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This is a farce. All credibility has been lost when you have to scan players like you scan people when entering a plane. Chess is touted as an ingenious game w
by erfgh 4y ago
This is a farce. All credibility has been lost when you have to scan players like you scan people when entering a plane.
Chess is touted as an ingenious game when it is little more than a brute-force search with simple prune and huge amounts of memorization.
I would argue that most GMs would easily play up to 200-300 elo points below their current level with little to no practice. But they spend decades of their lives memorizing and memorizing just to get the highest rating they can. And it is diminishing returns --- if you spent 1000 hours memorizing to get 100 points, the next 1000 hours will only get you 50 points. And when you reach your peak --- be prepared to keep memorizing forever just to stay there and inevitably drop when you reach a certain age.
What a waste of intelligence.
It is telling that nobody is pushing for chess960. This would greatly devalue memorization and make chess a brute-force-search-with-simple-prune game once again, as it was meant to be. But that's exactly the problem; if you are at the top after doing all this memorization you don't want to throw it away! In fact, your memorization might be better than your calculation in which case you will be surpassed by other players.
- fastball 4y ago> It is telling that nobody is pushing for chess960 I mean chess960 seems to be on the up, no? FIDE had their first ever world champs only three years ago (where notably Carlsen still made it to the final, though did end up losing to Wesley So)
- nottorp 4y agoI have no idea about the main topic of this discussion. But I did lose all interest in chess years ago when I realized the same thing: at the top level it's not about thinking but about memorizing (at the least) openings. I believe go is too complex for the human mind to memorize strategies? Human mind, not computer.
- lastofthemojito 4y agoI feel similarly about a lot of games and sports as they're played at the very highest levels. Scrabble is a fun game to play with kids, or sometimes with adults, and having a bigger vocabulary is an advantage. But competitive Scrabble means memorizing the dictionary of allowable Scrabble words. It's just a different game. There was the story a while back about the Scrabble champion who doesn't speak French but memorized French Scrabble words and won the French-language Scrabble World Championships: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/21/424980378/winner-of-french-scrabble-title-does-not-speak-french https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/21/424980378... And that's fine - competition spurs invention to find any advantage possible. But to me it'd be more impressive to see someone play an obscure Scrabble world, and then when you ask what the word means, they're actually familiar with it, rather than "eh, it's in the word list".
- zach_garwood 4y agoThis is a weird criticism to me. It's like complaining that a karate master is just drilling the same moves over and over instead of coming up with moves in sparring, or complaining that a football team is rewatching old games to see what plays work instead of just coming up with plays on the field. The memorization and preparedness IS the intelligence, not the waste of it.
- erfgh 4y agoThe difference is that karate moves are not perfectly reproducible. Everyone performs them differently. Chess moves are perfectly reproducible. I can play the first 5 moves of many openings perfectly, exactly the same way as the world champion plays them.