'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.
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."
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!
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
There is very clear evidence he has cheated before. He then admitted to it. Then chess.com says that he admitted to a very small portion of the actual cheating. So there is a LOT of evidence he is a cheater.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Every single time I see someone mention anal beads in this story I get more angry. For fucks sake. The anal beads suggestion was an anonymous shit-post on reddit about how Magnus has been using anal beads his entire career to win. Now you've got The Atlantic dropping in stuff about anal beads.
Here's a message- you get to be a serious authoritative news source, or you get to post unsubstantiated jokes about anal beads. You don't get to do both. Every single word in this article is untrustworthy now, because I don't know if it's serious, or just a reddit shitpost that The Atlantic decided to repeat.
[+] [-] Aqueous|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davisoneee|3 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] evrydayhustling|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chongli|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] friedman23|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] furyofantares|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mcbrit|3 years ago|reply
* 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.
[+] [-] SkyMarshal|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mcguire|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daniel-cussen|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] awb|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jstx1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tepix|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CSMastermind|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pocketsand|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dvirsky|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stonemetal12|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] charlieyu1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnFen|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] WastingMyTime89|3 years ago|reply
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|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] PpEY4fu85hkQpn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wilsonnb3|3 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] golemotron|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] revolvingocelot|3 years ago|reply
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|3 years ago|reply
Well done parody. I'm laughing
[+] [-] todd8|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] blackbrokkoli|3 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] radarsat1|3 years ago|reply
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|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] confidantlake|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hosh|3 years ago|reply
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|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darepublic|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fay59|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] andrewla|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] runarberg|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bnralt|3 years ago|reply
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|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] c3534l|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkagenius|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PartiallyTyped|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danrocks|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exogeny|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] me_me_me|3 years ago|reply
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>
[+] [-] Barrin92|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] robot_no_419|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] adolph|3 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] mellosouls|3 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] SilverBirch|3 years ago|reply
Here's a message- you get to be a serious authoritative news source, or you get to post unsubstantiated jokes about anal beads. You don't get to do both. Every single word in this article is untrustworthy now, because I don't know if it's serious, or just a reddit shitpost that The Atlantic decided to repeat.