dfan

30 ms·

271.
by dfan 12y ago
I can't think of anyone else who has been so effective at managing both the biggest abstractions of theory and the smallest concrete elements of practice.
272.
by dfan 13y ago
That's exactly what it does. Every spaced repetition tool takes into consideration how long it has been since you last got the flash card right. When you add a card, the time you added it at is used as the last time you got it right.
273.
by dfan 13y ago
Heartily seconded.
274.
by dfan 13y ago
Threes did pretty well too.
275.
by dfan 13y ago
I've been using Mnemosyne for over 4 years (9000 cards) and have been quite happy with it. The only slowness I've noticed is when generating graphs of extended time periods (over a month).
276.
by dfan 13y ago
Yes, it was amazing. The good news is that it was turned into a book, The Theoretical Minimum. The bad news is that the book was really disappointing. I'm more of a learn-by-reading than learn-by-watching person, but Susskind's le
277.
by dfan 13y ago
It is interesting what an emotional reaction people instinctively have to 4th down. Going for it on 4th down and failing feels like a catastrophe. But punting would have given the ball away anyway, so all you've done is give the oppone
278.
by dfan 13y ago
I feel like playing Go helped my chess and vice versa.
279.
by dfan 13y ago
This is a good set of suggestions for improving in chess that obviously worked well for the author. When I saw how great his results were, though, I suspected that he must have been pretty young during his improvement phase, and sure enough
280.
by dfan 13y ago
Greg Shahade's videos are great. I particularly enjoy his solitaire chess games, where he attempts to guess the moves of existing games by great players of the past and present.
281.
by dfan 13y ago
I believe Regan just measures how badly a given player's opponents tend to err (as determined by computer evaluation of moves). So it's just a post hoc statistical measure, not an actual evaluation of how tricky that player's
282.
by dfan 13y ago
Just to make sure I am absolutely clear, I am talking about 61...Kh6, which enabled Carlsen to play 62.Qb6+ forcing the queen trade.
283.
by dfan 13y ago
If Anand played the king to the eighth rank instead of to h6, Carlsen would have kept checking on the seventh and eighth ranks, with a draw by perpetual check.
284.
by dfan 13y ago
The number one thing you should work on as a chess novice (and a chess intermediate!) is tactics. chesstempo.com is the best place on the web to practice tactics: it serves you tactics problems from a database of over 100,000 problems harve
285.
by dfan 13y ago
It's hard to say precisely because top players don't really play top computers competitively, but the best computer engines appear to be well above 3000 by now. The estimates on the TCEC page put Stockfish and Komodo both at aroun
286.
by dfan 13y ago
Yeah. It was a standard type of calculation error (forgetting when you visualize a variation that a piece has vacated a square so that it can now be passed through) but not one I would expect a top-level player to make.
287.
by dfan 13y ago
Yes, exactly! It is no insult to players from earlier eras that today's players have surpassed them, just as it is no insult to track and field athletes from earlier eras that their records don't still stand. Today's athletes
288.
by dfan 13y ago
Rating differences at any given point in time are comparable to rating differences at another given point in time. That is, A being 200 points better than B in 2013 means the same thing as C being 200 points better than D in 1963. This is a
289.
by dfan 13y ago
Chess players typically peak in their 30s, and it's very difficult (though of course not impossible) for players to stay world-class through their 40s. This is one reason everyone has been so impressed with the play of Boris Gelfand (4
290.
by dfan 13y ago
I was specifically responding to the claim that there was no comparison of their "dominance": that is, how good they are/were relative to their competition.
291.
by dfan 13y ago
Sure there's a comparison. Kasparov maxed out at 79 points higher than the second-rated player (Kramnik). Carlsen is currently 70 points higher than the second-rated player (Aronian). By the way, Fischer at his peak was 125 points ahea
292.
by dfan 13y ago
We have an off-line coding test that probably takes about a day on average. This is after a three-question quiz that takes a couple of hours. I'm pretty surprised that so many people are willing to go through all of that.
293.
by dfan 13y ago
I largely credit spaced repetition with my improvement as a chess player from a rating of 1800 to 2000, something pretty unusual for a middle-aged adult. I wrote about about my experience at http://dfan.org/blog/2013&#x
294.
by dfan 13y ago
Reading her Medium essay does not induce me to give her the benefit of the doubt.
295.
by dfan 13y ago
Yeah, Metacritic scores tend to decline over time. Based on my experiences I'm going to guess it'll stabilize at 94.
296.
by dfan 13y ago
These lectures are awesome if you have already encountered the material and want to start over from scratch really internalizing it this time. If you use them as a first-time learner you are likely to be pretty confused.
297.
by dfan 13y ago
The worst thing about Go is that the scoring rules that are taught to everyone (the Japanese ones) don't make any sense unless you already understand the game well, so there's a terrible bootstrap problem. Everyone should be taugh
298.
by dfan 13y ago
chesstempo.com, for tactics problems, is the chess site I visit most frequently.
299.
by dfan 13y ago
This is the second time this week I've seen "counterexample" used to mean "something that is bad because it breaks the rule, thus showing why the rule is good" rather than "something that invalidates the rule,
300.
by dfan 14y ago
Lilov's analysis is good but he is a little quick to jump to conclusions. I wasn't convinced until I saw Regan's data.

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