Magnus Carlsen Repeats at World Chess Championship
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There is an interesting trick that was common for a time and still gets referenced by magicians where even the worst chess player can guarantee that they will win at least half of n chess games where n is any even number. They will also be able to appear to need very little time when they get to each table.
The trick of course is just to play each player against another. The magician acts as a proxy and makes the moves of one player against another. Of course it takes a little practice at memorisation but magicians are often practised at mnemonics anyway.
It's hilariously improbable to chess players, but some of my non-playing friends thought it was clever.
I actually don't think this is true. As I understand it, a given routine will have a number of high-risk tricks that may work, say, only 1-in-3 times. If they do work, they're highly effective, precisely because they're so implausible, and if they don't work you can just pretend it's a bluff and move onto plan B. It's all about effective showmanship and managing expectations.
(Disclaimer: not a magician!)
One of my friends had a card trick that involved me selecting a card. Before starting the trick, he jokingly picked a card at random from the deck, and asked me if that was my card. He had 1/52 chances of being right, but it would have been an insane trick if it had worked.
He guessed wrong (naturally), shrugged and went on with the actual trick as though the first attempt was just a joke, to be forgotten because an actual trick was about to take place.
And we don't want symmetry on one board, but between two boards.
Try it yourself vs a few instances of your favourite chess software or just here http://www.chess.com/play/computer (requires Java). Open a few instances and see how can you chuck away a move.
Playing a game blindfolded seems like incredible feat if you are not serious/competitive chess player. Playing several sounds like magic. The thing is though that at certain level almost anybody can play decent blindfolded game, especially vs much weaker opponent. Playing several takes some practice but it's mainly connected with not being confused (anchoring positions to something so it's easy to switch). It's really not that much more taxing on the brain as chess players have tons of positions memorized anyway. I am talking about 2-3-4 games. 10 is already very impressive to me and things like 20+ is insane even for competitive chess player standards.
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I don't think about individual pieces placed in a board but rather interactions and moves. Pieces are not located at random, you can remember where pieces are because you remember the plans, the threats and the moves that lead to a setup. If I had to remember seemingly random arrangements of pieces it would be a completely different story and much harder.
Might help that I also played Shogi rather intensely and after being used to Shogi, the chess board feels very small.
When I'm alert, jacked up on caffeine, I can keep track of 100s of classes, 1000s of methods and member variables. When, I'm in the flow, I basically write the program in my head and let the fingers be my mouth.
There's a fair amount of new code... I'd say 10000 - 15000 lines, some of which I generated.
Maybe she wasn't ranked at the time, but a quick search revealed she played chess at an international level in her youth.
If a few players use the same openings and get themselves into similar positions it's very hard for the opposing player to keep track of the small differences that accrue.
Anyway, this reminds me of an anecdote I read long ago in a Tim Krabbe piece:
"A grandmaster once played a 10-board blind simul somewhere. Knowing the ropes of blind simuls, he varied his games right from the start, maybe opening two with 1.e4, two with 1.d4, one with 1.b3, and so on. To his suprise, all of his opponents played 1...b6. On the second move, five of them played 2...Bb7, and the other five 2...Ba6. On the third, three of the five players who had played 2...Bb7 now played 3...Bc8 and the other two played 3...Ba6, while three of the five who had played 2...Ba6 now played 3...Bb7, and the other two 3...Bc8. On move 4, the grandmaster saw bishops everywhere. After move 5, he excused himself and went to the toilet where he was happy to find a window big enough to let him through."
I agree it probably works better in blindfold play, but it works well in normal simul too (I used it successfully once, though that wasn't against a GM, and I had fairly recently stopped playing competitive chess).
Now going way off topic, but Krabbe's cycling book "The Rider"[1] is probably the best book about cycling I've ever read. Along with "Once a Runner"[2] I think it probably the best piece of sporting fiction ever:
My whole life had only one goal: making that last wheel, here, now. I was wasted. But that elusive finish line, eight, seven, six and a half meters in front of me, kept my hope and desire awake. I coughed and slobbered. I remembered the words of advice ‘Shift, when you’re really, truly at the end of your rope, to a higher gear.’ I shifted. A few hysterical kicks on the thirteen, then clenched power of a mortal struggle. I was there. I was sitting on that last wheel. I was in the lead group.
[1] http://cyclingtips.com.au/2010/11/the-rider/
[2] http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2008/12/speed_...
Similar moves with small differences to encourage mistakes? Very different to make the mental switching harder? Very esoteric openings to avoid "played this a 1000 times" situations for the grandmaster?
The GM's positional ability is almost certainly better than yours.
Game 3, which Anand won: http://en.chessbase.com/post/sochi-wch-g3-the-tiger-roars
And game 11, in which Carlsen clinched the title: http://en.chessbase.com/post/sochi-g11-in-dramatic-finale-ca...
Assuming a 70% draw chance, there was a 22.6% chance of the match ending 3-0-7. 17.9% chance of 2-0-9, 13.6% chance of 4-0-5. There was only about a 15-18% chance Anand would win a game.
I think people overestimated Anand's chances last year because he had a positive score against Carlsen going into the match, and that underestimated Carlsen because it included games long before Carlsen reached his present level. Or they thought wrongly that Carlsen would not perform as well in match play as he does in tournament play.
http://en.chessbase.com/post/sochi-g6-carlsen-won-anand-miss...
Well, once upon a time (i.e. 42 years ago), during the Cold War, we had the "Match of the Century"[1], aka Fischer-Spassky. The dominant evil empire USSR against the upstart USA. Played in Reykjavík, Iceland over a period lasting more than 6 weeks. Certainly more than 10,000 people were "interested" in the proceedings.
I was "glued" to the local NYC PBS station as Shelby Lyman "narrated". Those two words are in quotes, because moves might arrive two or three at a time, about every 15 or 30 minutes or so. In the meantime poor Shelby could do nothing but ad-lib, speculate as to what might be happening. The local PBS station devoted many many hours a week to this play-by-play.
Times have changed.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Chess_Championship_1972
Both VG and NRK do a great job of making the streams accessible and fun to ordinary people who aren't really into chess, and a lot probably watch due to national proudness, yet it's still cool to see so high ratings for chess.
VG has a great interface for the games, with text updates, computer calculations, tweet/questions, best moves, live stream from studio etc: http://direkte.vg.no/studio/sjakkvm2014-9
He's an interesting personality. I enjoy watching him. He did the same thing during the last grandmaster match of Carlsen v. Anand.
I hope he keeps it up; it certainly has rekindled my appreciation for chess.
It's also the beauty of chess - you can be down by a mile and come back when your opponent blunders. At my level (awful) it happens all the time.
But seriously, I was following this like a TV show, kind of hoping Anand would win for the extra drama it would create.
Congrats to Carlsen, clearly an amazing player but...
#Caruana2016
I am not a rated player but dabbled in chess throughout my youth. One lesson I learned that stood out is to always avoid "hope chess" (although Josh Waitzkin articulated it in a different way). Even when playing with weaker opponents, always play as if you are playing a top rated GM.
This was an unnecessary gamble. He let the fact that he had to win the game cloud his judgement.
Every other year makes a lot of sense for different reasons, though. It allows the champion to be more active outside of the championship (not just prepare for the next one all the time), it allows for a proper candidates cycle, it makes it easier to find venues/sponsors, etc.
What happens in that game is that Nakamura locks up all the pawns and then sacrifices some material. Rybka, because it's up material, think it's winning and doesn't want to draw. But because a game of chess is drawn if 50 moves are played without a pawn move or capture, Rybka's only option to avoid a draw is to sacrifice a pawn, blowing open a hole in its pawn wall and thereby seeding its own destruction.
The mistake that Rybka makes is one that even a patzer like myself can understand. It's a mistake at a level well below human grandmaster quality.
You can read more about anti-computer chess in general here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-computer_tactics
Computers are better than humans on average, but not in all dimensions.
There was a time when perhaps the top, top grandmasters (2750+) could handwave about understanding positional motifs better and maybe, occasionally, have a chance of winning, but those days are over. Engines routinely get into the 30 and 40 ply (15 and 20 moves ahead) range in under a minute these days, running on off-the-shelf hardware. Whatever advantages humans could have once claimed to have are annihilated by the pure depth of vision an engine has into a position.
Nakamura's win, while amusing, was at 3 0 time control, shuffling pieces hoping for a win on time. You couldn't get me to bet on him vs Rybka (or Komodo, Shredder or Stockfish) at normal time controls.
It's not that computers are perfect, they are not, but they are so dominate at the aspects they are good at, humans cannot cope. It's like a soccer player whose only skill is being able to run 10x faster than everyone else. It doesn't matter if that player can barely kick the ball, they will be so fast that they will cover all of their mistakes and dominate every other human player on the field by a large margin.
That was a four game match, played at G/45 with a 30 second increment. Nakamura's opponent was the latest developer build of Stockfish, running on an 8 core 3 GHz Mac Pro. Stockfish had no opening book or endgame tablebase.
For the first two games (which, for some reason, are listed as games 2 and 3 at the above link), Nakamura had the assistance of an older version of Rybka (about 200 points less strong than Stockfish on the computer rating lists) running on a 2008 MacBook. For the remaining two games, Nakamura played without computer assistance.
Sometimes, though, you WANT computers to make mistakes. For instance, when a mere mortal wants to play a game of chess with a computer.
It's no fun to get repeatedly crushed, so chess computer developers try to provide a way to set the playing strength of the computer.
So far, this has generally not been satisfactory. Here's how games often go when you are not a grandmaster and you set a computer to play at your level. It starts out totally kicking your ass. Then it makes a completely idiotic move that even a beginner can see is bad, turning the game around so you are theoretically winning. Then it plays perfectly for a while, brutally punishing every mistake you make, and it ends up winning again. Then it makes another idiotic move, and so on.
It's kind of funny. We've basically solved the problem of how to make a computer play like a person with a 3100 rating, but how to make a computer play like a 1500 is still largely unsolved.
This comes up in situations like fighting games, racing games, and to some degree, RTS games. No one wants to play a computer that perfectly blocks, drives, or micros its units - the super human reaction times and control input can exploit the game engine and overwhelm a human player in almost every instance.
It's easier to make a computer with super-human skills than one which accurately replicated human foibles.
You can browse through the games... a lot is happening, maybe more than in human chess :)
"The winner of the game is the player who makes the next-to-last mistake." -- Savielly Tartakover (1887–1956, Polish and French Grandmaster and chess journalist)
Anand should gracefully retire from chess and passon the batton to younger generation.
Nerves aside, Anand is still great and was almost there in this match. Don't underestimate him so easily.
He's the challenger to the world title, and lost a pretty close match. I wonder what's lacking in that, grace-wise.