
Data Mining Reveals Factors That Lead People To Make Blunders in Chess (2016) - tosh
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601774/data-mining-reveals-the-crucial-factors-that-determine-when-people-make-blunders/
======
yangez
> The bottom line is that the difficulty of the decision is the most important
> factor in determining whether a player makes a mistake. In other words,
> examining the complexity of the board position is a much better predictor of
> whether a player is likely to blunder than his or her skill level or the
> amount of time left in the game.

I wonder if this also works the other way around with _good moves_ instead of
just avoiding blunders.

A parallel in business: we spend so much time thinking about hiring "A
players" and "10x-ers". But could refocusing on better processes, environment,
and goal-setting (reducing the complexity of the position) be just as
effective for increasing performance?

~~~
vernon99
On point. I think that also is applicable to your personal life btw. I had a
short-lived existensial crisis a few days back, realizing that my life is
getting too complex for me to properly manage it. Things were falling out of
hand, I wasn’t making enough progress, etc. I even had a suicidal thought, my
first in a very long while. But then reflecting on it I realized that this
complexity is driven by my mounting desires. To improve my balance and regain
the sense of control over my life, I should examine these desires and get rid
of secondary ones, which would make my life simpler and I would be less prone
to error (blunder in the article’s terminology). Instantly made me feel better
:)

~~~
sova
Our lives are frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify. -hdt

------
fundingshovel
It's poorly written press coverage of
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04956](https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04956)

tl;dr We find strong evidence that in our domain, features describing the
inherent difficulty of an instance are significantly more powerful than
features based on skill or time.

~~~
d0mine
Does it mean the more complex a problem the more likely an error? (while skill
and the time available to make a decision matter less)

~~~
castlecrasher2
More like if the problem doesn't fit our mental models we're likely to fall
into a cognitive tunnel where we depend on a familiar process for an
unfamiliar problem.

------
rhlala
'Anderson and co have found evidence of an entirely counterintuitive
phenomenon in which skill levels play the opposite role, so that skillful
players are more likely to make an error than their lower-ranked
counterparts.'

I would to see more how the study was done because i highly doubt this could
be possible. It can be the case that in high ranked games the oponent will put
you in harder spots, and errors will comes. But by definition, better players
take better decisions Ev average.

An interesting study will be a list of leaks the population usually have.

For exemple in pkker before solvers, people with a very strong hand on flop,
lets say straight draw+ flush draw, when the board turn bad for them, they are
way more likely to call a bet on river, because they hand was so strong on
flop. Solver will show is a bad call because you block possible bluffs
opponent could have (flush and straight draws) so his value range is bigger.

~~~
everdev
The finding that better players make worse decisions is only under very
specific conditions where the board complexity is high.

One theory could be that stronger players are going for a win which requires
more risk while weaker players are happy to play a non-aggressive move looking
for a draw.

Unfortunately the article didn't state if most blunders come from being ahead
or behind in material.

~~~
toolslive
Sometimes you need to go for the win because of external conditions (last
round of a tournament, or your chess team is losing and the captain told you
to press on). Last world championship qualifiers for example saw Kramnik
tilting because he needed to go all in in order to still make a chance to
qualify.

------
ganeshkrishnan
10 seconds for what kind of chess? For classical chess it has to be much
higher; probably minutes. For bullet chess on LiChess we have less than 2
seconds per move including the network lag

Also important point to note is that most chess masters avoid reaching this
complex position and that itself is an important skill. The best way to solve
a problem is to avoid it from happening.

GMs like Garry Kasparov would deliberately go into complex positions to
confuse their opponents.

~~~
MisterOctober
re : intentionally creating complications : Yes indeed -- Petrosian was also
[in]famous for doing this. It's also a great way to win on time in blitz /
bullet.

Silman has spoken / written about the little-discussed but non-negligible role
that chance / stochastic processes have in the outcome of chess games. In one
of his books [I think the recent edition of 'Reassess You Chess'], he
ballparks chance at something like 10% of the total factors influencing
outcome.

------
fermienrico
Offtopic: is to me or the Technology Review writing quality has plunged for
the worse? It is difficult to get through this article. What is the plot doing
in the article without any labels?

~~~
thanatropism
I don't think I've ever seen a good article from there.

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yesenadam
One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet on this page is the huge role of
_overconfidence_ in chess. It serves as a devilish kind of levelling factor:

If I play someone much lower-rated than me, it's hard to care much about the
game. I will play careless aggressive moves, make reckless sacrifices,
thinking anything will be good enough.

They will be playing a much higher-rated person. Winning will mean a lot to
them, they'll try hard, focus intently, make the most of resources etc.

Because of this, I've often had the impression that higher-rated people are
easier to beat than lower!

Then when you get in a very easily won position, it's really hard to keep
focus, you just think it's already won, are already celebrating in your mind.
But in chess, one slip is often fatal, no matter how winning you are. Or there
are stalemate tricks, and the win is thrown away. And the more you're winning,
the more paths to victory to select from, and the less you care to think about
it. You impatiently wonder why the other guy hasn't resigned already. Thus the
saying "There's nothing harder to win than a won game".

When you are losing, you focus, use every resource... Survival mode kicks in.

------
rozim
I enjoyed the paper but one thing they didn't seem to consider was the human-
difficulty of the move e.g. sometimes long horizontal moves are harder to see
(sorry, no reference, just anecdotal based on experience), so one could see
later works that fold that in.

Also, they used endgames with IIRC < 7 pieces, so again, some derivative work
might use middlegame positions and use engine analysis as an oracle, similar
to Regan's work ([http://www.buffalo.edu/news/experts/ken-regan-faculty-
expert...](http://www.buffalo.edu/news/experts/ken-regan-faculty-expert-
chess.html)).

~~~
CalChris
Ivanchuck (I think) said the hardest move to find is a knight retreat.

~~~
oli5679
[https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/8015h5/vasilly_ivanc...](https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/8015h5/vasilly_ivanchuk_gives_a_passionate_description/)

"According to my experience in chess, the most difficult in chess? To see
moves with knight back." @5:34 --Ivanchuk

------
darmokjalad
Setting aside the poor writing of this article, the reasoning seems to miss a
key element.

The higher the skill, the higher are chances of blundering probably because:
1\. Higher complexity 2\. Very high likelihood of being punished for it. At
lower elo, your opponent probably didn’t realize the blunder either.

------
everdev
tldr;

> Quick decisions are more likely to lead to a blunder, but after about 10
> seconds or so the likelihood of a blunder flattens out

> More difficult positions are more likely to lead to a blunder. And skill
> levels have a big impact in reducing the likelihood of a blunder. In
> general, better players make better decisions.

> The bottom line is that the difficulty of the decision is the most important
> factor in determining whether a player makes a mistake. In other words,
> examining the complexity of the board position is a much better predictor of
> whether a player is likely to blunder than his or her skill level or the
> amount of time left in the game.

------
yesenadam
I looked at the paper.. They used only positions analyzable by 6 piece
tablebases, which was a surprise, i.e. only positions with a maximum of 6
pieces, e.g. each side has king and 2 pawns. The game starts with 32 pieces,
so that means eliminating all the complex board positions I imagined a study
of chess complexity would involve! So they're not so much studying chess
proper, as endgames, and very minimal ones at that.

They have an new definition of _blunder_ \- "a player has committed an error
if their move worsens the mini-max value from their perspective. That is, the
player had a forced win before making their move but now they don’t; or the
player had a forced draw before making their move but now they don’t. ...we
will refer to such an instance as a blunder." .. "Since we are interested in
studying errors, we exclude all instances in which the player to move is in a
theoretically losing position — where the opponent has a direct path to
checkmate — because there are no blunders in losing positions (the minimax
value of the position is already as bad as possible for the player to move)."

"Our data comes from two large databases of recorded chess games. The first is
a corpus of approximately 200 million games from the Free Internet Chess
Server (FICS), where amateurs play each other on-line. The second is a corpus
of approximately 1 million games played in international tournaments by the
strongest players in the world. ... we focus on this large subset of the FICS
data consisting exclusively of games with 3 minutes allocated to each side."

I've played 10,000+ games on FICS, so I have some idea how it works. Players
have a standard, blitz and lightning rating, all separate. 15 0 and slower
counts as 'standard', anything faster down to 3 0 is blitz, anything faster
than 3 0 is lightning. [0] 3 0 is a different world to 14 0, so treating those
ratings as the same is already misleading - I often played 5 14 (i.e. 5
minutes on your clock to start, plus 14 seconds added on after each move), a
bit faster than 5 15, which is counted for rating purposes as the same as 15
0. (It assumes a game goes for 40 moves, so 5 minutes + 15 seconds x 40 moves
= 15 minutes.) So 5 14 is the slowest blitz speed. If I played someone rated
the same as me whose rating mainly came from 3 0 games, they would be _much_
stronger than me at 5 14. (Usually, on FICS, the faster the time control, the
higher the rating. And obviously the more time you have, the better moves you
make.) The point being - someone's blitz rating didnt mean they got it playing
at 3 0. It's not their 3 0 rating.

Also, FICS _doesn 't use Elo_. (It uses the Glicko rating system[1]) The
paper's authors seem unaware of that, or maybe I missed the part where they
explained how they converted between FICS and Elo. As far as I know, it's not
possible. There's not a linear relationship, or any simple conversion formula.
From memory, lower rated FICS players have higher Elo, higher rated FICS
players (over 2200) have lower Elo etc. But chess websites have a variety of
rating systems, none of them compatible, commensurable or equivalent.

Sadly, I kind of lost interest there. I meant to study the paper more
thoroughly. But already that rating confusion seems a huge 'blunder'.

[0]
[https://www.freechess.org/Help/HelpFiles/blitz.html](https://www.freechess.org/Help/HelpFiles/blitz.html)
[https://www.freechess.org/Help/HelpFiles/standard.html](https://www.freechess.org/Help/HelpFiles/standard.html)

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glicko_rating_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glicko_rating_system)

