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Comment by EnPissant | Hacker News Reader

Magnus Carlsen would get crushed by an engine running on an iPhone 1. Meanwhile the world has access to iPhone 16s. The entire concept is flawed. I'm guessing someone made money off it, though.

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> Magnus Carlsen would get crushed by an engine running on an iPhone 1.

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.

I don't know enough about chess, and will take your word for it. What it suggests to me is a deeper question: How do you get 143000 people to all fall in line behind a single machine, or person, making the best decision for them?

If you had a military-like organization and turned 143000 people into calculators led by one (talented) person or a hierarchy, then yes, they would crush Magnus.

No they would not. If you imagine running a computer chess engine on 143,000 humans, it's not even remotely close to the amount of compute you need to win.

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.

You could absolutely form a system to harness the power of that many people. It would not happen spontaneously, but it is possible given enough effort. Calculation and memoirzation plays a huge role in chess.

Now I want to see a YouTuber hire 1000s of humans to make a human CPU. Each human can do a single simple task like a redstone block. What would their equivalent CPU clock speed be?

Could you play doom on humans?

Cheating obviously does happen but on the whole chess is kept alive by people who do it for fun. What would be the point of beating Magnus with a computer? Would anyone get satisfaction from that?

I mean, with Carlsen facing this sort of aggregate, large number of ‘opponents,’ yeah, I imagine quite a lot of them are cheaters.

Oh, sweet summer child.

The proper question might be: Why is this one iPhone stalemating 140k other iPhones in this particular task?

iPhone/computer/machine/etc

Better heuristics. Even 1% better heuristics is enough of an edge in a zero-sum game.

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