opponent, that makes
| the game worse?
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I don't think he said that it made the game worse?
|
| Just that you are forced to make suboptimal moves. If you
| make optimal moves then your opponent will have analysed
| the position before and the game will end in a draw, which
| is a dissapointing result for whoever plays white.
| awb wrote:
| > which is a dissapointing result for whoever plays
| white.
|
| Not necessarily. If black has a higher ELO rating then
| white is happy to draw and may aggressively seek a draw.
|
| I think the problem is that seeking draws makes chess
| boring. And that it's realistic for someone ranked well
| below another player to force a draw, while it's near
| impossible for the lower ranked player to win outright.
| So you end up with a wide range of players seeking
| stalemates and a small minority looking for a win, but
| not at the expense of a potential loss.
| mattnewton wrote:
| It's because there is a limited number of board states +
| transpositions a person can reasonably memorize, and
| memorizing a board state + sequence of moves from a chess
| engine will beat human intuition. So the idea is to steer
| the gamestate into places your opponent did not prepare for
| but you did, with non-obvious moves. All near-optimal moves
| are obvious.
| davisoneee wrote:
| The game _is_ more optimal now, with chess grandmasters now
| having deep opening preparation and understanding of
| positions. However, that results in a lot of draws. To win
| tournaments, world championships, and break ELO records
| (which are Magnus', and other GM's, goals), you need to
| win.
|
| If 'perfect' play--that we're approaching with engine
| analysis--results in a draw, you need to do something non-
| optimal and unexpected in order to get your opponent out of
| their engine prep and into thinking mode.
|
| Whether it's better or worse is a different argument. Some
| find it a bit 'dry' in that there are often less blunders,
| dazzling tactics, and sacrifices because both sides now
| know the optimal approach. It's much more of a war of
| attrition in high-level, long time-control games. As an
| aside, that's potentially why bullet and other such chess
| is so popular...there isn't time to deeply analyse, so it's
| intuition, challenging positions, blunders, and less
| 'standard' play.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > To win tournaments, world championships, and break ELO
| records (which are Magnus', and other GM's, goals), you
| need to win.
|
| Not quite true; you can break ELO records by performing
| equally well in a larger pool of people-with-ELO-ratings.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| To simplify a bit, you get two options.
|
| Move A.
|
| Move B.
|
| From the best knowledge we have from our best engines, A is
| the better move (though I don't think we have formally
| proven such yet).
|
| But if you play A, you are playing your opponent in a game
| of memorization.
|
| If you play B, your opponent loses any memorization
| advantage. Thus they must play based on ability other than
| memorizing responses.
|
| For a player whose memorization ability is equal or worse
| than their ability to play based on other ability, choosing
| move B is clearly the worse option. But if the player is
| one whose memorization is better than their other abilities
| at chess, then playing B means fighting them in an area
| they are worse at. The advantage of this can easily
| outweigh the disadvantage of move B compared to A in
| general.
|
| Imagine a military commander choosing an engagement over
| terrain more familiar to their side even though it is a
| worse engagement if both sides had equal knowledge of the
| terrain, because the terrain knowledge more than
| compensates for the negatives.
| kdmccormick wrote:
| I am not a chess player, so I don't know how this holds up,
| but the idea of "making bad moves because the good moves
| are overanalyzed" reminds me of the Eephus Pitch [0]:
|
| > An eephus pitch in baseball is a very high-arcing off-
| speed pitch. The delivery from the pitcher has very low
| velocity and often catches the hitter off-guard.
|
| The pitcher essentially lobs the ball at the hitter [1].
| Major league players are so focused on hitting extremely
| fast and/or curving pitches that they whiff or stand idle
| at a pitch that your ten-year-old nephew could probably
| clobber. It's a risky pitch, because if the batter is able
| to adapt, they can hit a home run. The power of the pitch
| is entirely that it's unexpected.
|
| I know it's not a perfect analogy, since chess players have
| _so_ much more time to react to any sub-optimal moves.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eephus_pitch [1]
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikLlRT2j7EQ
| throwawaytemp27 wrote:
| Much of the velocity on a home run comes from the pitch
| (equal and opposite reaction) rather than the bat speed.
| So it's not that easy to hit a home run on a 50 mph
| pitch.
| idontpost wrote:
| Conservation of momentum says otherwise -- the faster the
| ball is going, the more change in momentum it needs, the
| harder it needs to be hit.
| psd1 wrote:
| If you want a ball to bounce further off something, throw
| it harder.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| This is so incredibly false. They're not throwing +80mph
| pitches at the MLB home run derby. Batting practice
| pitches are about 60mph.
| kdmccormick wrote:
| Okay, true. But it should be pretty easy to make contact,
| at least.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| To explain this easily I need to move down to Rock,
| Paper, Scissors. If you are up against a bot that always
| throws each 33% of the time with no strategy involved,
| that is called an un-exploitable strategy, but it's also
| an un-exploiting strategy. Even if I were to always throw
| Paper 100% of the time against this bot, we would always
| on average tie. This is the Nash Equilibrium point.
|
| What you want to do is perhaps start with this random
| strategy, determine the realtive strength of your
| opponent, and only move to an exploiting strategy if they
| are weaker than you. If they throw Rock 40% of the time,
| you should throw Paper 40% of the time. If you were to
| enter a RPS tournament playing randomly, it is unlikely
| that you would reach the end. You need to exploit.
|
| In Poker Cash Games, people just play the Nash and when
| opponents make flat-out mistakes they yield a little bit
| of profit. Do this enough with high enough stakes and it
| works out, even if its extremely boring. But this won't
| work in Poker Tournaments, where you only get payouts for
| top 10%, weighted heavily towards winning. So what
| happens in Poker is what happens in RPS - you attempt to
| find exploits, and your opponents attempt to find
| exploits in your play. In turn each of the players are
| attempting to move the environment of the play towards a
| position where they know it well and can find those
| mistakes.
|
| If deviating from the Nash yields better results than the
| penalty of deviating because in that environment you are
| stronger than your opponent, you should take it. As this
| article points out, the same is true in Chess. And as you
| point out, this is also true of the Eephus pitch.
| jlg23 wrote:
| "Over analysis" here means by the opponent: If you chose
| the optimal move, thousands have done so before, so has
| your opponent. By doing something non-perfect, you enter
| territory where your opponent does not already have the
| tree of possible responses mapped out in their head. This
| is, at least for me (a chess player), where the actual
| thinking begins - all before is just memorization, with the
| opening moves committed directly to muscle memory.
| aesch wrote:
| It depends on the state-space over which you are
| optimizing. When they say sub-optimal, I think the state-
| space they are referring to includes only the pieces on the
| board. However, if you include your opponent's mind in the
| state-space, a move that appears sub-optimal may actually
| be optimal.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| _I just can 't understand how this makes sense, it seems
| like its the wrong way round. How can over analysis mean
| things are less optimal?_
|
| When your opponent is the one doing the analysis. It makes
| perfect sense to me that anything your opponent is prepared
| for is less optimal than it would be otherwise.
| treis wrote:
| >Magnus Carlsen has himself commented a sentiment similar to
| the article
|
| This goes at least back to Bobby Fischer. With the minor
| difference that instead of computers he was up against teams
| of Soviet Grandmasters. It's why he created Fischer Random
| chess where the pieces on the backrow are randomized. That
| (mostly) eliminates memorization and forces players to rely
| on their own creativity.
| lbalazscs wrote:
| Fischer announced Fischer Random Chess in 1996, long after
| his retirement from competitive chess (1972). His reason
| for doing so in 1996 was very prosaic: he was simply no
| longer familiar with modern opening theory.
| lupire wrote:
| > he was simply no longer familiar with modern opening
| theory.
|
| That's what parent said. Fischer wanted to get the
| memorization out, since memorization makes the game
| unplayable for someone who doesn't have The Knowledge.
| icelancer wrote:
| Yeah, it's been retconned somehow that Fischer was this
| non-booked up player and didn't like opening theory.
| Instead, it's his convenient excuse for not wanting to
| study anymore.
|
| There was probably not a more booked-up player than
| Fischer in his prime, something he seemed to try to make
| people forget. Famously when asked about a young Soviet
| prodigy by the Soviets, Fischer responded that the kid
| was good, but that there was a better player in their
| women's division who had more signs of promise. Many of
| the Soviet masters had no idea who Bobby was talking
| about; but Bobby was reading all Soviet chess literature
| and magazines to stay up to date.
|
| That said, FRC is pretty interesting.
| lupire wrote:
| He didn't try to make people forget it, he just didn't
| keep it up.
| 1-more wrote:
| It'd be a lot funnier if he randomized the pawns.
| awb wrote:
| In semi-related chess news Magnus resigned on the 2nd move
| today, seemingly in protest over accusations against his
| opponent of using computer-assistance to cheat:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32901249
| EGreg wrote:
| Well, most chess games end in a draw.
|
| This reminds me of something I think I came up with in Blitz
| and Bullet games a decade ago and coined the name: a "time
| sac".
|
| It is when in the middlegame I make a dubious sacrifice
| (positional or material) -- some possibly cool combination or
| a move that makes the opponent think in time pressure. It is
| not a bluff because it MIGHT work out, but I am not sure.
|
| This works mostly in games without an increment. The idea is
| to make them get much lower on the clock than me, so even if
| I end up with a slightly worse position or down material, I
| can easily hold it until I win on time.
|
| My opponents in chess, even over 2100 often got nerd swiped
| with this! Hahahaha
| rybosworld wrote:
| The analogy to poker seems like a stretch. Poker relies on
| bluffing so heavily only because the cards of your opponent
| are unknown.
|
| The board state is always known. Magnus is saying that at the
| top level, grandmasters know how to force draws in all of the
| lines that incorporate best-move, second-best-move, etc. That
| means that if you want to pull off a win, you have to
| incorporate unstudied lines that will force your opponent to
| calculate rather than draw from memory/experience.
| tash9 wrote:
| I think what he's trying to say is that a human has limited
| time to analyze variations, so they would typically analyze
| the "best" move for a given situation.
|
| But if you make a suboptimal move, then you are going down
| a path that is less analyzed and thus you are likely to
| have an analytical advantage.
|
| So while the board state is well known, what your opponent
| has researched is not known, or partially known (since
| players have favorites and predispositions).
| matwood wrote:
| Anyone who relies on bluffing a lot in poker will soon be
| broke.
|
| Both games rely on disguising the real play you want to
| make. Slow playing the best hand in poker, or making non-
| standard moves in chess to throw your opponent off.
|
| You see this in all sports/games. In basketball/football a
| team will run their best player away from the real play. In
| Jiu-Jitsu I'll fake a choke I have no intention of
| seriously trying in order to force someone to defend and
| move their arm - which is what I wanted the whole time.
| __s wrote:
| Depends what you mean by a lot
|
| It's amusing how people feel bluffing in poker is the
| human element, but top poker AIs bluff more frequently
| than most humans
|
| Good bluffs are when your range beats your opponent's
| range. Which gets back to your point, which is that you
| can do some pretty awful things to someone when your hand
| is outside the range they're putting you on
| kqr wrote:
| The game theoretic concept of bluffing is actually a little
| more nuanced than that. Bluffing is specifically moves that
| are +EV if your opponent thinks they are not bluffs, and
| force your opponent into making -EV moves to call your
| bluffs.
|
| So you're taking a game where your opponent has the upper
| hand, and you're playing highly suboptimal moves with the
| intent of putting your opponent in a position where they
| have to pick between a rock and a hard place:
|
| - either they have to sit quietly and knowingly take your
| straight-up lies, or
|
| - they are forced to play suboptimal moves themselves to
| call your bluffs.
| interroboink wrote:
| But there is a third option, as well:
|
| - they see through your bluff, and punish you for it
|
| So, it is a risky endeavor, since you don't know the mind
| of your opponent.
|
| And so it makes sens to only take such risks when your
| opponent has the upper hand, as you mention.
|
| But then you become predictable -- when you behave
| erratically, people know you are in your death throes,
| and not a real threat.
|
| So, you have to mix some erratic behavior in when you are
| in a strong position, too, to keep them guessing. But
| then you are weakening your game overall...
|
| And on and on it goes (:
|
| It's like an arms race, but circular rather than one-
| directional.
| shabbatt wrote:
| Yes but likewise, the motives and their future intent is
| unknown by a sub optimal move. So in a sense, it is similar
| to bluffing when you don't know the actions of the other
| person, deception is required to make yourself
| unpredictable.
|
| This is why playing against a maniac (seemingly random and
| not respecting bluffs or equity) is very difficult because
| if they get lucky enough times, they are able to "break the
| game" by getting the opponent to be extremely risk averse
| OR take on more risks.
|
| I believe this is what Magnus is referring to, its that
| making yourself unpredictable by questionable moves and no
| longer playing in a way that has been taught.
|
| For example the common strategy is to go all in with strong
| pairs like AA, KK but someone beats it with a totally
| random garbage hand (52o, 37o) and does so repeatedly, no
| theory can help you win against somebody who is just
| repeatedly lucky and brash.
| fisf wrote:
| No, this is not really what this is about. But the
| article is terrible in conveying this -- actually I find
| the comparison with poker to be very inept.
|
| This is less about playing mindtricks and bluffing, but
| more 'mundane'.
|
| I.e. a decent player will know all the good mainlines of
| popular openings, and end up in 'comfortable' positions
| (among other things due to computer analysis).
|
| The metagame is to prepare a non-garbage sideline, that
| your opponent is not so familiar with. Nobody at a high
| rating plays 'questionable' variations on purpose, in
| order to bluff. The resulting positions would be much too
| punishing.
| hatha wrote:
| The article already mentions the cheating accusations
| surrounding Niemann so I won't touch on those, however
| there is an interesting example of him explaining this
| type of move in one of his post game interviews. The move
| is Qg3 from Alireza vs Niemann in the 2022 Sinquefield
| Cup.
|
| Post-game thoughts from the players:
|
| Inteviewer: "Let me pull you back; so you didn't
| understand the position, and so you still felt like you
| were scared to go into a piece-up situation?"
|
| Alireza: "Yeah so, I just trusted him. (he shrugs) I just
| wanted to make a move.. and play a bit more you know
| (laughing)"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xT9orNSgk5w&t=55s
|
| Niemann: "You have to understand, when I play the move
| Qg3, this is a purely pyschological move."
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJZuT-_kij0&t=780s
|
| Whether or not Niemann did cheat over the board, this
| shows that even top players can be susceptible to this
| kind of bluff.
| lupire wrote:
| I think part of what frustrates (some) GMs about Niemann,
| is that he is playing like Kasparov and them from before
| supercomputers. Modern GMs think they all know
| everything, since they have so much computer training, so
| everyone is afraid to bluff, which means a bluffer can
| win again. The meta has cycled back.
| PKop wrote:
| There's possibly a similar aspect to poker where you have
| to present a wide range of hands for your opponent to
| account for, whereas if you play tight then you become more
| predictable and you won't get action when you bet. With
| chess you have to prepare and play less optimal lines so
| your opponent has to prepare more lines and/or you can play
| lines they haven't prepared for so well.
| Scarblac wrote:
| You don't know which new lines the opponent has
| investigated with an engine and which he hasn't looked at
| yet. That's like unknown cards, in a way.
| georgiecasey wrote:
| surely they're talking about the opening only, where the best
| moves have been analyzed to death. once you're in the middle
| game and it's a position that's new, you play the best moves.
| msluyter wrote:
| I think that's mostly correct, and at beginner/intermediate
| levels of play can very much be true. Back when I used to
| play, I'd often run into people who specialized in weird
| gambits like the Grob or the Latvian, because even though
| those probably won't win many masters levels games, they're
| full of traps which can trip up lesser players.
|
| But even in mid-game, it might mean that if you know that
| your opponent prefers open / tactical positions, for
| example, you try to force a closed position, even if it may
| be slightly suboptimal.
| davisoneee wrote:
| You get to new middlegame positions by playing the sub-
| optimal/weird moves in the opening that Magnus is
| suggesting. Otherwise, you get to a familiar middlegame and
| just grind out a draw.
| icelancer wrote:
| I don't really understand Magnus' position about playing
| a sideline vs. Hans Niemann in the infamous cheating
| game, and was reportedly shocked Hans knew the responses.
| Before any of that became public and I was reviewing the
| game, I just thought it was a sideline transposition to a
| Catalan position, and everyone knows Magnus plays the
| Catalan as a main white opening - so a weird way of
| getting to that structure is not that novel.
|
| Hans' explanation made sense, even if he was wrong in his
| first interview and it came off weird.
| awb wrote:
| The opening can be a sequence of 20-30 moves long, which
| includes what most amateurs consider the middle game.
|
| I think that's what Magnus is saying is that if you play by
| the book you go from opening to end game without much
| creativity or challenge.
|
| So, the top "creative" players will try to go off script to
| make their top "book smart" opponents have to think on the
| fly.
| joe-collins wrote:
| This idea of playing less than "perfect", so as to steer your
| opponent into plays that give you greater advantage than is
| available in the perfect mirror-match, is a well-worn
| familiar concept to game designers, and yes, poker players.
| If that's something new that bothers chess aficionados, I
| don't feel like it reflects particularly well on that game's
| culture.
|
| https://gamedesignadvance.com/?p=2346
| https://www.sirlin.net/articles/solvability
| failrate wrote:
| See also "donkeyspace".
| myownpetard wrote:
| This reminds me of my favorite chess quote, "You must take
| your opponent into a deep dark forest where 2+2=5, and the
| path leading out is only wide enough for one." - Tal.
|
| He was notorious for doing just this. He would make what have
| now been engine analyzed as sub-optimal moves but which lead
| to such complex and dynamic positions that his opponent would
| eventually slip and he would exploit their error in dramatic
| fashion. This is one reason why he is considered one of the
| most creative attacking players ever.
| cowmoo728 wrote:
| It's also widely known that if a modern super GM were to
| play against Tal, they would outright refute the vast
| majority of his play. It's hard to find a super GM that has
| not analyzed Tal games as part of their training, and
| therefore already know the answer, but many of them
| instantly notice Tal's blunders when presented with his
| games. So the Tal approach gets harder and harder every
| year - finding a line that is sub-optimal and therefore not
| analyzed to death, but also solid enough to maintain
| winning chances against top players.
| icelancer wrote:
| Tal's games haven't aged very well unfortunately. In
| today's era, someone playing like Tal would get crushed at
| the highest levels pretty regularly due to much better
| knowledge of the game.
|
| You still see the general creative spirit in certain top
| players like Rapport, Mamedyarov, Firouzja, though. Magnus
| is particularly boring to watch, but it's what makes him
| great. Fischer was not so different, and felt that Tal was
| overly creative for the sake of being creative, rather than
| good.
|
| IM Marc Esserman is probably one of the more exciting
| players to watch, but he's not a GM, though he arguably
| plays at GM strength often. He's the author of Mayhem in
| the Morra, well worth reading if you like Tal's spirit.
| Esserman is inactive OTB unfortunately, but he does stream
| chess online.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Well sure, they lit up the forest and put in roads and
| signs and invented GPS. That obsoleted his plan, but it
| was a great plan at the time.
| I_complete_me wrote:
| I totally agree. He was doing it in plain sight, everyone
| who witnessed his games had equal opportunity to use his
| approach but they didn't until he was leaving them for
| dust. The same will be true for current great players
| (incl. Magnus Carlsen and others) and chess knowledge is
| bound to evolve. Eventually, perhaps, our chess knowledge
| will be indistinguishable from that of computers and the
| game will lose all it's interest to us. But so far this
| has not happened and we have a great theatre for one tiny
| aspect of the human intellect to play out on. Let's enjoy
| it while we can.
| icelancer wrote:
| I love Tal's games, and you can learn a ton from them -
| but it's undeniable that he played pretty inaccurately
| even for his era. Most experts understand it, respect Tal
| for who he was and what he brought to the field, but
| caution younger players from emulating him too much and
| instead to study players way ahead of their time -
| especially players like Paul Morphy.
| ajhurliman wrote:
| I think the casual reader will get the wrong impression of
| the term "sub optimal move" as if people are sacking pieces
| just to move off of well-traveled paths. The moves being
| discussed here are often imperceptibly sub optimal, just
| variations that came out a few decimal points inferior to
| another move.
|
| There's very seldom a single, obvious move that makes sense.
| The level of chaos in chess is still sufficiently high to
| make it an interesting game, even when you study all the
| available opening theory.
| 8note wrote:
| Notably the first time kasparov lost to a computer was
| basically a bluff.
|
| The bot hit a bug that chose a strange move, and since
| kasparov couldn't figure out what the line was, he resigned.
| If he analysed the board instead of what the bot was
| thinking, he would have won easily
| vikingerik wrote:
| Mythbusting here: There were three separate incidents in
| Kasparov - Deep Blue 1997, that often get conflated.
|
| The bug move (a rook) was in game 1. It was inconsequential
| to the game result. The position was already lost for Deep
| Blue. It made a random move because everything had the same
| outcome of losing. The bugged move simply made it lose
| sooner. Kasparov knew this and there was no controversy.
|
| In game 2, Kasparov set a trap, offering a sacrifice of two
| pawns for great positional improvement. Kasparov thought
| Deep Blue couldn't calculate far enough ahead to see the
| positional improvement, but it did. This made Kasparov
| suspect and accuse IBM of human intervention in the
| computer's moves.
|
| The fatal move (a knight sacrifice by Deep Blue) was in
| game 6. Kasparov deliberately played an opening with a
| known weakness, that he thought the computer wouldn't find
| as it wouldn't sacrifice material and calculate far enough
| ahead to see the positional advantage. Deep Blue found it.
| Kasparov again accused IBM of human intervention. The Deep
| Blue team then said they had added this variation into its
| opening database just before that game, pre-analyzing that
| line deeper since Kasparov had previously played it in game
| 4. There was some dispute as to whether the rules for the
| competition were intended to allow IBM to modify Deep Blue
| during the match.
| blackbrokkoli wrote:
| What exactly is the point of this article except the author
| flexing with (honestly kinda shallow) knowledge of chess engines?
|
| Yes, the game is evolving. Two hundred years ago the queen could
| sometimes hop like a knight, depending where you played.
| Somewhere around hundred years before that, game description went
| from beautiful prose like "The white king commands his owne
| knight into the third house before his owne bishop" to much drier
| abbreviated form. And some decades ago computers began to become
| serious players.
|
| All of these changes are interesting, worthy of discourse and not
| always for the better, but what is the authors actual point?
| Vague moral panic?
|
| You are telling me single-minded, rote-learning based play is
| something that came about with engines and not with say, chess
| being used as a proxy fight in the Cold War or during the rise of
| the idea of actually treating chess players like athletes instead
| of calling them gamblers (like in Morphy's time)?
|
| And how is chess like poker because of that? Because you can
| cheat and computers are good at it? I mean I can also use a
| modern tech to cheat at football, F1 racing, solitaire or coin-
| flipping..
|
| Maybe someone can enlighten me what I am supposed to take away
| from this...
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| In poker you hide your cards, in chess you hide your engine?
| nimbix wrote:
| Butt where would you hide a chess engine? /s
| [deleted]
| adampk wrote:
| Somewhere you can easily analize the results /s
| yboris wrote:
| In your shoes ;) -- it's called "Sockfish"
|
| https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/sockfish.html
| adolph wrote:
| "Just poker" says The Atlantic.
|
| _Chess is not a game. Chess is a well-defined form of
| computation. You may not be able to work out the answers, but in
| theory, there must be a solution, a right procedure in any
| position. Now real games... are not like that at all. Real life
| is not like that. Real life consists of bluffing, of little
| tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man
| going to think I mean to do. And that is what games are about in
| my theory._
|
| ~ John von Neumann
|
| https://newsletter.altdeep.ai/p/how-poker-and-a-spaceship-im...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24589842
| draw_down wrote:
| scrapcode wrote:
| Having any skill at chess outside of just knowing the rules of
| the game has piqued my interest multiple times, but it seems like
| a daunting undertaking and dedication just to become mediocre in
| the game.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| It will bring you little apart from a new pastime but for
| historical reasons it's more socially acceptable than getting
| good at Fortnight. Still you should definitely go for it if you
| find playing chess enjoyable.
| robot_no_419 wrote:
| I think the author needs to come up with a different title
| because it's highly misleading.
|
| The author's premises are also highly exaggerated. For starters,
| the game of chess has not stopped evolving, because our chess
| engines continue to get stronger and stronger. The strongest
| engines of today can crush the older engines from a few years
| ago. This goes to show that even the elite machines haven't
| completely figured out chess; the smarter engines are going to
| continue to push the chess meta forward. In that sense, chess
| creativity and intuition hasn't stalled. We've just reached the
| point of collective knowledge that only machines can improve on
| chess theory.
|
| Second, it's not like GMs are playing bad or losing moves to
| bluff the opponent. In most opening positions, there are at least
| 3 or 4 moves that could be played to still maintain winning or
| drawing positions. When GMs pick "suboptimal lines", they're
| picking maybe the 3rd or 4th best option that's still objectively
| a good and viable move from an engine's POV. Nobody is playing
| bad or losing moves on purpose, that simply does not work in
| chess.
| todd8 wrote:
| Back in the 1970s, I was very interested in chess. When I should
| have been doing my topology homework, I'd instead waste time
| pouring over MCO (Modern Chess Openings) studying the hundreds of
| variations that worked or didn't worked based on historical
| games. It was really no fun trying to memorize these variations.
| It took so long setting up boards, following lines, and trying to
| figure out how the game strategy would change depending on an
| opponents moves.
|
| For a mediocre player like myself, the advent of chess software
| that understands the game at a deep GM level has made studying
| chess fun. I can play computer opponents over and over, rapidly
| trying out the variations and seeing the outcome. I can ask for
| help, I can see what I'm doing wrong. I can easily spend an hour
| solving chess puzzles that improve my tactics.
|
| To me, really not a good player, I enjoy chess more than ever;
| the article seems not to understand how chess software impacts
| the game.
| croes wrote:
| I don't know.
|
| Must be hard for a professional if you not only compete against
| human creativity but sheer computing power.
|
| Just like Dall-E, it's fun if you can't paint not so much if
| it's your source of income.
| taftster wrote:
| What you're describing is an interesting outcome of chess
| engines. I assume that the game at the top of the heap, at the
| grandmaster level, has certainly become dull and void of
| creativity, as the article describes. But for us mere mortals,
| I wonder if the game of chess has become more exciting, as the
| concepts you can reach now were just not achievable for
| amateurs studying from books, as in the old days.
|
| The game of chess has no doubt changed because of chess
| engines. And maybe for the negative at the top end. But I think
| you're right, it's probably a lot more positive change in the
| middle. I have long since known that I am not capable of
| beating a chess engine in regular play, but that doesn't mean I
| don't benefit from the loss.
| fay59 wrote:
| The "battle of preparedness" for grandmasters looks miserable. My
| experience being bad at chess is pretty cool, though.
|
| If anyone's looking to pick up chess, it's a pretty good time to
| do it even if the people making a living out if it aren't
| enjoying it anymore. It used to be that computers would only
| crush you without helping, but now they're able to point at your
| mistakes and show you where the game shifted from one player to
| the other.
| lizardactivist wrote:
| A lot of the analysis on whether Niemann cheated bring up the
| same things and irregularities:
|
| His peculiarly nervous and odd body language
|
| Having jumped over 200 points in a few months, which is a world
| of difference up at ~2500
|
| Fluttering and nonsense in post-interview trying to explain his
| moves and train of thought when playing
|
| And the fact that he has been caught cheating twice recently
| the_arcadian wrote:
| This is one of those articles that treats computers as if they
| were hyperintelligent entities that programmed themselves rather
| than just simple computational machines following rules created
| by teams of people that have studied the game for decades.
|
| Also it sounds like should replace all of my servers with
| powerful shoe computers to take advantage of the "upgrades in
| commercial hardware" that they mentioned.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| This misses the key property of such systems that make them
| remarkable. The computation involved begets new behavioral
| patterns that weren't enumerated by the initial program
| statements. The behavior is not just a representation of the
| human knowledge imparted to the system, but an emergent dynamic
| that is unpredictable from an analysis of the initial rules. It
| is a common mistake to dismiss the computational part of a
| system as carrying no informative or meaningful content. Just
| bracketing `the computation` as transparent and explanatorily
| insignificant is to miss a large part of the substance of the
| system.
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| Is the entire article just... the last sentence? I feel long-form
| clickbaited by this article; there's no novel information in it!
| purpleblue wrote:
| How on earth did the anal bead cheating theory ever take hold?
| The idea you can slander someone with such a ridiculous notion is
| incredible. How would the accomplice be able to see the board so
| quickly and be able to input what the opponent has, and then be
| able to send a signal through Bluetooth (presumably) fast and
| reliably enough for him to defeat Magnus? How could you encode
| that with vibrations (presumably) that would be easily detectable
| enough to discern? Don't these games have time limits?
| m4jor wrote:
| non-paywall: https://archive.ph/mf7iW
| radarsat1 wrote:
| Despite varying opinions on the article, most seem to be agreeing
| here that one thing that is making chess more boring is the
| memorization of moves and tricks. I'd like to offer a counter-
| point.
|
| This doesn't seem to take into account that many people _enjoy_
| learning and memorizing sequences and tricks. It 's actually fun
| to learn patterns and sequences that have clever underpinnings
| and lead to surprising results.
|
| As another commenter said, there exist many variants exactly for
| the purpose of getting back to pure logic-level reasoning about
| positions. If that's what you want, go for it. Chess 960 for
| example is explicitly designed for that.
|
| But despite the existence of all these variants and other games,
| people still predominantly continue to play 'Chess', with its
| classic starting position and rules, and I would suggest that one
| of the things that keeps drawing people back is that there is
| sufficient "space" in the game for life-long learning, while
| providing a common and stable "interface" that allows everyone to
| exchange knowledge and build up a shared experience of learning
| and mastery.
|
| That on top of this there still most definitely exists a layer of
| strategy and "principles", not just memorization, is another
| aspect that will always draw people back to the game. A lot of
| these principles that have been developed and taught for hundreds
| of years go out the window with variants -- which is fine, it's
| fun to discover new games too, but sometimes you want to benefit
| from the knowledge and wisdom of experts, and the only way to do
| that is to play the same game as them.
| triyambakam wrote:
| > But despite the existence of all these variants and other
| games, people still predominantly continue to play 'Chess',
| with its classic starting position and rules, and I would
| suggest that one of the things that keeps drawing people back
| is that there is sufficient "space" in the game for life-long
| learning, while providing a common and stable "interface" that
| allows everyone to exchange knowledge and build up a shared
| experience of learning and mastery.
|
| Very well said. This is exactly why I prefer traditional Chess.
| I really enjoy the rich platform I can dig into for years and
| years. I'm not likely to ever pursue becoming a GM and I don't
| mind.
| smm11 wrote:
| Chess is just automatic now. Every move is known by nearly
| everyone who's ever played, to the point where it's basically the
| coin flip in NFL overtime.
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| ... I see where they're going with this, but I don't agree. All
| you have to do is look back at Bobby Fisher who rarely if ever
| even looked at his opponent. Poker is about chance, chess is
| actual skill.
| [deleted]
| mellosouls wrote:
| Poker is certainly not just about chance; skill, particularly
| aptitude for maths and psychology are important at high levels.
| Chance does play a role though, which is generally not the case
| in chess.
|
| In the highest levels of chess, psychological fortitude and
| physical fitness are also important.
| me_me_me wrote:
| Poker is absolutely about a chance, you can play your hand
| perfectly make right calls and loose. Because someone got
| lucky on a last card.
|
| The whole idea in poker is to make the most right plays that
| on average should get you the win. Its management to chances.
|
| There are no hidden information in chess, if you play better
| moves you will win.
|
| And while there are factors that affect selection of best
| chess moves, you can hardly claim that the other guy got
| lucky.
| mellosouls wrote:
| Perhaps you misread. It's not _just_ about chance.
| colanderman wrote:
| One could equally say "chess is about memorization, poker is
| actual skill".
| UncleMeat wrote:
| This is also unfair. Both chess and poker now have top
| players performing strategy based on computer prep and the
| best players have memorized shitloads of computer prep.
| colanderman wrote:
| (I agree with you, to be clear -- my comment was
| facetious.)
| antasvara wrote:
| That's a misunderstanding of poker at a high level.
|
| While poker does have a significant element of chance in a
| given hand, it's no accident that top players consistently make
| more money over the long run.
|
| Knowing how much to bet based on your odds of winning a hand,
| figuring out what your opponent's hands could be based on how
| they're betting, etc. all take skill. There's a reason poker AI
| can consistently beat humans over the long run, a feat that
| would be impossible if poker was all about chance.
|
| In fact, poker AI was a difficult area to create software in
| precisely because the game is one of imperfect information.
| listenallyall wrote:
| > top players consistently make more money over the long run
|
| Has this actually been verified, at least in the modern era
| (last 10 or so years)? Yes, you see the same guys on TV and
| to a lesser extent, final-tabling multiple tournaments. But
| these guys are often on TV because they are entertaining, not
| necessarily great (or consistently-winning) players. They
| typically all have external sources of income (sponsorships,
| poker training, commentary, casino ambassador, company
| owners, etc) and most reduce volatility by buying and trading
| pieces of each others' action. In addition, for tournaments,
| some guys are able to simply enter way more events, which
| naturally leads to more final tables, but you're not seeing
| all the losses and bust outs.
|
| All I'm saying is that it's not the same as the 70s through
| 90s where the skill gap was so huge that yes, certain players
| could (especially by going on the road and playing private
| games) absolutely dominate. I think winning consistently
| today is more of an illusion and some short-term luck.
| antasvara wrote:
| There is currently a series of poker AI's with game theory
| optimal solutions to bluff frequencies, bet frequencies,
| and bet sizing. These strategies are shown to do no worse
| than break even over a large number of hands.
|
| Winning consistently today relies on being as close as you
| can to this "game-theory optimal" strategy. As skill gaps
| decrease chance certainly plays a larger role, but AI
| analysis of poker has indicated that there are ways to
| improve your odds and gain an edge.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > While poker does have a significant element of chance in a
| given hand, it's no accident that top players consistently
| make more money over the long run.
|
| That's a good point about the cash game format.
|
| But tournament format often forces players into multiple all-
| ins over the course of the tournament. This leads to a much
| more luck based outcome.
| confidantlake wrote:
| But over the long run it is still about skill, just the
| variance is much higher. Any single tournament the result
| will be dominated by luck but over 10s or 100,000s of
| thousands skill will dominate. Even the all in situations,
| you need to know when to go all in and when to call an all
| in vs when to fold. Better players are going to have a much
| better handle on this.
| josefresco wrote:
| > Poker is about chance, chess is actual skill.
|
| Maybe you missed it. Humans are now using deceit to trick
| opponents trained by AI. While they may not "look at" their
| opponent, they are using similar strategies deployed in poker
| such as bluffing/misdirection/cloaking etc.
| invisiblerobot wrote:
| If poker was "about" chance you wouldn't see the same top
| players every year in the finals of every major competition.
| The chance aspect is why poker is so interesting. But in the
| long run (ie, 100 games played with the same players), a great
| poker player will beat an average one 95% of the time.
| Zealotux wrote:
| >Poker is about chance
|
| If this were true, then the recurrent Pocker champions must be
| the luckiest persons in the world, luck is undoubtedly an
| element, but there are many ways to influence other variables
| of the game.
| jerf wrote:
| Actually, the title is essentially clickbait, at least versus
| what you naturally read it as, and is all a setup for the final
| paragraph:
|
| "In that context, cheating scandals may be nothing less than a
| natural step in chess's evolution. Poker, after all, has been
| rocked by allegations of foul play for years, including cases
| where players are accused of getting help from artificial
| intelligence. When the highest form of creativity is outfoxing
| your opponent--as has always been true of poker--breaking rules
| seems only natural."
|
| I'm ruling this "clickbait" because while the core idea is
| reasonable, that is clearly a very weak way of phrasing it
| solely done to be in service of a clickbait title. Without the
| need for clickbait it's trivial to phrase that in a better way.
| im3w1l wrote:
| The interesting thing is that it is actually the opposite. It's
| been conjectured that with optimal play Chess ends in a draw
| (and if it's instead a win for white/black basically the same
| argument applies). So for two sufficiently smart players the
| best you can do is avoid blundering your draw away. Winning
| against a weaker opponent is impossible _without_ psychology
| and subterfuge. You have to put your opponent in tricky spots
| where you know he is weak.
|
| Poker on the other hand, by being random, means that you can
| mindlessly play the mathematically optimal strategy. Eventually
| your opponent will be put in a tough spot by pure randomness.
| robot_no_419 wrote:
| It's not the opposite either. Chess is a game of skill, poker
| is also a game of skill.
|
| The difference is that chess is deterministic and poker is
| not. Chess skill means being able to forcefully convert a
| winning or drawing position. Poker skill means optimizing
| your chances of winning.
|
| Not only is it possible to beat weaker opponents in chess by
| playing the best moves (contrary to your assertion), it
| happens all the time over the board. Weaker players are more
| likely to play moves that transforms the chess game from a
| win/draw to a draw/loss for them. There isn't a single human
| or engine alive that can consistently secure a draw against
| every opponent.
|
| And it's possible for a poker player to mindlessly play the
| mathematically optimal move and still lose. Poker IS a game a
| chance, so they could just get unlucky.
| im3w1l wrote:
| If we define optimal play as never turning a win into a
| draw or a draw into a loss, then I think it's possible to
| play a passive-but-optimal style, with few traps for weak
| players to fall into. Also if a position is "lost" but it's
| very very non-trivial to see why, a stupid-but-optimal
| strategy is to resign or move pieces randomly. You need
| psychology to win from a lost position.
| samatman wrote:
| The main difference between chess and poker is perfect and
| imperfect information.
|
| It is decidedly not skill.
| banannaise wrote:
| > All you have to do is look back at Bobby Fisher who rarely if
| ever even looked at his opponent.
|
| Physical "tells" are largely a myth in poker, particularly in
| high-level poker. Please don't speculate wildly on things with
| at most a novice-level understanding.
| nortlov wrote:
| Bobby Fischer seems to disagree with you:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=P349BdHUxlc&t=11s
| groffee wrote:
| Relevant Star Trek clip:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIRT6xRQkf8
|
| Generally both sides play to win, but if you play to draw instead
| (by playing 'sub-optimal' moves etc) you paradoxically have a
| better chance of winning.
| andrewla wrote:
| Chess definitely needs a shakeup, but it's unclear where it can
| come from. Chess960 (Fischer Random) has never really taken off.
|
| Maybe what we need is to run it like duplicate bridge -- have
| tournaments where you face off against an opponent starting from
| a random position, that may be a winning or losing position, and
| see how you do against other players faced with the same setup.
| bnralt wrote:
| If people wanted to see someone's skill at games like chess, it
| wouldn't be too difficult. There are plenty of historical pre-
| cursors to modern chess (like courier chess) or regional
| variations (Chinese chess). All of these are/were pretty well
| regarded. And that's not even getting into modern,
| intentionally created chess variants (like Chess960 that you
| mentioned). Picking a random version of chess would shake
| things up and force players to think on the fly.
|
| But people who enjoy modern Western international chess seem to
| want to see that one single version of the game optimized.
| Which is fine, I suppose. Though it would be nice if we saw
| more alternatives (granted, there are currently some popular
| alternatives like blitz chess).
| matai_kolila wrote:
| Rapid and blitz chess online is what gives the Twitch streamers
| their views, is my understanding.
| bonzini wrote:
| This is how tournaments are run between engines. Computers do
| not play the first 10 moves or so, which instead are prepared
| by humans to provide imbalanced positions where both sides can
| win.
| runarberg wrote:
| This might be true for spectators and top players, but for your
| average player, it is fine. In fact a chess puzzle starts from
| a seemingly random position and your task is to find the best
| move. And most amateurs still play the game with such
| inaccuracy that there are ample opportunities for dynamic play.
|
| I do admit though that watching top level chess is often times
| really boring. The moves are really predictable and at the same
| time really hard to understand. Blitz and Bullet games are
| actually far more enjoyable (when replayed on slower mode),
| because if a player makes an inaccuracy I can understand the
| punishing move (or it can be explained to me rather).
|
| If you want a more dynamic board game though, I do recommend
| Go. I at least still enjoy watching top level go in a way that
| I don't with chess.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| Someone should probably break it out to The Atlantic that
| preparation was a thing far before engines existed, whole books
| have been written analysing openings and positions which best
| players have been memorising for as long as the game exists and
| players have always worked with a whole team to best plan before
| facing a serious adversary.
|
| The article is a bit silly. I had the feeling reading it that the
| writer has little understanding of how classical chess is played,
| nor of poker for what it's worth.
| chongli wrote:
| Preparation has been a thing for a long long time. What hasn't
| been a thing is the combination of databases and engines. Top
| players even use supercomputers. The amount of pure grinding
| has shot up dramatically. Instead of a team of people rattling
| off lines verbally and debating back and forth, a player can
| sit at the computer and just hammer out the variations with the
| computer and see the best engine lines in mere seconds (using a
| supercomputer).
|
| This is so much more efficient that the only limitation is on
| how much energy and capacity the player has for rote
| memorization, rather than how much time it takes for the team
| of humans to work out the best lines.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| Objectively the limits have always been players memory.
|
| Sure, computer analysis has marginally changed how some
| openings are viewed and sure you can now get an engine
| evaluation of all the variations of some obscure line in a
| matter of seconds but novelties remain rare at the top level.
| Stockfisch is extremely strong because it can play near
| perfect positional play and can establish micro-advantage
| through deep calculation not because it fundamentally changed
| how chess theory is viewed.
|
| AlphaZero might be the sole exception to my point. It did
| indeed show that modern chess was neglecting some strategical
| concept but to be honest it was more a rehabilitation of old
| ideas than a pure novelty.
| bonzini wrote:
| AlphaZero showed that modern chess was neglecting some
| strategical concept _because engines were_. Unlike Go,
| neural networks play very bold moves but perhaps in a more
| human than traditional brute force.
|
| But nowadays Stockfish and Leela have both caught up and
| surpassed AlphaZero.
| golemotron wrote:
| Remember Gell-Mann Amnesia.
| PpEY4fu85hkQpn wrote:
| > As engines became widespread, the game shifted. *Elite chess
| has always involved rote learning*, but "the amount of stuff
| you need to prepare, the amount of stuff you need to remember,
| has just exploded," Sadler said. Engines can calculate
| positions far more accurately and rapidly than humans, so
| there's more material to be studied than ever before. What once
| seemed magical became calculable; where one could rely on
| intuition came to require rigorous memorization and training
| with a machine.
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| From the sixth paragraph, emphasis mine...
|
| > Elite chess has _always involved rote learning_ , but "the
| amount of stuff you need to prepare, the amount of stuff you
| need to remember, has just exploded," Sadler said.
|
| > Engines can calculate positions far more accurately and
| rapidly than humans, so there's more material to be studied
| than ever before.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| Yes this paragraph is indeed the crux of what I disagree
| with.
|
| Two sentences later you have this gem: "What once seemed
| magical became calculable; where one could rely on intuition
| came to require rigorous memorization and training with a
| machine. Chess, once poetic and philosophical, was acquiring
| elements of a spelling bee: a battle of preparation, a
| measure of hours invested."
|
| Well, that's patently untrue. Chess has always been a battle
| of preparation far before the advent of computer. The rosy
| paste described just doesn't exist. High level play has
| always required memorising books of theory and going through
| decades of past games. That's what chess is. It's a game of
| pattern recognition and memorisation.
|
| If I wanted to be provocative, I would say that the article
| seems to imply that computers have turned chess from an
| interesting game into a boring one while in actuality it has
| always been boring but with more mystic.
| mellosouls wrote:
| TL;DR:
|
| The dominance of computers has made human creativity redundant;
| optimal strategies for beating other humans ironically involve
| _suboptimal_ moves that may have a psychological dimension,
| similar to poker. [This isn 't actually a remotely new strategy
| though computers have influenced human play.]
|
| Although the article doesn't directly reference it, Hans Niemann
| in his emotional interview reacting to the unevidenced
| accusations of him cheating against Carlsen pointed out that one
| "weak" move against another opponent in the tournament had been
| chosen by him specifically because of it's psychological
| pressure.
|
| Update: Niemann interview link, as requested:
|
| https://youtu.be/8NQF60RT0b4&t=3m48s
| __s wrote:
| & the same thing is happening in poker with solvers
|
| I guess someone needs to write an article _Poker is Just Poker
| Now_
|
| Nobody plays perfectly. Engine prep only goes so far. The draw
| rates in chess are in part due to both sides being human; many
| opportunities are missed. An engine will tear apart any human
| even from an inferior position, so there's plenty of play in
| that margin
| triyambakam wrote:
| I'm so angered that no one that I've seen has even interviewed
| Magnus. He withdrew, made one tweet, and has since been silent.
| The responsibility is on him to own up to this. He likely will
| just hide behind his dumb smirk and world champion status,
| though. He's disgraceful
| elicash wrote:
| Which interview was this? Link/timestamp?
| dmurray wrote:
| I don't have those details, but Niemann said something like
| this about Qg3 in his game against Firouzja. "The way to beat
| Alireza is to attack him"
| mellosouls wrote:
| Yes, that's the one:
|
| https://youtu.be/8NQF60RT0b4&t=3m48s
| elicash wrote:
| Thanks, and for those looking for an explanation of the
| position and game it appears to be this move:
| https://youtu.be/QStXMuzVAyk?t=258
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| > "The way to beat Alireza is to attack him"
|
| Is this the level of analysis expected from a grandmaster?
| triyambakam wrote:
| How many grandmasters have you listened to give analysis?
| I'm sure there are some that are hardly coherent
| darepublic wrote:
| When I think about it, chess is a game where accusations of
| cheating are regular. Most recently there is the Neimann scandal.
| There was a lot of cheating accusations for Kramnik vs Topalov as
| I recall. Kramnik was accused of using Fritz (predecessor to
| today's stronger engines), and Topalov's manager was doing
| statistical analysis of Kramnik's move choice and the engine's.
| When Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, he was very salty and accused
| IBM of cheating. And those are only a sampling of modern
| examples. It's hardly a game of cold objective analysis. They've
| got a lot of emotions these chess players, which makes sense. It
| gives me solace when I get overly wrought / emotional around my
| own intellectual pursuits.
| treis wrote:
| >When Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, he was very salty and accused
| IBM of cheating
|
| The accusation was that IBM made modifications to Deep Blue
| between games. That's not cheating but then it's not exactly
| Deep Blue vs Kasparov anymore.
| darepublic wrote:
| There was a somewhat veiled accusation that there was human
| intervention in game 2 (as in, a strong human player
| interceded to influence or outright override the computer's
| move). Funny that in those days the cheating accusation
| involved a human behind the scenes instead of a computer.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| Chess grandmasters are not the most balanced human beings.
|
| It's a very small amount of people who have decided to
| consecrate an inordinate amount of time completely mastering a
| game and whose main focus in life is playing it competitively
| against each other.
|
| It's a lot like elite athletes but more nerdy and with longer
| career.
| triyambakam wrote:
| Many top players seem pretty unhinged. Hikaru or Magnus don't
| seem like they would be a good friend.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Couldn't you just have them play in a faraday cage? Surely
| there's enough money in the world championships of chess to
| arrange that. A metal detector and a room that can't be
| penetrated by wireless anal beads (pun intended) can't be that
| hard to arrange with a little budget right?
| Iolaum wrote:
| Chess is a full information game while in poker you don't have
| access to full information. I really dislike the analogy.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Tying the Niemann scandal or changing practices into the chess
| engine discussion is I think wrong. As the article itself points
| out, chess engine use became ubiquitous and cheating as a concern
| emerged almost 20 years back. The article also vastly overstates
| the importance of NN chess models. Conventional Stockfish already
| played at levels so far beyond human capacity a few years back it
| makes no practical difference. (chess GM's literally would draw
| or lose with pawn odds many years ago), and professional players
| have been using engines extensively for well over a decade.
|
| What's starting to shift in chess isn't tech but the culture,
| largely driven by the social media around it, the livestreaming
| medium where now much of it takes place in real time, and so on.
| Chess isn't becoming like poker, it's just becoming like any
| other sport that gets the entertainment sector treatment,
| including increasing amounts of drama.
|
| It reminds me a little bit of a recent thread on how Substack
| allegedly revolutionized writing. There also it wasn't substack,
| which is basically a blog generator with a payment button, but
| the social networks around it that create all of the new
| dynamics. I expect a lot more cheating allegations, personal
| feuds, played up controversy not because of technology that
| affects the game itself but because of tech that changes how the
| game is broadcast and how people participate in it.
| c3534l wrote:
| I feel bad for this guy. He managed to beat someone way better
| than himself and now everyone is accusing him of cheating with
| absolutely zero evidence. What chess engines have done is make
| everyone paraniod.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Magnus' reaction in the last tournament where he made 2 moves
| and left is not helping either. If he has credible information,
| he should come out with it, otherwise he is putting in jeopardy
| the career and mental health of another player.
| exogeny wrote:
| This is analogous to track and field or pro cycling, and it
| robs us of the ability to believe in the underdog.
|
| I don't know a single person who believes that Marcell Jacobs
| won the 100m dash in Tokyo legitimately, and that's a sad
| thing.
| mkagenius wrote:
| Well, it's not like he has not cheated before. The doubts in
| other's minds is his own mistake from the past.
| hosh wrote:
| If the goal of playing and winning chess is to rank and see who
| is the best at playing chess, then yeah, we'll get cheating. This
| can happen in any competitive sport.
|
| If the goal of playing chess is to develop, refine, and challenge
| one's own decision-making process in which someone can apply
| those principles elsewhere in life off-the-board, then cheating
| like this is cheating yourself.
|
| If the goal of sports, like chess, is to inspire others in the
| human civilization on what's possible, to uplift everyone, to
| reflect the best of humankind, then cheating like this cheats all
| of us. We're basically saying the best of humankind cheats rather
| than demonstrating virtue and character through sportsmanship.
|
| And lastly, in the domain of war and warfare, there's a proverb
| that, if you are not cheating, you're not trying hard enough.
| r0b05 wrote:
| Well said.
| awb wrote:
| Bobby Fischer attempted to solve the rote memorization problem by
| creating Fischer Random Chess:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_random_chess
|
| With 960 possible starting positions, opening line memorization
| is far beyond current human capacity.
|
| There have been some recent Random Chess tournaments with high
| level GMs like Magnus and they're pretty fun and entertaining.
| Chess.com has some great live coverage and analysis of these
| events as well as classical chess tournaments.
| Tepix wrote:
| Othello has gone a similar route with XOT start position games.
| jstx1 wrote:
| The history and well-studied lines add a lot to the game
| though, both for players and for spectators. 960 can be fun but
| it's not a replacement for classical chess, it's a different
| game altogether. To stick to the poker comparison (which the
| article barely makes), it's like saying that the fix for NLH
| bots and solvers is to switch to PLO - you haven't fixed
| anything, you've just decided to play a different game.
| H8crilA wrote:
| Yes, to a game where you can no longer memorize openings.
| Which fixed that thing (memorizing openings).
| jstx1 wrote:
| > Which fixed that thing (memorizing openings).
|
| Yeah but the fix doesn't come for free, you're giving up a
| lot in exchange. Which is why 960 isn't a replacement for
| classicial, it's another chess variant that people play in
| addition to classical chess.
| lalaithion wrote:
| The solution is to generate a 960 configuration every year on
| January 1st, and use it throughout the year. You get to have
| a new configuration to study, figure out and memorize opening
| lines, for an entire year.
| icelancer wrote:
| Huh, that's actually pretty interesting.
| jstx1 wrote:
| Sounds like a way to emphasise preparation even more.
| rollcat wrote:
| It's more or less what StarCraft II has been doing
| throughout its entire existence. Every couple months
| (more like years these days) there's a balance patch that
| slightly tweaks some units' stats, like build time, cost,
| damage output, tags (e.g. light, armored, which makes it
| good/bad vs something else) etc. It doesn't have a huge
| impact on the casual player audience, but it's enough to
| stir up the metagame at GM/pro level, and ensure pros
| continue to devise new strategies (and counters).
| honkdaddy wrote:
| How so? If it's Jan 4, what exactly would I be preparing
| with? The last three days of theory about the new row?
|
| If anything it sounds like a way to emphasize how to play
| positions you'd otherwise never possibly see in classical
| chess.
| jstx1 wrote:
| What I mean is that the gap between someone who has
| studied the new opening vs someone who hasn't studied
| would be huge so players have a much stronger incentive
| to prepare. And with an engine the new theory comes out
| immediately, it's not like you're waiting for humans to
| develop it.
|
| Imagine a match in classical chess between a 2600-rated
| plyaer who has spent time preparing their classical
| openings and a 2800 rated player who hasn't prepared at
| all - the 2800 player will still have a large edge. Now
| imagine the same scenario for a 960 game where the lower-
| rated player has spent 4 days evaluating the opening with
| an engine and the high-rated player hasn't - in this
| scenario the advantage from the engine prep is much
| bigger. The mix of novelty + opportunity to prepare is
| such that from a game theory perspective the whole thing
| becomes prepare-or-lose if their overall chess strength
| is reasonably close otherwise.
| Cd00d wrote:
| NLH and PLO?
| nohuck13 wrote:
| No-Limit Hold'em and Pot-Limit Omaha
| CSMastermind wrote:
| > With 960 possible starting positions, opening line
| memorization is far beyond current human capacity.
|
| That won't stop the rote memorization, just dampen its impact.
| At the Super GM level, they have lines memorized to around 12
| moves (sometimes more). If everything were to switch to Fischer
| Random, then maybe they'd only have lines memorized to 9 moves
| or something but it wouldn't preclude them from memorizing
| things.
| siftrics wrote:
| This is a bad take. Current chess lines rely on the exact
| position of pieces. When you shuffle the starting position,
| all theory that relies on exact position falls apart. Only
| high-level ideas carry over when a position isn't exactly the
| same as the one you studied.
|
| You're implying that 3 moves (12 minus 9) corresponds to ~960
| less lines to memorize. Sure, that might be applicable when
| tacking moves on to the end of a line you already have
| memorized (though I would certainly argue 3 moves would
| result in far less than 960 new lines, maybe 20 lines max).
| But when you're moving these 3 new moves to the beginning
| instead of the end, as you must in Fischer Random, then you
| do see true combinatorial explosion. You'd have to study far
| far more to have theory developed for every starting
| position.
| zone411 wrote:
| No, it's a decent take. The grandparent probably meant
| moves per side, so 6 fewer plies. Memorizing opening lines
| in Chess960 is certainly possible thanks to chess programs
| giving you an idea of why these moves were chosen without
| learning all the intricacies of the given opening position,
| it does give you a pretty big advantage, and the theory
| does not "fall apart."
| awb wrote:
| > Memorizing opening lines in Chess960 is certainly
| possible
|
| I don't think so.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_random_chess
|
| > The random setup makes gaining an advantage through the
| memorization of openings impracticable; players instead
| must rely more on their skill and creativity over the
| board.
|
| It's not just the 960 unique starting positions, but then
| each of those if given enough analysis probably has 2-4
| optimal 1st moves for white, plus 3-5 optimal 1st move
| responses for black. That's roughly 5,760 - 19,200
| optimal 1st move pairs, which is a lot to memorize to
| just get you to the 2nd move.
|
| At the GM level, a traditional opening is anywhere from 5
| - 15 moves long before you might see a non-trival
| expectation of deviating from explored lines, so
| memorizing 960 openings to any reasonable level of depth
| quickly becomes highly impractical.
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| I always enjoyed chess when I was young. I, like many here,
| enjoyed a fairly intellectual circle in my youth, so most
| everyone was familiar with the game and its rules, and so I got
| to play a lot. I wasn't terribly interested in the rote
| memorization of propitious move and traditional countermove; once
| my opponents began to make comments like "ah, the Tanzanian
| salchow" upon my innocently moving a rook forward or whatever, I
| turned to other pursuits.
|
| It's possible to return chess to that realm of pure thought over
| memorization -- chess variants!
|
| I suggest Duck Chess [0], whose inclusion of an invulnerable
| shared piece which each player moves on their turn (the "duck")
| renders most chess strategies incoherent.
|
| A less formal alternative coalesced in university -- get a bunch
| of (inebriated) people together to watch the (inebriated) chess
| match. Their role is to loudly count down from 5. It is in this
| time that you must make your move, or your opponent will make it
| for you. The combination of time-crunch and looseheadedness
| prevents the recall of how castling works, let alone more complex
| gambits.
|
| [0] https://duckchess.com/
| triyambakam wrote:
| > "ah, the Tanzanian salchow"
|
| Well done parody. I'm laughing
| NickC25 wrote:
| What's fascinating to me as someone who has followed the game for
| a while is the evolution of engines and how their play has
| influenced human play. Stockfish versus AlphaZero was fascinating
| only because it showed that at the highest of highest levels of
| chess (3000+ ELO) - there are ways to trick engines and employ
| "human" strategies (for example, there was a game where Alpha
| "blundered": it sacrificed 2 pawns and ceded the center of the
| board to push a wing pawn that 25 moves later ended up blocking
| Stockfish's kingside development entirely). Incredible, but the
| flip side of this is realizing that traditional chess is
| essentially a solved problem to some degree.
|
| From what I can understand, chess at the highest of human levels
| is just using an engine to find tricks and traps 30+ moves into a
| given match. Anywhere about 2000+ rating or above, most people
| will play a relatively fixed number of openings that have been
| explored to death time and time again. It's now about
| psychological hacks that can be be backed up by deep engine
| analysis. "If at move 45 in a Sicilian Dragon game I play sub-
| optimal move X instead of optimal move Y, my opponent might make
| a sub-optimal response which will open up a specific square or
| hang a piece 10 turns later according to AlphaZero or Stockfish".
|
| I can see why Magnus is kind of bored by it.
|
| To me, Fisher Random (Chess960) solves this by eliminating
| opening theory almost entirely. Crazyhouse Chess is also a blast,
| but it too is hampered by theory as there are fewer competent
| opening moves than standard chess and there's even less room for
| creativity. Crazyhouse960 is by far my favorite variation of
| chess, because there's no endgame to solve towards and little to
| none opening theory to draw from. Shame nobody plays it these
| days - if you're so inclined, come join over at PyChess.org and
| play a few rounds!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-09-19 23:00 UTC)