7 ms·

Computers revolutionized chess – Magnus Carlsen wins by being human

97 points by wallflower 5y ago

greenyoda 5y ago
rchive with full text of article: https://archive.md/4e50f https://archive.md/4e50f
rtkaratekid 5y ago
… a very smart human
- heroku 5y ago
  chess has nothing to do with intelligence, unless you consider memorizing as intelligent.
  - rtkaratekid 5y ago
    Watch a GM chess match. They’ll play memorized moves till a point and then they’ll be “out of the book” and will have to start dealing with novel positions outside of what they’ve learned or prepared prior. Do they memorize? Absolutely. Can they also play completely novel positions better than anyone else? Absolutely.
  - smokey_circles 5y ago
    Because it is usually impossible to remember all possible permutations of a chess board, I disagree. Humans handle large data set with a cheat by using creativity and predictive reasoning to avoid having to store EVERY piece of data we encounter. Inference is a large part of this. Most models I'm aware of consider these traits to be related to intelligence.
  - patrick0d 5y ago
    He's referring to Carlsen's prodigious fantasy football skill.
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    Variations of this often comes up often on HN. Please note that: - in some (many? most?) places IQ tests does not include questions that require memorizing anything neither before or during the tests. (In I spoke to one colleague who was into such stuff and he made a major point out of the fact that asking for facts would disadvantage certain parts of the population.) - Something is measured using such tests even if they don't contain math or facts, only sorting sequences or figuring out what elements fit in a sequence. - We call that something "intelligence". We could call it something else: "Synthetic problem solving skill", "fu", or whatever, but we typically call it "intelligence". - On average that "intelligence" also seems to be a good indicator for a persons performance in many situations. As far as I know chess playing benefits greatly. - People who play chess will again and again end up in situations they haven't seen before and cannot have memorized. - in those situations, the same skills that are measured in an intelligence test will help a person calculate outcomes and choose one to their advantage
AlbertCory 5y ago
It was pretty interesting to read that Carlsen figured out how to defeat the opponent's training, and the best move, from the computer's point of view, wasn't necessarily the best one to take. I hosted Garry Kasparov at Google in 2017 (his London talk is the one on YouTube, not the visit I did), and he made a point of saying that there was no way to defeat the computer now, and the best players would work with the computer rather than against it. I'm not sure this is exactly what he meant by that, though. The article's capsule summary, "Though Kasparov argued that Deep Blue had cheated" is pretty superficial. One thing he said was that IBM did not allow him to study Deep Blue's games ahead of time, as he would for any human opponent, and IBM suddenly changed their approach from a friendly, collaborative one to being out for blood. I'd have to go back & read the book again to remind mysel, but I think he was also suspicious about IBM's handling of Deep Blue during the match.
- routerl 5y ago
  > the best players would work with the computer rather than against it He was certainly talking about "advanced chess"[1], where computers are used to make move suggestions but the human player actually selects the move to play. This combination of human+engine is consistently stronger than the strongest chess engines on their own. This fact also demonstrates that chess engines do not simply recommend "the best move". Since chess is not mathematically solved, it is actually meaningless to speak of "the best move", unqualified. Certain positions are solved, such that in those positions an objectively best move does provably exist, but the vast majority of the game is still mysterious. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess
  - roenxi 5y ago
    That sounds optimistic given the advent of the neural nets, which seem to roughly match human positional judgement. Any assumptions from pre-2016 seem suspect.
  - noir_lord 5y ago
    > This combination of human+engine is consistently stronger than the strongest chess engines on their own. This was true when computers where approach/just met the strength of the best humans. I'm not aware anyone has done it seriously recently and at this point the computers are so insanely strong relative to a human I think the human would just be along for the ride.
AdamJMarsh 5y ago
Magnus Carlsen is going to be an all time great in our history books. Potentially, even better than Fischer was.
- lervag 5y ago
  As far as I understand, experts already rate him better than Fischer. It seems one may still claim Kasparov is greater; Carlsen even says so himself. It will be very interesting to observe the performance the next 4 years!
  - dmurray 5y ago
    I think he's very clearly "better" in that he plays objectively stronger chess moves and would beat 1972 Fischer if we had a time machine. "Greater" is a different question, more one for sports fans than sports scientists. What do you need to be great at a sporting vocation? Pure playing strength? Longevity? If so, in years, or in number of championship matches won? Dominance over your peers? Cultural impact on the world outside of your sport? Some kind of adjusted playing strength where we hypothesize how strong players would be given all the same opportunities and training material? If so, should it be modern grandmaster games and engines, or that from an earlier era? "All of the above" is a good answer, and depending how you weight them you could incontrovertibly claim any of Carlsen, or Kasparov, or Fischer is the "greatest". You could also try to squeeze out a case for Morphy, or Lasker, or Capablanca.
    - noir_lord 5y ago
      Kasparov states this well in an interview. You can't compare the best in a given era because the players now learnt from the players in that era i.e. Carlsen grew up studying Kasparovs games so it's simply a flawed comparison. Instead he suggests a metric of "how far ahead of the field" they where, So Morphy and Fischer do really well on that metric, Kasparov does as well, Lasker and most of the other greats. Fischer was unique in so many ways but late 1980's Kasparov would have crushed him. Carlsen may be the only player to have a reasonable claim to be his equal.
totorovirus 5y ago
Just a quick question: if finding the most obscure path is the holy grail, can't we just write a quick modification to algorithm to find the lines with most diversity of its variations? I do not know the details how the chess engines work, but it doesn't sound too difficult to write one.
- skytreader 5y ago
  I'm not sure I understand the question so I'll break down the quote from the article: > It’s figuring out what it sees and dismisses that might still be useful. The dream of any computer-savvy chess player is to discover a string of moves that an engine doesn’t necessarily favor, yet taps into a line that their opponent hasn’t prepared. The first part ("discover a string of moves that an engine doesn’t necessarily favor") is algorithmically trivial of course. Just print out all the lines the algorithm discarded. At this point I think you can even narrow your options based on a heuristic like, as you suggest, diversity of variations. But here comes the difficult question: which of the remaining lines is "still useful"? That alone requires massive insight. But of course, tournaments at the GM Level require hyper-specialized preparation; at WCC, each of the two contestants has the luxury to obsess over the other's style. At that point in their analysis, not only are they trying to evaluate what line is still useful but, even further, what line is their opponent likely to take. This gamesmanship is sort of like boxers studying each other, figuring out their opponent's chin is open after a jab and drilling the hell out to exploit that fact. (Note: I'm not a ranked player, just an enthusiast. I've dabbled a bit with Chess engines during the WCC 2014 and a bit more beyond but my knowledge is in no way state-of-the-art.)
alliao 5y ago
surely this is a setup to alphaChess?

97 points by wallflower 5y ago

greenyoda 5y ago

rchive with full text of article: https://archive.md/4e50f https://archive.md/4e50f

rtkaratekid 5y ago

… a very smart human

heroku 5y ago
chess has nothing to do with intelligence, unless you consider memorizing as intelligent.
- rtkaratekid 5y ago
  Watch a GM chess match. They’ll play memorized moves till a point and then they’ll be “out of the book” and will have to start dealing with novel positions outside of what they’ve learned or prepared prior. Do they memorize? Absolutely. Can they also play completely novel positions better than anyone else? Absolutely.
- smokey_circles 5y ago
  Because it is usually impossible to remember all possible permutations of a chess board, I disagree. Humans handle large data set with a cheat by using creativity and predictive reasoning to avoid having to store EVERY piece of data we encounter. Inference is a large part of this. Most models I'm aware of consider these traits to be related to intelligence.
- patrick0d 5y ago
  He's referring to Carlsen's prodigious fantasy football skill.
- skinkestek 5y ago
  Variations of this often comes up often on HN. Please note that: - in some (many? most?) places IQ tests does not include questions that require memorizing anything neither before or during the tests. (In I spoke to one colleague who was into such stuff and he made a major point out of the fact that asking for facts would disadvantage certain parts of the population.) - Something is measured using such tests even if they don't contain math or facts, only sorting sequences or figuring out what elements fit in a sequence. - We call that something "intelligence". We could call it something else: "Synthetic problem solving skill", "fu", or whatever, but we typically call it "intelligence". - On average that "intelligence" also seems to be a good indicator for a persons performance in many situations. As far as I know chess playing benefits greatly. - People who play chess will again and again end up in situations they haven't seen before and cannot have memorized. - in those situations, the same skills that are measured in an intelligence test will help a person calculate outcomes and choose one to their advantage

AlbertCory 5y ago

It was pretty interesting to read that Carlsen figured out how to defeat the opponent's training, and the best move, from the computer's point of view, wasn't necessarily the best one to take. I hosted Garry Kasparov at Google in 2017 (his London talk is the one on YouTube, not the visit I did), and he made a point of saying that there was no way to defeat the computer now, and the best players would work with the computer rather than against it. I'm not sure this is exactly what he meant by that, though. The article's capsule summary, "Though Kasparov argued that Deep Blue had cheated" is pretty superficial. One thing he said was that IBM did not allow him to study Deep Blue's games ahead of time, as he would for any human opponent, and IBM suddenly changed their approach from a friendly, collaborative one to being out for blood. I'd have to go back & read the book again to remind mysel, but I think he was also suspicious about IBM's handling of Deep Blue during the match.

routerl 5y ago
> the best players would work with the computer rather than against it He was certainly talking about "advanced chess"[1], where computers are used to make move suggestions but the human player actually selects the move to play. This combination of human+engine is consistently stronger than the strongest chess engines on their own. This fact also demonstrates that chess engines do not simply recommend "the best move". Since chess is not mathematically solved, it is actually meaningless to speak of "the best move", unqualified. Certain positions are solved, such that in those positions an objectively best move does provably exist, but the vast majority of the game is still mysterious. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess
- roenxi 5y ago
  That sounds optimistic given the advent of the neural nets, which seem to roughly match human positional judgement. Any assumptions from pre-2016 seem suspect.
- noir_lord 5y ago
  > This combination of human+engine is consistently stronger than the strongest chess engines on their own. This was true when computers where approach/just met the strength of the best humans. I'm not aware anyone has done it seriously recently and at this point the computers are so insanely strong relative to a human I think the human would just be along for the ride.

AdamJMarsh 5y ago

Magnus Carlsen is going to be an all time great in our history books. Potentially, even better than Fischer was.

lervag 5y ago
As far as I understand, experts already rate him better than Fischer. It seems one may still claim Kasparov is greater; Carlsen even says so himself. It will be very interesting to observe the performance the next 4 years!
- dmurray 5y ago
  I think he's very clearly "better" in that he plays objectively stronger chess moves and would beat 1972 Fischer if we had a time machine. "Greater" is a different question, more one for sports fans than sports scientists. What do you need to be great at a sporting vocation? Pure playing strength? Longevity? If so, in years, or in number of championship matches won? Dominance over your peers? Cultural impact on the world outside of your sport? Some kind of adjusted playing strength where we hypothesize how strong players would be given all the same opportunities and training material? If so, should it be modern grandmaster games and engines, or that from an earlier era? "All of the above" is a good answer, and depending how you weight them you could incontrovertibly claim any of Carlsen, or Kasparov, or Fischer is the "greatest". You could also try to squeeze out a case for Morphy, or Lasker, or Capablanca.
  - noir_lord 5y ago
    Kasparov states this well in an interview. You can't compare the best in a given era because the players now learnt from the players in that era i.e. Carlsen grew up studying Kasparovs games so it's simply a flawed comparison. Instead he suggests a metric of "how far ahead of the field" they where, So Morphy and Fischer do really well on that metric, Kasparov does as well, Lasker and most of the other greats. Fischer was unique in so many ways but late 1980's Kasparov would have crushed him. Carlsen may be the only player to have a reasonable claim to be his equal.

totorovirus 5y ago

Just a quick question: if finding the most obscure path is the holy grail, can't we just write a quick modification to algorithm to find the lines with most diversity of its variations? I do not know the details how the chess engines work, but it doesn't sound too difficult to write one.

skytreader 5y ago
I'm not sure I understand the question so I'll break down the quote from the article: > It’s figuring out what it sees and dismisses that might still be useful. The dream of any computer-savvy chess player is to discover a string of moves that an engine doesn’t necessarily favor, yet taps into a line that their opponent hasn’t prepared. The first part ("discover a string of moves that an engine doesn’t necessarily favor") is algorithmically trivial of course. Just print out all the lines the algorithm discarded. At this point I think you can even narrow your options based on a heuristic like, as you suggest, diversity of variations. But here comes the difficult question: which of the remaining lines is "still useful"? That alone requires massive insight. But of course, tournaments at the GM Level require hyper-specialized preparation; at WCC, each of the two contestants has the luxury to obsess over the other's style. At that point in their analysis, not only are they trying to evaluate what line is still useful but, even further, what line is their opponent likely to take. This gamesmanship is sort of like boxers studying each other, figuring out their opponent's chin is open after a jab and drilling the hell out to exploit that fact. (Note: I'm not a ranked player, just an enthusiast. I've dabbled a bit with Chess engines during the WCC 2014 and a bit more beyond but my knowledge is in no way state-of-the-art.)

alliao 5y ago

surely this is a setup to alphaChess?