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AI Perfected Chess. Humans Made It Unpredictable Again
- curiousObject 7mo agohttps://archive.is/o69yu https://archive.is/o69yu
- NitpickLawyer 7mo agoBit of a fluff piece with a weird title. Yes, GMs use "suboptimal moves" in their games, but the main reason is to take their opponents out of prep, and more importantly those lines are also heavily analysed by engines. They are specifically looking for imprecise moves that are only imprecise if the opponent finds the correct line, which could be 10-15 moves deep (so it might not be feasible to do over the board). And this isn't something new. Magnus has been doing this for a few years now, after getting bored of facing the same over prepped opponents. He has mastered this technique, and showed that he's still the GOAT at mid to late game positions once the opponent is out of prep. But again, he's not doing this "randomly", he's studying when and where he can do it to temporarily get a disadvantage that will sort itself out later in the game. And engines are heavily used still.
- raincole 7mo agoA valuable lesson AI taught me is how bad articles on Bloomberg and Forbes are. They probably have always been this bad, but I were unaware of that until they started writing about AI (because, admittedly, I subconsciously thought well-known = good).
- IanCal 7mo agoThere’s something called the Gell-Mann amnesia effect where people often see what you have but then go back to assuming the other stories are all reliable. I used to love Private Eye and they have done great journalism that’s highly acclaimed, but the only thing they wrote that I really knew about (literally the office I was in) was outrageously wrong and would have been so easy to verify (ask literally anyone in the BBC building we were in to go to that floor, or take a tour or write an email). Can’t read it any more.
- SyneRyder 7mo agoHere's Wikipedia's entry on the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, because I've found it a very useful concept to know. Despite my media experiences, I still keep falling for it. And I love that we're still referring to it as Gell-Mann Amnesia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn... In a speech in 2002, Crichton coined the term "Gell-Mann amnesia effect" to describe the phenomenon of experts reading articles within their fields of expertise and finding them to be error-ridden and full of misunderstanding, but seemingly forgetting those experiences when reading articles in the same publications written on topics outside of their fields of expertise, which they believe to be credible. He explained that he had chosen the name ironically, because he had once discussed the effect with physicist Murray Gell-Mann, "and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have".
- stavros 7mo ago> "and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have". Ahh, yes, the SyneRyder effect.
- zwischenzug 7mo agoEverything I've known anything about first hand has been utterly garbled - or was completely made up - when written up in Private Eye.
- cwillu 7mo agoOdd take, as this was actually a pretty good article. The GP appears to be mostly bemoaning the fact that it's targeted at a lay audience.
- qsort 7mo agoThe article says exactly that: > As much as chess players can prepare, they can’t memorize everything. When they’re sitting at the board, their computers slumbering at home, they will inevitably be defined by the limits of their knowledge and ability. As a result, the elite grandmasters have realized the most valuable move is often the one that forces their opponents to start thinking with their brains rather than their engines, even if it might not be the “best” possible move. I agree it's not exactly breaking new ground, but it's an okay article for a generalist audience.
- DeathArrow 7mo agoMaybe that's why I don't like to play chess, because you have to have a very good memory to at least be average.
- vova_hn2 7mo agoHave you tried Chess960?
- csallen 7mo agoYou can for sure be above average without a very good memory if you're good at spotting tactics. But average isn't a super high bar.
- bit1993 7mo agoMemory helps but another way is just to play the best moves every turn based on the position.
- trusche 7mo agoTotally. Especially handy in openings. /s
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- n7itro 7mo agoI don't see the sarcasm because it IS especially handy in openings. If you understand the core principles like developing pieces and taking space, you won't need to memorize any openings to become good.
- trusche 7mo agoIt's not that simple, though. Even with solid core principles, there are lots of established openings where move order makes all the difference. All other things being equal, the player who has memorized a bunch of standard openings will have a distinct advantage.
- kubb 7mo agoThe „AI” messaging barrage is relentless. Stockfish is AI, LLMs are AI, neural nets are AI. It’s a self reinforcing system. We need a major disruption to move on from it.
- xrisk 7mo agoStockfish uses neural nets for its evaluation function, I don’t see how it’s unfair to call it “AI”.
- vova_hn2 7mo agoIt is totally fair, but for a lot of average non-tech people, AI == "something you can prompt in a natural language". I personally prefer to avoid the term altogether in favor of more specific terms, like: - LLM - chess engine - image generation model etc
- Aachen 7mo agoI'm not sure most people are that naïve that they can't differentiate between "any computer that acts smartly" (how the term "AI" is used) and the word chatbot. Of course, LLM is even more precise
- MarsIronPI 7mo agoTangential question: what do you call transformers-based models that generate images or videos? Are they LLMs? They're not really "language" models. But there's not really an easy term for them. Maybe "image models" and "video models"?
- Aachen 7mo agoI'd call them video/image generators because I don't know the word for the underlying technology. I can't imagine they're LLMs because, indeed, the second L is for language
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- yubainu 7mo ago[dead]
- MattPalmer1086 7mo agoFunnily enough, this is how I managed to start beating my best friend at chess, who reliably beat me every game previously for 2 decades. One day I just started making somewhat random moves (not terrible obviously, but unusual, and which sometimes gave me a temporary disadvantage). This completely messed with his style of play. He was trying to figure out what my grand strategy was I guess and tied himself in knots. From that moment, I could often beat him.
- leumon 7mo ago> AlphaZero, the engine that pioneered the “neural network” approach now incorporated into Stockfish That's simply not true. While stockfish does use a neural net, it's not using the MCTS approach like LeelaChessZero, and only uses the neural net for evaluating a position, not for suggesting moves. And it was only implemented after stockfish lost to lc0 in a computer chess tournament.
- dmurray 7mo agoMeh, I think the description is accurate. AlphaZero did pioneer neural networks for board evaluation, even if there was prior art on this. AlphaZero also showed a revolutionary new approach to search and training which Stockfish did not adopt, but that doesn't make the first part wrong.
- bradley13 7mo agoBack in the dark ages of high school, our chess coach specialized in this. We would study openings and strategy. Then he would come up with totally off-the-eall moves. And win, of course, because we had no clue how to respond.
- fsiefken 7mo agoSeirawan Chess, Euroshogi, Fischer Random/chess960 (or chess18) or Crazyhouse are other ways to make chess more interesting or less predictable. In this video Fischer briefly and enthusiastically talks about this topic. He talks about Fischer Random and he suggests the Capablanca proposal might be even better, and there can be even more creative variants. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb7-0R2qg98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb7-0R2qg98 I like Seirawan Chess and Euroshogi a lot, next to King of the Hill and other games like Minishogi, Tak, Tzaar and RftG.