[HN Gopher] God Plays Chess (2018)
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God Plays Chess (2018)
Author : akkartik
Score : 41 points
Date : 2024-12-09 18:55 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.chessbase.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.chessbase.com)
| mock-possum wrote:
| The whole article being ultimately an ad for chess endgame
| position _DVDs_ of all things was quite a twist.
| perihelions wrote:
| It's prosocial to mention that the market rate for endgame
| tablebases is $0 [0][1][2]. (And also that this particular
| vendor are ethically challenged weasels who steal very labor-
| intensive GPL projects and try to pass them off as their own
| [3]).
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endgame_tablebase#External_lin...
|
| [1] https://syzygy-tables.info/
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40949943 ( _"
| Optimizing the Lichess Tablebase Server (lichess.org)"_)
|
| [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27896386 ( _" Our
| lawsuit against ChessBase (stockfishchess.org)_")
| snikeris wrote:
| I have trouble believing in God, but when I play chess, I
| sometimes get the sense that it's not me and the opponent playing
| against each other, but God playing against himself. I guess it's
| something to do with the mystery of insights.
| thom wrote:
| Dunno if it's just the timezone difference, but whenever I
| play, God's drunk.
| why-el wrote:
| not to be confused with "Drunk Magnus", a very strong player.
| wavemode wrote:
| Do you mean that in the sense of that old quote, "we are the
| universe experiencing itself"?
| snikeris wrote:
| Yes, indeed. It's like you are witnessing the unfolding of
| the universe with each move.
| tromp wrote:
| > "No, no," said God, "it was really tough. More than 10^35 legal
| positions
|
| God should know there are approximately 4.8*10^44 legal positions
| [1].
|
| > Secondly Ken was predicting that the game of chess was a draw,
| i.e. that probably a majority of all legal positions, including
| the starting position, would lead to a draw with perfect play.
|
| Only the latter is what the game being drawn means. The majority
| of legal positions is in fact overwhelmingly to one side's
| advantage, as is clear from sampling a few dozen random legal
| positions.
|
| [1] https://github.com/tromp/ChessPositionRanking
| volemo wrote:
| To be fair, 10^44 _is_ more than 10^35.
| thom wrote:
| ChessBase is a horrible program and you don't need it to get your
| own tablebases. You can generate your own with:
|
| https://github.com/syzygy1/tb
|
| But everything up to 6 pieces is on BitTorrent these days. The 7
| piece tablebase is 20TB or so, so it'll be a few years before you
| can fit that one your phone. Pretty sure Lichess has an API for
| that. Never tried to hook it up to Stockfish or Leela though.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Chessbase is one of those pieces of software that would be
| completely eaten by a cheaper alternative if the market was
| bigger. $400+ for a single download, selling mostly open source
| data, and it looks like it was made in 1998.
|
| The thing is, there is money in chess but not that much money.
| There will never be a unicorn in chess software.
| Scarblac wrote:
| Scid exists of course, I've used it since forever and it works
| fine. But you have to find your own games to fill it with
| (probably from The Week In Chess) and it looks like Linux did
| in 1998.
|
| Most of my opening stuff is just in a bunch of Lichess studies
| these days though.
| dmurray wrote:
| Open source may have eaten the other end of the market. Lichess
| is good: not as feature rich as Chessbase and a less complete
| database, last time I checked, but less buggy and faster for
| some purposes.
|
| It's hard to imagine a competitor at say $50 that did say 80%
| of Chessbase's functionality would sell many copies. It needs
| to be 150% of Chessbase and cost $200.
|
| Scid (and forks) also exists in the open source world. It works
| just fine but the UX is lacking; I've never met a serious
| player who relied on it. It's the GIMP to Chessbase's
| Photoshop. So the UI needs to be great or to be a clone of
| Chessbase's.
|
| There's also Chessbase mobile which was an amazing product when
| it first came out. It has the three features people really want
| from Chessbase: search for a position, search for a player's
| games, run engine analysis. All in the cloud. For something
| like $6.99. Sadly Chessbase seem to underprovision servers for
| it, but it's a sign they can give away the product if they need
| to get into a price war.
| pmdulaney wrote:
| Dice, no; chess, yes.
| aphantastic wrote:
| Backgammon, most likely.
| soegaard wrote:
| Love the Leko anecdote.
| Scarblac wrote:
| I didn't know that anecdote. The point that a perfect chess
| engine would not necessarily be hard to play a draw against
| (until you accidentally play a losing move) is one that many
| people miss.
|
| Although it could of course use some strong existing engine to
| pick a move in drawn tablebase positions. I assume Stockfish
| already does that.
| veidelis wrote:
| Really appreciate the Leko story about the endgames. He's the top
| level commentator that I enjoy the most, but I don't always
| understand what he says in his analysis. Leno's Banter Blitz was
| also quite fun to watch -
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5-eGwi2NSmY
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