Magnus Carlsen forced into a draw by more than 143000 people playing against him
apnews.com
apnews.com
But there's an interesting meta in that Magnus played far more passively than he normally would. And so I think he also expected he was probably playing an engine by proxy, and wanted to keep the position completely under control. If he knew the world was legit, they probably would have lost!
I'm still trying to reconcile how it came to be that the world didn't cheat though. Lowest common denominator amongst 140k+ people paired with inevitable chatter of 'Hey best engine move is blah' seems unavoidable.
But things like this are social. I didn't follow this (or even know it was going on somehow) but it seems very safe to assume that somebody and probably multiple somebodies were regularly pointing out and discussing engine moves.
So my only real assumption is that a significant chunk of people would end up deferring to the engine moves rather than their own preference. Of course my implied assumption there is also that a significant chunk of people were involved in the social aspects of this, but I think that's also a fairly reasonable assumption.
A very non-zero chunk of people also probably would not have even understood that that's cheating if it wasn't really clearly laid out in the interface somewhere. For instance computer assistance in the largest correspondence chess league is legal.
Any evidence of this whatsoever?
Here, for example, is one of the more well known and easy meta-indicators of cheating: Humans spend more time on difficult moves than on trivial ones. Cheaters will typically spend a comparable amount of time on a trivial forced move, and the start of an exceptionally deep combination. And an even bigger tell is that said exceptionally deep combo may be followed by a couple of forced moves, yet he will again take just about the same amount of time to play those moves.
But then again, with 24 hour time to brute force every possible combination, I guess chess engines may be better at freestyle when compared to classical chess, due to the sheer amount of creativity and calculation involved.
Source: am rated 2000 fide (partly because I struggle with openings)
That said, they have been trained almost exclusively on games that started from the normal starting position. But then, so have humans.
What makes it funny is: when 143000 chess players merge, they basically become Anish Giri.
> In the Chess.com virtual chat this week, players appeared split on whether to force the draw — and claim the glory — or to keep playing against Carlsen, even if it ultimately meant a loss.
Freestyle chess has been almost universally known as Fischer random. But of course Fischer being who he was history needs to be sanitized. The ap story is also wrong in its description of how it works since pieces are only randomized along the back rank not "all over the board"
Then you have so called experts racing into this thread to pronounce that cheating had nothing to do with the outcome. On the contrary the accuracy of the world is suspicious and I don't believe chess.com would ever permit Magnus to lose this match so it makes sense that, despite strengthening its position a strong "draw by repetition" faction magically appeared to prevent that possibility.
Did a quick sanity check here - this seems about right - Carlsen might be at least competitive with Pocket Fritz 4 at similar hardware performance to the iPhone 1, but that discounts the software improvements chess engines have seen over the past couple decades.
Humans don't win by calculation the way computers do. When you have multiple humans working together on chess they don't add up to an ultra-smart human. You are simply as smart as the smartest human in your crew, and that's it.
Could you play doom on humans?
iPhone/computer/machine/etc