Carlsen came to play an exhibition at my previous company. He played against 8 players simultaneously. Two had been chess-club players and competitively ranked. One employee played Carlsen to a draw. This earned several gasps from his handlers who had never seen such a thing. They asked what she was ranked and she said she wasn't with a wry smile. Truly something special to behold.
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.
This is part of the plot of Sidney Sheldon's If Tomorrow Comes. A woman on a cruise ship with two chess grandmasters bets a large amount of money that she can draw a game with each of them. Of course she plays them at the same time, one game with white, the other black.
It's hilariously improbable to chess players, but some of my non-playing friends thought it was clever.
Derren Brown pulled this off but with 9 boards, scoring 4W 3L 2D. The strongest players he played "against" each other and was able to beat the weakest (relatively speaking) player there. Quite impressive.
> Magicians don't like to do tricks that might not work :)
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.
That's kind of a cool approach. As long as you can "salvage" the trick, then nobody needs to know about the failed portion.
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.
He may also have been practising a risky method of forcing a card on you. It is standard advice to do this often as it is the only real way of getting good at it.
Magicians probably wouldn't be playing in the same situations as standard chess players and it would probably be easy to usurp this norm with throw away lines like 'and I don't even need to play as white against all of you'.
Still no, you cannot lose a move in the opening. There is no "pass" move in chess. In fact any initial move no matter how wasteful you try to make it, will very soon alter the game. Even rook pawn a3 or h3 will soon have an influence in the game and cannot be ignored. It's very hard to craft the equivalent of a lost move in the early game - say, use an extra move with the bishop or something like that - and it's virtually impossible without the collaboration of the opponent.
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.
Imagine playing chess while blindfolded. Now imagine playing against 33 people simultaneously while being blindfolded and winning 29 games and losing none. This was done by American Grandmaster Timur Gareev, see: http://www.uschess.org/content/view/12187/709
To do this you have keep 33 chessboards in your mind simultaneously, and track the movement of 32 pieces on each board.
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.
IT sounds like an incredible feat even if you are a serious/competitive chess player. And whilst it is indeed the case that 'at a certain level almost anybody can play a decent blindfolded game' that level is high.
I have a colleague at work who plays blindfold chess with his nine year old son on road trips. Well, it's not actually blindfold chess, neither of them are wearing blind folds - they just are able to play games without a board, which, if you think about it, is pretty amazing.
I can play blindfolded and I'm nowhere near Kramnik. I've been around 17 hundreds in ELO when I played the most. I usually beat my beginner family members playing blindfolded against them.
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.
I decided to do a total re-write of one of my applications over the weekend. 30k lines later, I'm wondering if this at all feels similar.
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.
You rewrote an entire 30K line app in a weekend?? I have a side project that I really need to rewrite and I keep predicting it will take me weeks. Maybe I should actually give it a try.
Don't get me wrong, some of it was refactoring. So, there was quite a lot of copy-paste / text replacements. A lot of moving things here and there. Splitting classes. Encapsulating stuff. Creating new libraries. Etc.
There's a fair amount of new code... I'd say 10000 - 15000 lines, some of which I generated.
Yeah - I actually need to add a lot of new functionality and change the language, so it might take me a while longer. Still pretty cool. Refactoring can be fun.
There's a trick to beating good players in simil play.
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.
This is only applicable for blindfolded simuls where one needs to remember all board configurations. If the GM (or the one providing simul) can see the board then he wouldn't need to track differences, he can simply play according to each board. Only in blindfold does he need to remember each configuration with perfect clarity so tiny differences can get very confusing.
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 think that's one of the anecdotes that I read regarding that strategy, but I didn't know it was from Krabbe.
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.
An interesting question: What is the best strategy for a group of mediocre chess players against a grandmaster in simul?
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?
For those that weren't following closely, this rematch was nothing like the last world championship between Carlsen and Anand, when Carlsen won in a blowout. Carlsen didn't seem to be in top form this time, and Anand clearly came better prepared than the last match. Two games stood out as being particularly fascinating for me:
I wouldn't call 2013 a blowout, considering that it ended at the most likely final score based on their ratings at the time. Carlsen was 95 points higher than Anand, and 50 points higher than Anand's best ever.
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.
The word choice "blowout" is arguably strong, but I do agree that this year's match was much less one-sided than last year's. This one was even until the very last game, while Carlsen had a good lead after only Game 6 last year.
It wasn't even going into today's game - Carlsen had been one point ahead since game 6. That's why Anand rolled the dice with that risky exchange sacrifice - with only 2 games left, he was running out of time to catch up.
Game 6 was the turning point of the match. Carlsen made a horrific blunder, and if Anand had noticed it, he very likely would have won and taken a 1-game lead in the match. Instead he lost, giving Carlsen a 1-game lead.
Anand doesn't like playing long games. Carlsen doesn't give an inch even when he is down. Regardless of rating differences, Anand's game was in bad shape in 2013 and it just continued in the world championship. He is playing much better these days. It is just that his game doesn't match up very well to Carlsen's relentless style. That said, he had his chances this time like how he predicted before the match. He just couldn't take them. I'm always reminded of Federer-Nadal rivalry when I watch these two play.
I found it interesting that there was a stream on twitch.tv that had over 10,000 viewers for this. It's how I found it, not being much a chess follower but still finding the game interesting. I was a very surprised to see so many viewers.
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.
Last year in Chennai VG, the second largest newspaper in Norway, had up to 250.000 daily stream views while the TV channel NRK had up to 450.000 daily views.
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
Jerry (ChessNetwork) will stream sometimes (typically once a month) and will normally get 3-4k viewers. He normally plays speed chess, vocalizing his thoughts as he plays. Sometimes he will play several timed games at once.
He's an interesting personality. I enjoy watching him. He did the same thing during the last grandmaster match of Carlsen v. Anand.
For a 1-man show, the production quality was pretty good. Discussion of possibilities, consulting with both chess databases and computer algorithms for potential moves, and a constant stream of high level analysis of possibilities and positions that allows even a novice like me to at least get a taste of what goes through the minds the these grandmasters.
I hope he keeps it up; it certainly has rekindled my appreciation for chess.
You could virtually hear the nerves cracking on move 27. I feel like this game will be burned in my brain for a long time and serve as a constant reminder to think objectively in moments of stress.
I can't imagine Anand ever playing Rb4 in any other situation except this one. Earlier on the move b5 was truly spectacular and gave Black the edge, I think this is the first time Anand gained such a dynamic initiative over Carlsen in this whole match (barring the game he won). Also Carlsen was short on time, I mean so was Anand himself but with one game left this was a now or never kind of moment. On the whole I feel that Rb4 was more of a hopeful and deliberate gamble (as in he knew what he was getting into) than an actual nervous breakdown.
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.
2013/2014 was an exception. WCC has been held every other year for the last few years, and it will return to that now. Honestly I'm not quite sure why they decided to arrange the 2013 WCC in the first place.
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.
It's been a real treat watching Carlsen play these past few years in his rise to fame - He has a fundamental understanding of endgame far above anyone else playing at his level. It's fun watching the latest generation of players add to the skill of the game, with Carlsen atop that list.
It's fascinating to read about the blunders both competitors made. One of the many strengths of computer chess programs is that they are virtually guaranteed never to make such mistakes.
I'd be careful about making claims that chess programs are virtually guaranteed not to make mistakes. Even today's top engines have flaws that can be exploited. For example, here's a bizarre game where the chess engine Rybka throws away its game against Nakamura because it lacks the long-term positional understanding to realize the game ought to be a draw: http://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/nakamura-defeats-ryb...
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.
I'd be careful about overvaluing the mystique of the human element. In classical chess computers are absolutely, positively dominating humans.
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.
>I'd be careful about overvaluing the mystique of the human element. In classical chess computers are absolutely, positively dominating humans.
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.
Interestingly the name of the computer opponent in the GP post "rybka" is the diminuitive of "fish" in Czech\Slovak (and possibly Polish?). Is it a coincidence that there's two "fish-y" named chess AIs or is this a thing.
Fish is chess slang for a weak player. An older term would have been woodpusher. Patzer would be about the same in German, which provides several other commonly used chess terms like zugzwang and zwischenzug.
For some reason Rybka is indeed named after the word for fish and the developers of Stockfish probably made a joke (I don't understand) by referencing this.
> One of the many strengths of computer chess programs is that they are virtually guaranteed never to make such mistakes
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 is actually a problem with a lot of computer games: it's easier to make the AI super-human than it is to make it make realistic mistakes.
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.
Hey, I just wanted to say that your GUI (Tarrash GUI) is my favorite chess program ever which I am using every day.
Its very simple clear and fast interface makes quick analysis a joy (comparing to waiting until bloated stuff like chessbase or aquarium loads).
Thank you, I love it when people say things like that! As I type this I am working on a massive upgrade that will introduce nice database features without bloating out the program (I hope).
I think the issue is that there is 1 (or possibly very few) perfect way to play the game, while there are endless ways to play it badly. When we want the computer to play badly we want it to play badly like a human would, so we're playing chess and trying to pass the turing test. When we want the computer to play perfectly we don't care if it seems like a human playing.
Computer programs are way stronger than humans but competition between them is still fierce and there is still long way to go until perfection. Current most known computer chess tournament: http://tcec.chessdom.com/live.php
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's play improved vastly during this WCC. In retrospect, he should've drawn the 11th game and pressed Carlsen with white pieces in game 12. Magnus played well but it appeared that he wasn't as prepared as Vishy for this match. Every champion eventually gets dethroned by a youngster. The new generation of players including Caruana, Karjakin, Nakumara etc. will pose a bigger threat to Calrsen than old-timers such as Vishy, Gelfand and Kramnik.
This is a great achievement. Though I am a Vishy Anand fan and I really liked the way the contest was fought, I do think that Carlsen deserved to win. World chess championships, with their rich history are our treasure!
Haha. Younger gen should first beat him in candidates, no? Do you want Barcelona or Real Madrid to retire because they didn't win the trophy last year?
Nerves aside, Anand is still great and was almost there in this match. Don't underestimate him so easily.
pass on the baton? You're talking team sports nonsense here. If a younger person is better, he'll beat Anand in the candidates tournament/be ranked higher.
He's the challenger to the world title, and lost a pretty close match. I wonder what's lacking in that, grace-wise.
