Hacker News Reader

Comment by zackzackzack | Hacker News Reader

I don't play chess or understand why this matters. What is going on?

They've drawn each game up till this win by Gelfand.

Beautiful mate at the end: Anand, the world champion, playing black, marched a pawn across the board, but Gelfand will checkmate in two moves regardless. The knight checks on G6, the King is forced to G8, then the Rook checkmates on G7.

Incidently, Kasparov just called out Anand as old'n lazy while visiting the match in Moscow. Gelfand came through candidate matches as a surprise challenger. He's been around forever in the top twenty.

Black could avoid the mate by sacrificing his rook with h1+, then promoting the pawn with a check, then sacrificing the new queen by taking the knight at e5. No point in that though. He has lost.

Modern chess matches like this require a huge amount of preparation. Computers are much better than even the best humans at chess, and they are (in the last decade or so) the number one tool for grandmasters when preparing. Each GM has a support team, which at this level includes HPC compute specialists. This match includes two players that over a year, beyond rigorous practice, include in-depth computer analysis of an exponential time problem (more possible chess positions than atoms in universe, etc).

Beyond that, the top 20 in the world are downright geniuses, locked in a fierce mental competition. Not directly hacker related, but there is an overlap in interest base.

When we have computers that can number crunch enough to beat the best humans in a game, I can't help but think that human competition in that game is no more exciting than humans competiting to do something like multiplying a bunch of large numbers together. Of course, I do believe that all human mental work is just number crunching (i.e. Turing computation), so this idea would seem to apply to all human mental competition given the right algorithms and enough computing power. Not to mention that machines can best humans in a lot of athletic events, but that doesn't seem to ruin those for me. And yet, I still just can't get excited about a discrete perfect information game like chess when computers have all but solved the game.

Is athletics uninteresting because we have cars (or bicycles, or horses)?

I mentioned that apparent contradiction in my comment.

Same here. But chess interests me a whole lot, so I'd love some explanation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com