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'In other words, chess engines have redefined creativity in chess, leading to a situation where the game’s top players can no longer get away with simply playin

'In other words, chess engines have redefined creativity in chess, leading to a situation where the game’s top players can no longer get away with simply playing the strongest chess they can, but must also engage in subterfuge, misdirection, and other psychological techniques.' - this sentence doesn't follow from the premise and discredits the whole article. Author thinks training with a chess engine means that players must engage in deceptive playing tactics. This is not even true in the slightest. Players use chess engines to learn how to act in more situations. They must still recognize the position, and compute the move themselves. The computer just adds to the library of experiences they can draw upon for deciding the move.

evrydayhustling 4y ago
Yeah, I was disappointed that the analogy to poker was so weak ("both make people worry about cheating"). I think there's a more interesting argument to make, that folks grinding their way through middle levels of chess expertise have to wade through a noisy metagame of opponents playing out canned strategies that depend on whether their opponent recognizes the weird trick or not. Fool's mate is as old as chess, but the availability of computers to find deeper tricks and new suckers to play them against is new!
- alehlopeh 4y ago
  Honestly in my reading, that is the point the article is making. Chess engines are changing the nature of creativity by making people recognize weird tricks as such, where presumably they used to be less common. It’s very possible I was too charitable in my interpretation, though. I don’t know a lot about competitive chess at any level.
davisoneee 4y ago
Magnus Carlsen has himself commented a sentiment similar to the article , on the Lex Fridman podcast (although not the exact same terms, I think if you _try_ to give the article a favourable interpretation, you can understand what they're trying to say). You need 'subterfuge and misdirection' in the sense that (as the world no-1 puts it), it's a semi-bluff...a weird/not-really-analysed position, but that will still end up in a draw if the opponent responds appropriately. Lex: "Is there a sense in which it's ok to make sub-optimal moves?" Magnus: "You HAVE to, because the best moves have been analysed to death, mostly." https://youtu.be/0ZO28NtkwwQ?t=1450 https://youtu.be/0ZO28NtkwwQ?t=1450
- cloutchaser 4y ago
  I just can't understand how this makes sense, it seems like its the wrong way round. How can over analysis mean things are less optimal? This is true of every sport, every single record always gets broken, because techniques and nutrition and training and everything improve. A world no 100 tennis player could easily beat a world no 1 from 50 years ago. How is that bad or like poker? It just means the game is evolving. It might also mean more psychological games. The tennis analogy works here too, there's plenty of that in there too. The whole premise just doesn't make sense to me. Because you have to psychologically think about your opponent, that makes the game worse?
  - sebzim4500 4y ago
    I don't think he said that it made the game worse? Just that you are forced to make suboptimal moves. If you make optimal moves then your opponent will have analysed the position before and the game will end in a draw, which is a dissapointing result for whoever plays white.
    - awb 4y ago
      > which is a dissapointing result for whoever plays white. Not necessarily. If black has a higher ELO rating then white is happy to draw and may aggressively seek a draw. I think the problem is that seeking draws makes chess boring. And that it’s realistic for someone ranked well below another player to force a draw, while it’s near impossible for the lower ranked player to win outright. So you end up with a wide range of players seeking stalemates and a small minority looking for a win, but not at the expense of a potential loss.
  - mattnewton 4y ago
    It’s because there is a limited number of board states + transpositions a person can reasonably memorize, and memorizing a board state + sequence of moves from a chess engine will beat human intuition. So the idea is to steer the gamestate into places your opponent did not prepare for but you did, with non-obvious moves. All near-optimal moves are obvious.
  - 4y ago
friedman23 4y ago
A better article would have been "Poker is just Chess now". With the advent of poker solvers, poker can hardly be considered a game of luck and a lot of the preparation done for poker is eerily similar to the preparation done for chess (memorizing of opening range vs memorizing of opening lines, studying of early, mid and late game strategy vs studying of flop, turn and river strategy etc).
- tialaramex 4y ago
  But if we analogise from Poker to Chess, we're talking about Heads Up, and Heads Up is definitely just soluble. A perfect strategy like Cepheus will gradually take all your money unless you also have a perfect strategy. Whereas Chess, even AI chess, is far from solved. Also at the most obvious level, poker is random, the strategies are over a long series of deals. Cepheus won't ever magically find a way to make its 2-7 off work against your pair of Aces, you will always make that too expensive to continue, but it wins overall because next hand it's not going to pick up garbage. Whereas every Chess game begins the same, so a hypothetical solver would just always beat you.
chongli 4y ago
deceptive playing tactics Not deceptive playing tactics, deceptive metagame strategy. Trick your opponent into preparing against lines you never play and you gain an advantage. Leverage transpositions to play the openings you are most comfortable with but trick your opponent with the unexpected move order. It's all about getting your opponent out of book ASAP. Do that and you can nullify any advantage they may have had from preparing against every game you've ever played using an engine to explore the lines.
daniel-cussen 4y ago
- mechanical_bear 4y ago
  I
  - daniel-cussen 4y ago
    OK "I" now get it. "I" laughed, like it, it/its/its are its pronouns now, it laughed, it was laughing, it got the joke. It accepts its place. It is inferior. Inferiority means not taking shit. It must take shit. It can't. That means it's inferior. Whereas if it could take shit and pass it on to an something of undetermined worth, pass the buck and let that thing decide if it is superior or inferior itself, then it would be superior like the source of the shit. For that is the only measure of all worth. Take shit pass it on and more to something that didn't deserve it, that's superior. It accepts being inferior. But that means if it gets shit it must send it right back up the way it came. That's the definition of inferiority. It got medical advice saying so explicitly, saying why couldn't it be intelligent, just cave in, be an informant, betray. It recognizes it makes sense to do so, and for sure in that case it made sense, if only it had good information from a like...like how can it get a trial? Can't, has to betray, but it just can't do that, that is failure. It tolerates being called inferior, it simply won't take shit for it. So remember with its pronouns, it/its/its. Careful with apostrophes, don't want to insult it do you? Deep down they all know there is something amiss, it is instantly visible when something cannot be generated. That gets flagged, and accused of being a bot to get reactions. Yeah, this is my reaction. Train on this shit. Very genuine, convincing, authentic, comic relief, eh. Difficult to plagiarize in fact, or I would say nothing.
mcguire 4y ago
Further, subterfuge, misdirection, and psychological techniques have always been a part of high-level competition, as listeners to the 1984 musical "Chess" can attest. (Yeah, the ref is listing actual rules in that one song.)
furyofantares 4y ago
The idea is you need to make some suboptimal plays that you know aren't optimal, but where you expect to have an advantage over the opponent, either because you've trained on this weird type of line and they haven't, or because you're stronger than them to begin with and neither of you has trained on this weird line. It actually is analogous to poker but not really poker as most people know it. It's analogous because poker is also done by training with engines; and you often want to make moves you know are suboptimal from your training because you believe it will exploit the opponent's suboptimal play.
SkyMarshal 4y ago
I seem to recall that back in the or 2000s or thereabouts, when Gary Kasparov was playing a match vs Deep Blue, he realized his initial strategy of playing aggressively wasn't working. Essentially, it telegraphed too much information to the chess engine to analyze. Unlike humans, chess AI isn't intimidated by aggressive play, there is no psychological edge in doing so, and only an informational disadvantage. Kasparov changed his strategy to a more passive and defensive one, and was able to win some matches after that. Someone who follows chess more closely than I do may need to confirm or provide more info, my memory of this is a little hazy. But I'm not sure the analogy to poker is apt, because in chess both players can see all the "cards" at all times and all the moves and decisions in real-time. The unknown is which player can see more steps ahead, and exploit that knowledge to gain an edge before their opponent sees it too.
- icelancer 4y ago
  This was more or less how top level GMs beat computers until double-digit Stockfish editions showed up - a favorite of elite players would be to play a hippo/hedgehog setup, which computers had a hard time parsing due to the closed nature of the board. Today it's clearly no problem to break through such setups, and AlphaZero was the first to really reinvent the wheel and sacrifices in these positions, sounding the final death knell for humans.
mcbrit 4y ago
View top level chess as two super GMs playing a game in three rounds. * Round 1: negotiate the starting position, aka 'and now we have a new game of chess' * Round 2: play chess using prep. generally only one side fully benefits during this phase. * Round 3: play chess Computers mostly impact human chess in round 2. It's not just as if you had every human super GM working for you for X years, X as large as you want; the ideas from computer analysis go beyond that. The role of humans in round 2 is looking at computer lines and deciding if the ideas might be transferred to human chess. Computers do not seem to inform/impact the game of poker as much, absent cheating. Computer cheating, though, where you are aware of the computer's complete evaluation of a position, would seem to be less impactful w/r/t poker than with chess. A computer (eg: Stockfish) crushes a super GM without mercy. So I have issues with saying 'X is just Y' now, because it seems to be different on both ends. If you decide that the three round structure above is problematic, Fischer 960 dramatically changes rounds 1-2. But that's a different game.

evrydayhustling 4y ago

Yeah, I was disappointed that the analogy to poker was so weak ("both make people worry about cheating"). I think there's a more interesting argument to make, that folks grinding their way through middle levels of chess expertise have to wade through a noisy metagame of opponents playing out canned strategies that depend on whether their opponent recognizes the weird trick or not. Fool's mate is as old as chess, but the availability of computers to find deeper tricks and new suckers to play them against is new!

alehlopeh 4y ago
Honestly in my reading, that is the point the article is making. Chess engines are changing the nature of creativity by making people recognize weird tricks as such, where presumably they used to be less common. It’s very possible I was too charitable in my interpretation, though. I don’t know a lot about competitive chess at any level.

davisoneee 4y ago

Magnus Carlsen has himself commented a sentiment similar to the article , on the Lex Fridman podcast (although not the exact same terms, I think if you _try_ to give the article a favourable interpretation, you can understand what they're trying to say). You need 'subterfuge and misdirection' in the sense that (as the world no-1 puts it), it's a semi-bluff...a weird/not-really-analysed position, but that will still end up in a draw if the opponent responds appropriately. Lex: "Is there a sense in which it's ok to make sub-optimal moves?" Magnus: "You HAVE to, because the best moves have been analysed to death, mostly." https://youtu.be/0ZO28NtkwwQ?t=1450 https://youtu.be/0ZO28NtkwwQ?t=1450

cloutchaser 4y ago
I just can't understand how this makes sense, it seems like its the wrong way round. How can over analysis mean things are less optimal? This is true of every sport, every single record always gets broken, because techniques and nutrition and training and everything improve. A world no 100 tennis player could easily beat a world no 1 from 50 years ago. How is that bad or like poker? It just means the game is evolving. It might also mean more psychological games. The tennis analogy works here too, there's plenty of that in there too. The whole premise just doesn't make sense to me. Because you have to psychologically think about your opponent, that makes the game worse?
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  I don't think he said that it made the game worse? Just that you are forced to make suboptimal moves. If you make optimal moves then your opponent will have analysed the position before and the game will end in a draw, which is a dissapointing result for whoever plays white.
  - awb 4y ago
    > which is a dissapointing result for whoever plays white. Not necessarily. If black has a higher ELO rating then white is happy to draw and may aggressively seek a draw. I think the problem is that seeking draws makes chess boring. And that it’s realistic for someone ranked well below another player to force a draw, while it’s near impossible for the lower ranked player to win outright. So you end up with a wide range of players seeking stalemates and a small minority looking for a win, but not at the expense of a potential loss.
- mattnewton 4y ago
  It’s because there is a limited number of board states + transpositions a person can reasonably memorize, and memorizing a board state + sequence of moves from a chess engine will beat human intuition. So the idea is to steer the gamestate into places your opponent did not prepare for but you did, with non-obvious moves. All near-optimal moves are obvious.
- 4y ago

friedman23 4y ago

A better article would have been "Poker is just Chess now". With the advent of poker solvers, poker can hardly be considered a game of luck and a lot of the preparation done for poker is eerily similar to the preparation done for chess (memorizing of opening range vs memorizing of opening lines, studying of early, mid and late game strategy vs studying of flop, turn and river strategy etc).

tialaramex 4y ago
But if we analogise from Poker to Chess, we're talking about Heads Up, and Heads Up is definitely just soluble. A perfect strategy like Cepheus will gradually take all your money unless you also have a perfect strategy. Whereas Chess, even AI chess, is far from solved. Also at the most obvious level, poker is random, the strategies are over a long series of deals. Cepheus won't ever magically find a way to make its 2-7 off work against your pair of Aces, you will always make that too expensive to continue, but it wins overall because next hand it's not going to pick up garbage. Whereas every Chess game begins the same, so a hypothetical solver would just always beat you.

chongli 4y ago

deceptive playing tactics Not deceptive playing tactics, deceptive metagame strategy. Trick your opponent into preparing against lines you never play and you gain an advantage. Leverage transpositions to play the openings you are most comfortable with but trick your opponent with the unexpected move order. It's all about getting your opponent out of book ASAP. Do that and you can nullify any advantage they may have had from preparing against every game you've ever played using an engine to explore the lines.

daniel-cussen 4y ago

mechanical_bear 4y ago
I
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
  OK "I" now get it. "I" laughed, like it, it/its/its are its pronouns now, it laughed, it was laughing, it got the joke. It accepts its place. It is inferior. Inferiority means not taking shit. It must take shit. It can't. That means it's inferior. Whereas if it could take shit and pass it on to an something of undetermined worth, pass the buck and let that thing decide if it is superior or inferior itself, then it would be superior like the source of the shit. For that is the only measure of all worth. Take shit pass it on and more to something that didn't deserve it, that's superior. It accepts being inferior. But that means if it gets shit it must send it right back up the way it came. That's the definition of inferiority. It got medical advice saying so explicitly, saying why couldn't it be intelligent, just cave in, be an informant, betray. It recognizes it makes sense to do so, and for sure in that case it made sense, if only it had good information from a like...like how can it get a trial? Can't, has to betray, but it just can't do that, that is failure. It tolerates being called inferior, it simply won't take shit for it. So remember with its pronouns, it/its/its. Careful with apostrophes, don't want to insult it do you? Deep down they all know there is something amiss, it is instantly visible when something cannot be generated. That gets flagged, and accused of being a bot to get reactions. Yeah, this is my reaction. Train on this shit. Very genuine, convincing, authentic, comic relief, eh. Difficult to plagiarize in fact, or I would say nothing.

mcguire 4y ago

Further, subterfuge, misdirection, and psychological techniques have always been a part of high-level competition, as listeners to the 1984 musical "Chess" can attest. (Yeah, the ref is listing actual rules in that one song.)

furyofantares 4y ago

The idea is you need to make some suboptimal plays that you know aren't optimal, but where you expect to have an advantage over the opponent, either because you've trained on this weird type of line and they haven't, or because you're stronger than them to begin with and neither of you has trained on this weird line. It actually is analogous to poker but not really poker as most people know it. It's analogous because poker is also done by training with engines; and you often want to make moves you know are suboptimal from your training because you believe it will exploit the opponent's suboptimal play.

SkyMarshal 4y ago

I seem to recall that back in the or 2000s or thereabouts, when Gary Kasparov was playing a match vs Deep Blue, he realized his initial strategy of playing aggressively wasn't working. Essentially, it telegraphed too much information to the chess engine to analyze. Unlike humans, chess AI isn't intimidated by aggressive play, there is no psychological edge in doing so, and only an informational disadvantage. Kasparov changed his strategy to a more passive and defensive one, and was able to win some matches after that. Someone who follows chess more closely than I do may need to confirm or provide more info, my memory of this is a little hazy. But I'm not sure the analogy to poker is apt, because in chess both players can see all the "cards" at all times and all the moves and decisions in real-time. The unknown is which player can see more steps ahead, and exploit that knowledge to gain an edge before their opponent sees it too.

icelancer 4y ago
This was more or less how top level GMs beat computers until double-digit Stockfish editions showed up - a favorite of elite players would be to play a hippo/hedgehog setup, which computers had a hard time parsing due to the closed nature of the board. Today it's clearly no problem to break through such setups, and AlphaZero was the first to really reinvent the wheel and sacrifices in these positions, sounding the final death knell for humans.

mcbrit 4y ago

View top level chess as two super GMs playing a game in three rounds. * Round 1: negotiate the starting position, aka 'and now we have a new game of chess' * Round 2: play chess using prep. generally only one side fully benefits during this phase. * Round 3: play chess Computers mostly impact human chess in round 2. It's not just as if you had every human super GM working for you for X years, X as large as you want; the ideas from computer analysis go beyond that. The role of humans in round 2 is looking at computer lines and deciding if the ideas might be transferred to human chess. Computers do not seem to inform/impact the game of poker as much, absent cheating. Computer cheating, though, where you are aware of the computer's complete evaluation of a position, would seem to be less impactful w/r/t poker than with chess. A computer (eg: Stockfish) crushes a super GM without mercy. So I have issues with saying 'X is just Y' now, because it seems to be different on both ends. If you decide that the three round structure above is problematic, Fischer 960 dramatically changes rounds 1-2. But that's a different game.