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Chess engines didn't replace Magnus Carlsen, and AI won't replace you
- kgthegreat 11mo agoNobody is paying money to watch you code
- JoeAltmaier 11mo agoWe're not all Magnus Carlsen. Some of us are hacks or very ordinary 'players', and can be replace without a ripple on the pond.
- v3am 11mo agoFair point but Magnus wasn't born Magnus. He became world champion partly by doing what the article describes: using engines for post-game analysis. A 1200-rated chess player who reviews their games with an engine improves faster than one who doesn't.
- Mistletoe 11mo agoIf I'm understanding this right his ELO was 2064 in 2001 when he was 11. I don't think he was using engines for post-game analysis at 11 or maybe he was, but he was certainly born better at chess than most people. https://ratings.fide.com/profile/1503014/chart https://ratings.fide.com/profile/1503014/chart I love the original article. Hey guys you just have to be the best programmer in the world to not be replaced by AI!
- CaptainOfCoit 11mo ago> Carlsen showed an aptitude for intellectual challenges at a young age. At two years, he could solve 50-piece jigsaw puzzles; at four, he enjoyed assembling Lego sets with instructions intended for children aged 10–14. His father, a keen amateur chess player, taught him to play at the age of five, although he initially showed little interest in it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Carlsen#Childhood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Carlsen#Childhood I don't know you could go as far to say he was born better at chess, but he certainly seemed to be smart early on, and with his father's influence and with a supporting environment that smarts got aimed at chess.
- jacquesm 11mo agoSome people have that talent, others do not. And then those who do have that talent and put in the hours studying theory can go very far without ever looking at a computer to help them with analysis. Carlsen is that once-per-generation exception, someone who has a talent that somehow allows him to see a little further down the game tree than others. I grew up next to someone who was nearly that good, but there are so many people in that bracket that outside of NL he's not very well known. The distribution of skill at the high end of chess is highly non-linear.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 11mo agoI mean, I could build any lego at age 4, that didn't make me smart, just obsessed with lego, lol
- CaptainOfCoit 11mo agoI don't think that particular snippet of text is supposed to highlight how smart Magnus is because of being able to build LEGO at 4, but rather shows the kind of environment he grew up with to foster what he is today.
- whyenot 11mo agoHe was a grandmaster at age 13. In 2003.
- itsnowandnever 11mo agoeveryone is the Magnus Carlsen of their own life, though. and humans are irreplaceable. sure, budget decisions are made that cause people to have to go find another employer. but there is no civilization without people in it.
- harimau777 11mo agoIt's a big problem if they can't find another employer fast enough or if the new employer doesn't pay enough.
- cindyllm 11mo ago[dead]
- bdcravens 11mo ago> budget decisions are made that cause people to have to go find another employer When those decisions are made en masse, incomes and even chosen careers can change dramatically. This is true even when there isn't massive changes in technology. I started my career during the time when many ended up leaving tech and not returning due to how competitive the job market became.
- gdulli 11mo agoIt's irrelevant who you are to yourself if you're nothing but a row in a database to the people looking for the earliest opportunity to replace you with a cheaper option. Those people are not acting in the best interests of long-term civilization.
- JoeAltmaier 11mo agoYeah tell that to the 1800s weavers obsoleted by machine looms. They didn't enjoy civilization's benefits after they (and their families) starved to death. One in four. Grim.
- ourmandave 11mo agoI'd be happy just being Hikaru, whose busy seal clubbing his way to the spot on the Candidates.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- tromp 11mo ago> Code review becomes your post-game analysis. Magnus reviews his games with engines to learn from their superior analysis. You review LLM code to ensure it's actually correct. If AI coding assistents really worked like Chess engines, they would review your code, pointing out issues and suggesting improvements.
- codeclimber 11mo agoYes, chess engines review your games and point out blunders. They also suggest moves you'd never consider. Like when you're analyzing a position and the engine recommends a move that flips the eval from -1.5 to +1.8. Similarly, coding assistants might suggest a solution you'd never considered. Both teach something new.
- xandrius 11mo agoThat's definitely possible, just not perfect but they can catch/point out some bugs.
- CaptainOfCoit 11mo agoI guess the purpose is difference? You play chess because you want to play chess, as a fun thing (and also sometimes more serious thing), but a lot of us write code for something else, the purpose is not the code itself, but what it accomplishes, the code just happens to be a tool, so it's not necessarily the activity you want to do, it just unlocks/improves some other activity. I think it'd be fairly easy to create a project that uses an LLM to effectively review your code, if that what's you want. But personally I'd rather do the opposite, describe what sort of code I'm looking for, how it's supposed to work, and what the goal is, and then not having to do the actual typing itself.
- hooverd 11mo agoAnd to what end? I sometimes get the impression software people want to optimize out everything so in the end, when there's nothing left to do, they can lay down and die.
- dchftcs 11mo agoThis is a poor analogy. Magnus Carlsen stays because chess consumers decide to pay for humans even though they are inferior to Stockfish. BigCorp will always pick machine over you if they can.
- jacquesm 11mo ago> even though they are inferior to Stockfish They're not.
- Powdering7082 11mo agoWith respect to winning a game of chess?
- jacquesm 11mo agoWith respect to playing a game of chess.
- manojlds 11mo agoWhat do you mean they are not?
- NickC25 11mo agoMagnus's peak rating was 2882. Stockfish is currently rated 3644. Lc0/AlphaZero was estimated to be rated 3800. Stockfish would destroy Magnus even with queen odds.
- jacquesm 11mo agoWho would you rather play: Magnus or Stockfish? And what made him inferior again?
- NickC25 11mo agoMagnus. With him being human, there's a 0.00000000000000000000000000000001% chance that he might miss something or miscalculate deep into a game. With Stockfish, those odds are quite literally 0%. Magnus could make a mistake. Stockfish is literally programmed to not make a mistake.
- jp57 11mo agoAI won't replace you ... if you are the Magnus Carlsen of your field. How you will get experience to grow into the Magnus Carlsen of your field is an open question, however.
- constantcrying 11mo agoMagnus Carlsen is a performer. If people wanted to see "perfect" chess they would be watching chess engine championships. These feature some of the deepest and most thought out moves ever performed in chess. They also get a few hundred live viewers. Magnus is objectively an inferior player to top chess engines. If there was a technological problem that requires the best chess abilities, nobody would be paying Magnus to solve that problem, they would be using a chess engine. The analogy does not work at all, because Magnus is not paid to be a good chess player in absolute terms, but a good chess player relative to other human top chess players.
- jacquesm 11mo ago> Magnus Carlsen is a performer. Not everything that draws a crowd is a performance. I suspect Magnus Carlsen would play chess even if nobody watched. Just look at Mikhail Tal, Max Euwe, Garry Kasparov and all those others. None of them did it because of the crowds. They did it because the game itself fascinated them.
- echoangle 11mo ago> I suspect Magnus Carlsen would play chess even if nobody watched. Maybe, but it wouldn't be his job then.
- EA-3167 11mo agoI agree with the conclusion but the premise is bunk. AI won’t replace you because it’s unsustainable and grossly overhyped, not because it’s as effective at general tasks or code review to the same extent that computers can play chess.
- dpark 11mo agoThis is like saying automated delivery drones haven’t replaced Saquon Barkley, so they won’t replace you (delivery driver). Imagine if you will that chess engines don’t exist but apps do. A chess game company might employ a small army of excellent chess players to play games against their customers. You load up your app, request a medium difficulty game, and get connected with James, who’s playing 10 games at once for $20/hour. It’s a decent gig. Customers pay a fee for the experience but it’s worth it to them. But now let’s say Google publishes a groundbreaking paper that lays out the foundation of an automated chess engine. Should James be worried about his job? Carlsen’s going to be fine. I’m not so sure about James.
- arisAlexis 11mo agoCrazy cope lately , understandable human emotions though
- bzalasky 11mo agoOne thing that might not be apparent to non-chess players is that an experienced human (particularly a GM or Super-GM) with an engine can often beat the same engine or another engine that lacks human assistance. There are some positions, particularly in closed games where this can become more of a factor. It'll be interesting to see if a similar logic plays out in other fields. I imagine that some companies may be quick to automate away roles to save money, however, if you follow what we've learned about chess, there's likely an opportunity to make a bet (start a company) on AI-assistance outperforming full AI automation in some domains.
- measurablefunc 11mo agoChess is a closed system w/ finitely many rules. I don't think success in closed domains transfers to open ones & this is the usual error optimists are making about AI & its success in closed domains like chess. Continuous learning is necessary for open domains b/c real world distributions are constantly changing & unless deployed systems can keep up w/ the changes their performance will continuously degrade until they're worse than random. Chess has been the same for millenia & that's why chess is essentially solved.
- codeclimber 11mo agoThis is advanced/cyborg chess in a nutshell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess)
- neaden 11mo agoCentaur Chess (the term for this) used to be better but outside of some positions that I don't think have ever occurred in an actual game, no human can help out a modern chess engine.
- medvezhenok 11mo agoI think this was true before AlphaZero; now, I'm not sure there's any benefit to having a human + engine versus just an engine alone. From my understanding the AlphaZero based engines (i.e. neural nets) do not really benefit from having a human in the loop.
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- haunter 11mo agoMildly OT: but which one is the best (offline) frontend for Stockfish? Or just what do HN people use? There are so many options [0] from free to paid I wish there was a big comparison table somewhere https://official-stockfish.github.io/docs/stockfish-wiki/Download-and-usage.html#download-a-chess-gui https://official-stockfish.github.io/docs/stockfish-wiki/Dow...
- cluckindan 11mo agohttps://github.com/mbiesiad/awesome-chess https://github.com/mbiesiad/awesome-chess
- stackghost 11mo agoIt wasn't that long ago that if you worked at an engineering firm, you needed a whole floor or floors of skilled draftsmen to produce the engineering drawings of your bridge, or your widget. Now an intern can do that in seconds with modern CAD software. The same phenomenon is already occurring with AI. The concern is not that it will replace people, it's that it will make people so productive that it will create an oversupply of workers and thus kill a lot of jobs.
- holyknight 11mo agoWhile I agree that AI wont replace you, the analogy is BS. Magnus Carlsen is not replaced by a chess engine because he is not paid solely because of his raw skills. As any professional player of any massive sport, he is an entertainer first. He gets paid only because people want to watch him play.
- mrs6969 11mo agoEven though cars are faster, there are still human runners.
- lostmsu 11mo agoTo add to your point, chess is relatively irrelevant vs other games. And there's a chance it is precisely because it is too simple. After all, human chess players have been beaten two decades ago. Dota 2 game and players were not (as of last try by OpenAI) - certain mechanics had to be removed to compete with the top players.
- AndrewOMartin 11mo agoMy go to phrase for the equivalent observation is "If they ever make a machine that can make a coffee at the press of a button then all the coffee shops will have to close" /s.