After reading that article it seems like it would be better to replace the “grandmaster norm” part of the process with standardized tournaments against a calibrated computer engine.
While it might solve issues with the norm process, it introduces more problems, specifically that two players of equal rating can have vastly different performance against a computer because they don't play like humans do.
While computer engines that are significantly better than the best chess players are plentiful, computer engines that are human rated and play human like moves do not exist. From the definition of ELO you could make a 1500 rated chess engine that plays perfectly half of its games and plays random moves the other half of the games, and it would stay at 1500 ELO if it continued to play against 1500 ELO players. This is an extreme example but it is not too far off from what chess engines do to reduce their ELO.
I haven’t followed the new wave of DL based engines but in the old Alpha-Beta algorithm days engines could be tuned by giving them a fixed processing budget per move (or a more sophisticated processing budget to allow for bursting).
I think it's really hard to make it play like a human. Even GMs miss two-move tactics sometimes, wheras computers are pretty perfect at this.
On the other hand traditional algorithms might not be very good at positional chess when on a budget, wheras even weak human players can understand basic concepts like putting your rook on an open file. Then it gets even more complicated with the NNUE position evaluation models - maybe even with a one-move budget the neural net is still implicitly strong at understanding several moves ahead, and could still beat a strong human player.
Yeah exactly - it's easier to build an engine that plays as well as possible compared to an engine that plays reasonable/imperfect moves like a strong human player.
> computer engines that are human rated and play human like moves do not exist
Without knowing much about chess, I'd be inclined to say this can't possibly be true. Predicting human chess moves given an ELO rating sounds like a much easier task than training it to be good at the game. It is a different task alltogether, but until you reach relatively high elo scores, I'd expect a fake human ai would have a much easier time simply because it only needs to plan a few moves ahead to mimic the mindset of a lower level player.
The problem is that humans don't play that way, by evaluating a tree a few moves ahead and selecting from that. Humans use conscious heuristics and unconscious intuitions to make their moves that would be hard for a computer to mimic. It's easy to make a machine complete a task better than a human would, much harder to make it convincingly human-like in its behavior. Consider the task of picking apples from a tree. You could easily make a machine to do that. But what if you had to make a machine that to an onlooker (who couldn't see the robot's "face", let's say) would appear to be a human picking apples from a tree? And these people aren't just glancing at the apple-picking robot, they're spending their entire lives painstakingly analyzing the movements of this machine and trying their hardest to predict how they will move next. And the people doing this are self-selected to be the best performers in the world at predicting the moves of this apple-picking robot. Think you can make the apple-picking robot that will fool these people??
There are many chess AIs on chess.com specifically designed to play "like" a specific grandmaster or well known chess streamer. I don't think any titled player would not be able to guess they're playing a computer if they played a few games against the AI without being told. It's very well known that computer moves are very different from human moves, even the ones specifically designed to represent a human.
Even if it were possible, I don't think there's a way to do it in a way that would make any sense. Would we set up an AI now and then forever use the same one? In that case people will learn any small quirks of the AI and optimize against those vs human play, fundamentally changing the game. If the proposal is to be constantly updating this AI, well even in that case I'd argue that people will over time identify any small difference between machine and human play, but in that case people will also be upset that someone got normed against the "easy" AI, or against the AI that didn't know about the dumdenmorph-joyce-allens countergambit yet, etc.
> The problem is that humans don't play that way, by evaluating a tree a few moves ahead and selecting from that.
As a modest 1400 blitz player, I definitely evaluate future states. That's not all I do, but it's certainly one thing I do. AlphaZero can also run just intuiting the next move without evaluating any additional states also fwiw. Though it is much better when it is allowed to do so.
> Consider the task of picking apples from a tree. You could easily make a machine to do that. But what if you had to make a machine that to an onlooker (who couldn't see the robot's "face", let's say) would appear to be a human picking apples from a tree? That would be much harder.
This is a very deep and nuanced task, made doubly difficult by obscure robotic hardware requirements. Not a great parallel.
> There are many chess AIs on chess.com, specifically designed to play "like" a specific grandmaster or well known chess streamer. I don't think any titled player would not be able to guess they're playing a computer if they played a few games against the AI without being told. It's very well known that computer moves are very different from human moves.
I don’t know that human calculation is so fundamentally different than computer evaluation, it’s just that it’s much, much slower. The human GM’s eval of any given position, without thinking ahead at all, is probably better than most engines. The problem is that strong evaluation isn’t worth much compared to a weaker evaluation that is nevertheless several candidate moves wider and many plies deeper (you might argue AlphaZero disproves this, but Stockfish was regularly beating the neural network engines even before its own neural network, for example).
Humans see fewer candidate moves. They regularly miss quiet moves that are the strongest. They often calculate to a certain depth (even a very shallow one) and stop based on gut instinct. But it’s still just trees of moves with some eval function.
I don’t think it’s fundamentally that hard to mimic, and it would actually be genuinely interesting for didactic purposes. But for fairly obvious reasons it’s not a priority outside of a couple of projects.
I have played a few hundred games against the various levels of Maia (https://lichess.org/@/maia1), and it has helped me improve from 1100 to 1425 blitz rating on lichess (along with playing against stronger players in the arena tournaments). It does seem to encapsulate the “average” playing style and common mistakes of the different ratings. It feels much fairer, more instructive, and more relaxing than playing against Stockfish, who will wildly blunder and then subsequently torture you.
However, even as a weak player, Maia is exploitable in a way that even novice humans are not. For example, it loves to give up obvious back-rank mates and almost never protects against it (e.g. with h3). It is easy for humans to spot if they are in danger of back-rank mate (especially if you’ve been burned before) and defend against it, so it does not happen much even at low levels. But Maia, game after game, gifts you an obvious mate in 1.
Computers are far stronger than humans and win every game. They cannot be artificially weakened as they do not play like weaker humans, but rather make a mixture of incredibly strong moves and random mistakes. As such, it would be a tournament of trying to lose the best game against a computer, which is not an accurate simulation of what human-human chess is like.
This isn’t really how most engines work. Reducing the depth that engines calculate to, or altering how they weight certain aspects of evaluation, are both perfectly natural ways to reduce an engine’s strength. They still won’t play like a human, but they don’t need to be forced into random mistakes.
Sorry if I misunderstood but it sounds like you're saying engines aren't programmed to make random mistakes in order to lower playing strength, but this is how Stockfish works. Lowering the calculation depth and calculation time is used to reduce difficulty, but in addition to those it is programmed to make mistakes:
> Internally, MultiPV is enabled, and with a certain probability depending on the Skill Level a weaker move will be played.
Within the constraints of the depth and calculation times it determines the best move, but depending on MultiPV it will deliberately not play that move and play an inferior one instead.
Your experience with engines then is very different from my own and that of the wider chess community. The general consensus is that playing computers at any strength is both counterproductive and unfulfilling. They do indeed make random blunders if you lower their search depth. The engine will play brilliant moves for any tactic that falls within the search depth, but fail miserably for tactics that fall one ply outside of it. Humans function very differently to computers: they evaluate a fraction of the positions, but use a much more sophisticated evaluation function. There is no way of emulating human weakness with such a vastly different style of computation.
Here is a game I just played that illustrates this phenomenon:
The engine plays well before making a series of random blunders no human would make. You can try this yourself by playing the different Stockfish levels on lichess.org. You will be unable to find a level that makes for an enjoyable game. There are some new engines that use neural networks to try and play similarly to how humans do [1]. I can't comment on their success, but their lack of wide adoption by the chess community signals to me that it is still incomparable to humans.
Ok, the implication in my comment was that they can't be weakened like humans, not that they cannot be weakened at all. The phenomenon of random mistakes does not need to be programmed in the engine, it is a byproduct of lowering the search depth or eval function.
Gotcha, apologies for the misread. I do think it’s an interesting problem space and worthy of more resources, there are all sorts of things that weaker, more human engines _could_ be helping humans with right now beyond traditionally just helping to memorise optimal lines. I don’t think this even means things like Maia that are perhaps human level but opaque, but rather being able to fit the kinds of heuristics humans use in eval or candidate move ordering. It would be great to be able to generate lines for specific opponent weaknesses (certain endgames, pawn structures, missed tactics etc). Even using engines to find things like forced draws from certain positions is harder than it should be right now. I’d love to see more chess _tooling_ rather than more pure engine research. If and when I retire from analytics in other sports this is what I’d like to spend my idle hours on.
Yup I agree, I think there's tremendous opportunity for computer tools to aid chess. Things like Lichess's recent ability to automatically categorize puzzles by the type of tactic was very cool, and only scratching the surface.
* You have to win a bunch of games against grandmasters, earning 'GM Norms', in order to become a grandmaster yourself.
* It is normal, at some contests, for lower-ranked players to pay to attend, while GMs are paid for attending.
* It is widely rumoured some contests are "norm factories" where fee-paying players get matched up with washed-up GMs who essentially throw the game.
* There are even rumours of contests where an aspiring grandmaster's parents offered cash to their opponents. There are even rumours of contests that took place only on paper.
yeah, sadly there are some dirty things going on when it comes to Norms. I guess with a better leadership and a clear policy of not tolerating pre-arranged games, this should change. But as with doping, it will never be erased 100%.
This is a very factual article explaining how to become a grandmaster, but I feel like it needs a disclaimer:
I know that Hacker News likes the idea that if you work hard enough then anything is possible [especially when there's so many easily available resources], but when it comes to becoming a grandmaster it has to be said that it's painstakingly hard. If you actually intend to become a grandmaster you'll essentially have to make your full life be devoted to chess for years. We're talking about making it your full-time job for at least 10 years. Yes, that's how hard it is. Today there are countless of IMs (the title just below GM) that has played since they were small kids, won a bunch of tournaments when they were teenagers and yet they realize that becoming a GM is so much work that it's not worth it.
If you like chess, then play chess! It's a fun game with an amazing depth and a huge player base. But if you're just starting out: Please forget about having "becoming a grandmaster" as a goal.
Chess also has a very decent rating system (either the official FIDE rating or the ratings on online chess servers) so another way of setting yourself an achievable goal is to pick a rating (i.e. 1700 on Lichess) and then work towards that. Rinse and repeat!
I used to play Scrabble daily and got pretty good. Memorized all of the two letter words, memorized a good number of the three letter words and thought about playing in a tournament.
Then someone gave me the book Word Freak and I lost any interest in playing in a tournament. The people that win Scrabble tournaments memorize dictionaries as their full-time job hoping to make $20,000 in tournament prize money per year. I can't compete with that.
It's still amazing to me though that the winner of the 2015 French Scrabble Tournament didn't speak French.
This reminds me of when I got front row tickets to see Michael Moschen, a world-class juggler, perform. I knew just enough to understand how much he outclassed ... everyone. And then I stopped trying for any of the harder tricks.
It's strange to me that so many of you seem to stop when you realize you're so far away from being at the top of the top of the top.
I know the chances of me being on the PGA tour or being an Olympic level skier are basically 0%, but that doesn't stop me from improving myself and even competing in golf tournaments sometimes (I'm not a good enough freestyle skier yet to compete, but that doesn't mean I think it's impossible).
It's not about winning the tournaments, it's about constantly improving myself and testing myself at the highest level I can qualify for.
It's so confusing to me when I see people completely write themselves off. "Oh I'm 30, there's no way I'll be [a scratch golfer, able to do a backflip on skis, etc]". Maybe it won't happen, but why completely write yourself off before you even try?
It depends why you're doing it. I have no illusions that I'll ever be anything close to an Olympic level skier, but I still find skiing fun, thus I do it. Similarly, I find Chess fun enough to the point that I will occasionally play a quick recreational game in situations where a Chess board is present.
But if improving oneself involves doing lots of practice that itself isn't fun, then that's exceeded the limit of what I'm willing to do recreationally. I'm only putting that level of effort in something I don't find fun into one thing in my life: work.
Sure, if you find the required work unfun, then so be it. I get it.
I was more talking about the attitude of the person I responded to. They saw someone world class perform and then "stopped trying for any of the harder tricks." I don't understand that attitude. It's basically "I don't think I'll ever be world class, so why try anything at all?"
Ah, you have not understood. It wasn't even "world class" I was trying for. I never set my sights that high, on anything, as I believe that statistically one is likely not to be rewarded. I just realized how vast the gap is between where I was and even "middling decent" and, based on my current status and effort expended, realized that I had not been spending my time wisely.
Sometimes, you can try hard and just be not very good at something, and it was witnessing his performance which made me understand that "middling decent" might need to be a lifetime pre-occupation to attain, for me.
This is really interesting to me. Back when I was a kid, I did a lot of programming for fun. I made small computer games, cracking and all sort of fun things.
Nowadays that I do it as my main job, it is nut as fun. Once you have to learn yet another framework or technology, it becomes "a chore" (that I am paid to do.)
I also play chess as a very light hobby. I am only ~1750 at Lichess and would be happy to be better, but apparently I am at the point that to improve I would have to dedicate a lot of time to read books and memorize openings/middle games etc. I decided not to do it because I would not enjoy it at that point.
> We're talking about making it your full-time job for at least 10 years
I played pretty high level scrabble and devoted 3 years of full-time effort to it (while holding down a menial job). I wasn’t particularly talented but I was willing to put the work in. Until one day I woke up and realized it was a total waste of time and moved on with my life.
During that time I heard it put even more pessimistically about chess. That 10 years of dedicated effort allowed you to maybe see most of the game.
There are people who devote their whole lives to Scrabble, poker, chess, backgammon, basketball etc. Many are horribly adjusted people and some of them end up incredibly skilled at a game. And a few of those people can end up making a living at it.
The average person just can’t comprehend the skill gap between the people who live their lives around a game and themselves.
There was an NBA benchwarmer named Brian Scalabrine who said about good YMCA basketball players, “I’m closer to LeBron James than you are to me.”
It’s nearly impossible to even fathom how good truly top-level game players are.
Years ago I watched a documentary on the World Series of Poker. They asked one of the top players if he was a gambling addict. His response was essentially, "To reach our level of play, you pretty much have to be." This is true to be the best in really anything. I've had the privilege to meet people who are considered the best in the world in a couple of different disciplines. They all see to have similar traits, bad home life, most of the alcoholics, obsessive. Losing everything else seems to be the price of greatness in a discipline.
For the most part I agree. But that said, there are definitely exceptions. Some truly world-class scrabble (and poker) players are well-adjusted, nice, friendly people, who seem otherwise normal.
Scalabrine is very accessible and does regular interviews and has talked extensively about "The Scallenge" (where he challenged several high level non-professional players in one-on-one). One extremely insightful point he once made on Duncan Robinson's podcast is that part of the reason he's "closer to LeBron" is that he's played LeBron. He wouldn't be a good player if he hadn't played professionally against top-level talent. It might not be worth it to dedicate yourself like that, but that kind of dedication and commitment to competition is probably the only way you will achieve close to a high level and even then, you may end up only an also-ran.
Absolutely, and the gap is so deceptive - it doesn't look like there's that much of a gap when you watch the pros. Like I watch pro badminton players, and compared to the best guys at my club who've trained for 10+ years it looks like they both play the same. But the guys at my club have no hope of winning provincial level tournaments here - like they're lucky to even make the quarterfinals, 0% chance of beating the top few players in the province. And the guy that wins provincial level tournaments here has no hope of winning national level tournaments - he rarely makes it past the first round, 0% chance of beating the top 5 players in the country. And the guys that win national level tournaments here have no hope of winning high grade international level tournaments - they could maybe pull an upset on a top 10 player 5-10% of the time.
But from my position, it's easy to watch the pros play and think "wow, that looks doable in 10 years of hard work". Yet so many people have put in that much work and still are effectively as far away from those pros as I am.
> Absolutely, and the gap is so deceptive - it doesn't look like there's that much of a gap when you watch the pros.
It's the unknown unknown. I used to play a lot of ball and lucked into playing pick up with some good college players and even ex-pros who played over seas. Until I had that experience, I had no idea how much better they were.
There's also nuance in the sport that requires knowledge to see the difference between top players. For example, when I started training BJJ all black belts were the same - as in they easily kicked my ass. After a few years of training, they still easily kick my ass, but I can feel the difference and have some idea just from our rolling which ones are better than the others.
Your friendly neighborhood normal distribution curve and z score makes this pretty easy to fathom. The z score of a 50th percentile player is 0. A player who is 1 standard deviation above the mean is about 84th percentile. The z score of a 99th percentile player (let's say Brian) is ~2.4. The z score of a 99.99th percentile player (grandmaster or lebron james) is ~3.8
So with these hand waving assumptions, Brian's comment holds true if the ymca players are <= 84th percentile of basket ball players. Sounds reasonable to me.
I took my own crack at this, because I think your numbers - intended to show the big separation - still make it seem too easy! Lebron is NOT just a 99.99th percentile player!
There's fewer than 500 players in the NBA. There are hundreds of millions of people in the US (being US-centric initially to try to do the YMCA comparison), so probably a few million that play frequently as amateurs? One in a hundred? Let's call it 3 million out of 300,000,000, to work with relatively round numbers.
So being in the best 1 out of 100 - top 99% - is a z score of 2.3. Being in the best 500 is then much smaller even than THAT! 99.983%, z score of 3.481. The single best one? 99.99997%, z score of 4.991.
So if you define closer by z score, they "good amateur" YMCAer is closer to the worst in the NBA than that person is to Lebron, but I think it's more meaningful to define closer by "how many people stand in between you and them" - and the answer is millions for the amateur.
And I think that shows that work alone only gets you so far compared to talent. If you and a million other amateurs all start putting in ten hour days, the vast majority of you aren't getting to the NBA - it's just not big enough.
That is sort of interesting. Depending on how extremely good Lebron James is at basketball could make Brian's statement false. I think I disagree that number of people is a meaningful metric. The difference between you and I, assuming we're both near average competency, could be millions of people, while the difference between Lebron and Brian could be just hundreds or thousands of people but represent a substantially larger skill gap. Otherwise you're suggesting that the more skilled two players are, the less noteworthy differences in skill are because there's fewer people around them to measure with.
That's true, we could be separated by millions of people but at the same time only, say, a year's worth of two-hours-a-week practice.
But in the absence of a reliable way to measure absolute skill, the z score one does seem about as good as we can get, though it can't truly answer something like "Lebron vs Jordan" - and you also would get different numbers depending on which population you picked. Population of the world, population of the US, population of the basketball-playing world, population of people who play basketball at least once a month? That's gonna change the denominator for the percentiles for the Scalabrines and Lebrons both.
I like this but you might want to up the z score for LeBron. GM is 2500 plus norms. LeBron has 4 rings and 4 MVPs. He would be Magnus level or at least one of the few who hit 2800 (there have only been 13).
A rating difference of 400 points means that the better player will score 0.9 on average (where 0=loss, 0.5=draw, 1=win).
A typical hobby player might have a rating of 1600. A good player at a chess club will have a rating of around 2000, meaning that they beat the hobby player around 90% of the time. A low-level grandmaster will have a rating around 2400, meaning that they beat the strong club player 90% of the time. The top few chess players in the world have ratings around 2800, meaning that they beat low-level grandmasters 90% of the time.
You might think the top human players are nearly perfect, but the top chess engines running on an average desktop computer are probably >800 Elo points above the top humans, and they're getting about 100 Elo points stronger every year, based purely on algorithmic improvements (not computing power).
It's more likely for the stronger player to have 8 wins and 2 draws in that line-up. If you're up against such a big divide you should play safe and aim for the draw, it's quite attainable.
I simplified a bit by saying the stronger player wins 90% of the time. They score 0.9 on average. That could be 9 wins and one loss, or as you say, 8 wins and 2 draws.
You would think that a low-level GM would be able to achieve more draws against the super GMs, but somehow the ratings indicate they don't. It may be that the super GMs deliberately avoid drawish lines against much weaker players and try to keep the game complicated.
I've played NBA players a few times. I was a quite good YMCA level player. What you can't imagine is just how fast they are. But what most people really don't see on TV is how strong they are. My brother blocked a European pro player's shot at the rim and above the rim. That guy just brought his other hand up and dunked it through.
Scalabrine closer to LeBron James than the likes of me are to him? He's a lot closer. But I considered it an absolute privilege to be on the court with these guys. Fact is, they were actually really nice. I got a compliment on my rebounding. The second time I walked into the gym when this NBA player I'd played against was there, he came over and said hi. He came over to say hi.
Even if you’re willing to devote 10 years of your life to chess you will not become a grandmaster unless you’re starting out as a child. You might be some kind of Ramanujan level chess prodigy, but those are rare these days and in any case You would find out quickly if you had that degree of talent.
The accessibility of chess databases and engines that even the world champions of yore did not have means that anyone with a smartphone can train at the highest level.
The best Ballerinas start dancing quite young, the greatest Chess Players have to start even younger.
The case of the Polgar Sisters [1]is quite instructive. So even if your ambitions to become a GM might be doomed, you’re Children might just realize what you never will.
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/László_Polgár
I really admire Laszlo Polgar, and I agree that everybody can be raised a genius, but there is a caveat in it too - it takes a lot of effort on part of parents to groom children that way. Maybe it's easier than to become a chess GM, but in practice, lot more effort than most people are willing to (or even can) afford.
With Olympics going on, this is very relevant. China has a training camp to dominate all aspects of the Olympics and training at young age is absolutely crucial.
> I believe his claim: if we tried, we could turn "any healthy newborn" into "a genius".
I don't. Intelligence is partially heritable, which is also the problem with his experiment. He was himself a leading intellectual, the probability that his daughters will inherit his high intelligence is pretty good. (it's not that much known about the mother, but I assume he married someone with above average intelligence as well).
I agree that intelligence is partially heritable. But there is also "regression to the mean" - where, for example, we should expect children of taller parents to be taller than average, but often not as tall as their parents.
There is likely tremendous potential that we as a society waste by not providing resources and opportunities for and and encouragement of better education at earlier stages of life.
Personally, I learned to read by 3 years old, but not because I was a prodigy -- but because my mom spent numerous hours encouraging me and building in me a love of it. I am confident more than 50% of children can learn to read by age 5 - meanwhile in the US we don't expect that kind of success until after a few years of schooling.
Susan "merely" became women's world champion. Judit didn't bother playing in women's events, was at one time #7 in the world, and is considered by far the strongest female player of all time. No-one else has come anywhere near the top 10.
In comparison, Hou Yifan, the 2nd strongest female ever, women's world champion at the age of 16 (!), was #59 in the world at her peak rating in March 2015, and is now #81. (Although she's been busy with university studies the last few years)
Judit is still very involved in chess, and is an excellent online commentator. e.g.
> Even if you’re willing to devote 10 years of your life to chess you will not become a grandmaster unless you’re starting out as a child.
Well that's bullshit.
The main reasons adults don't start chess and reach grandmaster levels at the same rate as those starting as children is the lack of free time and the lack of desire to put in the effort. Those two things eliminates the vast vast vast vast majority of adults, but it's not a factor in your hypothetical.
If some adult wants to spend 10 years of their life mastering chess, and didn't have to worry about work, life, dating, children, etc, they'd have about the same chance as a child of becoming a Grandmaster eventually. The chance is still extremely low for each, of course.
Maybe. But it's not a significant enough factor to say "you will not become a grandmaster unless you’re starting out as a child".
I'd wager that free time (and overall lack of responsibilities) is the vast vast vast vast majority of what factors into children excelling at chess.
Am I a bit off when I say "they'd have about the same chance as a child", all else the same? Maybe. But it's certainly closer to reality than the original post I responded to.
> I'd wager that free time (and overall lack of responsibilities) is the vast vast vast vast majority of what factors into children excelling at chess.
I don't agree, but I cannot prove my position. It's an interesting question that also applies to other fields (music etc.). My opinion is that when a child starts a certain activity at a young age, that activity "burns" its patterns into their brain like a language. I see that effect with one of my kids: although we started learning to play an instrument at the same time (and I can guarantee you with 100% certainty that he didn't practice more than I in terms of number of hours), his way how he handles the instrument and the music is completely different from mine: completely natural (like a mother tongue), recognizing patterns without needing to think about them,... I am certainly not the first who made this observation. The question is why chess should be different.
It certainly seems difficult to prove either side here :). I think I just trigger when someone says something so definitive like "you can't become a grandmaster if you start as an adult".
I'm one who has excelled in a handful of hobbies to pretty high levels while holding down a day job. Started golf at 23 and 4 years later I'm a low-single digit handicap. Started skiing around the same time and I'm working up do doing backflips off jumps, while already being able to do several tricks off jumps, slide rails, and drop moderate sized cliffs.
I'm not trying to brag, and I'm not saying that those are even extraordinary or comparable to anything professional. But I've had people legit tell me that the only chance I have of being a scratch golfer or do a backflip on skis was if I started as a kid. Which is obviously ridiculous to me, and I'll prove them wrong in the next few years.
MY POINT: Take a bunch of adults like me and give them the resources to practice golf or skiing all day every day? You'll eventually get someone who can go pro (which I'm saying is the equivalent of being a grandmaster for this conversation). At what rate would they go pro compared to kids? Who can say. I'd wager it's a lot closer than people in this thread are thinking.
But, as I mentioned in my other comment, don't underestimate the physical impact of age on your body. A young body can tolerate and recover from a lot of physical self-inflicted abuse and overtraining. Take a child: starts training skiing at the age of 10, wins a gold medal at the age of 20, body starts to degrade at age 25 (joints, testosterone level,...). Try the same as an adult at the age of 30 or 40 with a body that has been already degrading for one decade. It's good that you have learned several tricks as an adult, but will your body tolerate the literal mistreatment that is necessary to go from "several tricks" or even backflips to "professional level"? A pro is not somebody who can do a complicated trick on a good day. A pro has must be able to reliably perform the trick dozens of times in a competition. This last step from 90% good to 100% perfect is the hard one.
Well if it’s bullshit you should have no trouble providing a counter example. There are tens of thousands of adults learning the rules of chess each and every day. Is there any Grandmaster among them ?
I have worked with adults and children learning chess and regardless of how much time they invested the learning curves would invariably look very different.
> Well if it’s bullshit you should have no trouble providing a counter example.
That's logically not true. It's not like there's a huge pool to choose from. There are less than 1800 GMs right now in the entire world.
And it also depends on what we mean by all this. Learning the pieces? Most children learn the rules of the game at some point, I'd imagine. That takes a way too many people.
Actually starting to try? There are a few examples I can find of people being around ~1700 rating when aged 18+ and making it to GM (Jonathan Hawkins, Jacob Aagaard, John Shaw)
Ye Jiangchuan didn't learn the moves until they were 17. Still young, but not crazy young.
> There are tens of thousands of adults learning the rules of chess each and every day.
How many find they have a massive passion for chess, without having a job, a significant other (or pursuit of one), any worries about money/bills/etc, or have children or family to take care of? That, and they can't have found their passion for chess during their childhood.
Probably almost zero people fit that bill. You basically need a lottery winner or trust fund person who doesn't care about having an abnormal life of chess with minimal upside in the small chance they actually reach the GM level.
But those are all not related to the fact that they have an adult brain, which is my point.
There is no counter example because of the things they mentioned.
You're going to have real trouble finding an adult that is sufficiently motivated to become a chess GM, has an enormous amount of free time, willing to dedicate the next 10 years of their life purely to chess, etc.
> If some adult wants to spend 10 years of their life mastering chess, and didn't have to worry about work, life, dating, children, etc, they'd have about the same chance as a child of becoming a Grandmaster eventually
A friend of mine stopped playing chess competitively at the age of 50 because, as he said, he didn't have anymore the necessary physical stamina to learn and practice for hours and hours every day. Age /is/ a factor, even if the external conditions are identical.
"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."
Only with age I can appreciate how true that quote is. There was an article that came up not long ago about GMs selling games for others to earn their GM norms. And the sad truth is being GM in chess doesn't put a food on the table.
The very peak of the players can make a living some as coaches or streamers but not everyone can be a 'winner'.
And in those jobs being good at chess is only part of the equation. You have to be personable, someone that people aspire to. Physical attractiveness is also never a bad thing in the world of streaming. I once chatted with concert violinist. She was not happy about trends in the soloist community. "The moment I saw an exposed midrift in a concert hall, I knew I would never be a soloist."
> Physical attractiveness is also never a bad thing in the world of streaming.
That's life in general. Even at my company when choosing photos of people to profile to for recruitment posts on LinkedIn, it's pretty clear they lean towards attractive people.
I also notice that with Company Profile page, where who they show is not really indicative of who comprises the company.
>That's life in general. Even at my company when choosing photos of people to profile to for recruitment posts on LinkedIn, it's pretty clear they lean towards attractive people.
There have been several studies on this. Apparently being an attractive woman is a net negative when it comes to being hired by other women (6% fewer callbacks than the same resume with less attractive photo attached in one particular study).
> Physical attractiveness is also never a bad thing
I used to work with an ex-military guy (extremely bright, hard working, excellent leader, etc. etc.).
He was about 64 inches (1.63 meters) tall, balding, and not the handsomest fella. He told me point blank: "I was never going to become a general or achieve any other extremely high rank simply because I didn't have 'the look' or physical stature of a general."
Photos have been a big part of promotions in the US armed forces. There has been pushback in recent years, iirc the marines abandoned photos last year, but you still have to "look the part" and attach headshots to many promotion applications. I've seen people pay actual money ($$$) for professional photographers to get an edge over their peers.
Compare Canada where, beyond not having photos, even gender-based pronouns have been removed from performance reports in order that reviewers not risk gender bias.
How do descriptions of physical attributes work? Possibly by just giving the candidate's percentile rank by sex?
That would be gender-blind but also ignores the fact that absolute scale actually matters in war sometimes - running speed, ability to lift and load heavy tank shells for a few hours etc.
One might argue that actual physical strength doesn't matter much. One way to check this claim would be to look at recently granted medals for valor, and see how many of them are related to absolute (not relative) physical prowess.
Physical attributes are not particularly important wrt promotions in the military; you just need to pass that baseline fitness bar to not be flunked out on medical.
Indeed, the higher up you go, the more your job becomes about leading and the less it becomes about individual feats of strength. I think you're thinking about the military a little bit wrong here -- this isn't the Roman era (when centurions led from the front and had to be legitimate physical badasses). Being higher up in the military nowadays is a lot more akin to being a paper pusher director at a company.
>> baseline fitness bar to not be flunked out on medical.
Medical and fitness are different things. Lots of people can pass the fitness tests but still flunk out for medical reasons. Diabetics. People who get cancer. Failing eyesight. Sever allergies. It is very possible to ace the fitness tests while still failing the medical.
I'm not so sure. Attractiveness is a good quality if you want a claim to power through networking, but it's not the only way.
Take Thatcher or Merkel. Both women for whom this arguably matters even more, not attractive, and not even coming from a background that lends itself naturally to climbing hierarchies. Kohl, Merkel's mentor used to often refer to her as his "Mädchen", ('girl', but diminutive, only used for children) and she basically back-stabbed him and took control of the entire party.
There's definitely ways for unattractive or more generally, people who nobody expects to rise to power to do exactly that.
This New Yorker profile from a few years ago is a long read but very much worth it if you want to get a overview. The beginning recapitulates a lot about her childhood so you might want to skip that part if you're only interested in her career.
I think Alexandra Botez manages this kind of thing well— obviously she's young and attractive, and there's a certain amount of goofing around that goes on (her younger sister is a co-host), but overall the channel is pretty tightly focused on chess games, commentary, etc. And she's certainly a very serious player herself and has specifically spoken out on sexism issues in tournaments and the larger chess community, eg:
If the titles required the same Elo to achieve then there wouldn't be a point to have separate titles. The female-only titles are useful to encourage women to compete imo.
They're different titles though. Grandmaster (GM) != Woman Grandmaster (WGM). Judit Polgár, for example, peaked at an Elo of over 2,700, so she easily qualified for Grandmaster (requirement of 2,500).
Similarly, a Brigadier General is not the same rank as a General, despite some commonality in word choice between the two ranks.
Well OK, but it doesn’t explain why there’s a WGM. There isn’t a “woman sergeant” position, and we’d definitely take offense at a company defining separate “senior engineer” and “woman senior engineer” positions.. so why accept the condescension of WGM?
"These titles are sometimes criticized and some female players elect not to take them, preferring to compete for open titles. For example, Grandmaster Judit Polgár, in keeping with her policy of playing only open competitions, never took a women's title."
I'm curious what would constitute managing well or not well in your opinion. She certainly uses it to her advantage, while nonetheless being a very strong player.
I'm not a regular follower so I don't have a lot of history to base it on, but based on the streams I've caught, it just seems well balanced— like the presentation is definitely not "sexy" in the way of, like, a hot tub streamer, but it's also not completely locked down and soulless— there's personality and shenanigans in the way of a radio host or commentator, and also a lot of great chess-playing.
Another good example is Xyla Foxlin, who walks a similar line with a YouTube engineering/maker channel and has been very explicit about her approach: "I refuse to “act more like a man” in order to achieve legitimate and respectable success in the professional world. I happen to be someone who embraces her femininity and feels powerful in cute shoes and sparkly makeup, and I don’t see how any of that makes me less of an engineer." [0]
This is why my grandfather never played chess with me and actively discouraged it - "too many great minds are wasted on chess".
We always instead played checkers, for real - always encouraging and teaching, but no patronizing wins for me - it was a long time until I could actually take a few games. Great memories, and he was gone too soon.
I did play some in HS & college, very much enjoyed some intense games, and still think it was good advice.
The Paul Morphy quote is spot on, save maybe for great champions like Garry Kasparov, who also went to to greater things. I suppose the same could be said about many pursuits where only a few get to truly earn a living, such as acting, music, sports - it becomes what you make of it but perhaps chess is a bit more extremely consuming?
Learning and playing chess is great for you, but probably only up to the point of being competitive.
Mid/high level players to progress up are in large degree forced to study positions memorise lines etc. To large extend its a competitive memorisation game.
This is natural step in high level chess, its like a precopmutated hash table, the more upfront work you can precomputate the less time you need to spend over the board on that move.
I play chess for fun and as casual hobby, and i think its a great way to exercise your brain. Thinking about board and evaluation positions. It translates into real world too.
Its also one of the last few things i can do and not get distracted by anything else.
I suspect you are right about the strategy and point at which it reaches a point of diminishing returns. Your likening the memorization of huge numbers of opening and mid-game sequences to precomputed hash tables seems spot-on...
This phrase from Morphy and your story about your grandfather reminds me of this "Maybe I can win a pawn" scene: https://youtu.be/pOzaIcZwpwQ?t=60
This is what the mentor in the movie means: some become good, some foolishly pursue nothing. The game can be addictive. But to be great is the rarest thing.
This reminds me of a quote from Raymond Chandler, describing a chess game:
> ..seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armor, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.
I thought "advertising agency" was referencing that the best minds of our generation are thinking about how to make people click ads
at google/facebook.
Possible. But I think more likely is that it was a good frame of reference for him as he was an executive at an advertising agency for quite some time.
I think he meant that the best minds of his generation were devising advertising campaigns and writing advertising copy for laundry soap and canned vegetables. Advertising was more text-centric then, and talented writers like Chandler could make more money writing ads than books.
Chess is to humans as Bitcoin is to computers (Chess : Humans :: Bitcoin : Computers). Except humans stick up for the wastefulness of both, and computers stay silent on the matter.
You know little about either chess or bitcoin. The first enables self knowledge, molds character, and helps develop a mental model transferable to other pursuits; the second is the first iteration of computer money.
>The first enables self knowledge, molds character, and helps develop a mental model transferable to other pursuits;
That's what quickly got me out of chess, when it was me playing with my brother as a kid it was about thinking really hard and trying to explore as many options as I could - it was really about who can think faster and outsmarting eachother since we only knew the rules.
When I decided to look into chess I found out it was about learning openings, recognising patterns, traps, etc. I didn't feel any smarter learning those, I just learned more about chess. You can draw up silly strategic methapores with any activity, but chess does seem to have that Sun Tzu status.
I kindly disagree. It may appear that chess is a memoization game, but when or if you want to become a master of the game , you'll notice that rote learning will not take you there.
You do need to understand phases of the game, set up strategy, estimate your position, know when to attack or to defend, and have confidence in your technique.
Mind you, that is only for the plain master title (FIDE or even a national master). Grandmasters are a whole new level in comparison, aliens.
But this wasn't my critique. Chess strategy is again chess specific, the things that translate are going to be superficial. You can draw parallels between many domains, like there are phases, strategy and coordination in many competitive online games, and I'd argue that the cooperative nature translates better to most real world than chess.
Chess has this poetic image of playing around with kings, queens and pawns that lets artist paint grandiose metaphors about real world, but at the end of the day spending a bunch of time on chess is going to make you good at chess, doubt it will do much better than any other similar hobby for transferable skills.
“… the focus on those pure, well-defined, and easily discernible objects like triangles, or more social notions like friendship or love, at the cost of ignoring those objects of seemingly messier and less tractable structures.”
Which is exactly my point, chess is just another game but it has this social status where it's a sign of intelligence or whatnot. The whole thread is in response to OP making such claims.
>> the second is the first iteration of computer money.
I mean... I am charitably trying to find interpretation/context in which this is meaningfully true, and failing. In which way is bitcoin more "computer money" than any other money these days?
I purchase things, pay my bills, obtain payment, invest, and do all my transactions at least 95% digitally, with "computer money".
Uncharitably, I could call Bitcoin "that, but less practical / more wasteful". Charitably, I could say "There are specific goals/circumstances where Bitcoin has benefits".
But I feel it's decades late to be "first iteration of computer money", unless there's some squinting and extremely specific ad-hoc defining that I haven't imagined. Even the "Money" part (as practical transactional currency) is these days increasingly less relevant,by proponents and pundits alike, as opposed to "investment vehicle" or "storage of value".
(as for chess, I don't know; I gave up when I realized how much memorization, as opposed to developing of understanding, was involved to get much better; it may indeed enable self-knowledge and mold character at some level beyond the ones I've achieved. Therefore, I cannot contribute to discussion on whether Chess is practical/efficient/meaningful way to grow those characteristics - i.e. hammering rocks for 5,000hrs probably grows character at some level but may not be sufficiently practical/efficient to matter. I respect it like a do Golf - it takes immense skill, dedication, and investment to develop it to a high level, and world-class players are incredibly good at it; but it's not a skill I desire to grow myself anymore).
No they're not. Money is supposed to be scarce and has been for the vast majority of the history of civilization.
But let's agree to disagree there. Even then, money has multiple roles: unit of account, store of value.
Currently, Bitcoin plays the role of storing value. Like a savings account, or "digital gold". Not for payments. It might play a payment role in the future on layer 2, or it might not. Too soon to tell.
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments, and start following the site guidelines? You've been doing this kind of thing repeatedly and we ban that sort of account. It's not what this site is for, as you'll see if you review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Eh, there was nothing really for him to do in the Chess world. At that time period there wasn't really professional chess like there is today, he could have made a living gambling at it essentially but he would have considered that wasting his life.
Become a history teacher and open up a chess club. Organize tournaments and write books. There’s a lot he could do beyond “professional chess” as it’s known now.
There weren't really academic chess clubs around, and he became an attorney so he could have done that rather than being a history teacher. Likewise tournaments and demand for books wasn't really a thing in his lifetime.
> The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life
Wasted in what sense? Aren’t we all playing made up games and solving artificial problems at the end of the day? Most GMs probably aren’t doing it to make money, they get a similar thrill from it as, say, a mathematician gets from understanding and solving deep math problems.
> Most GMs probably aren’t doing it to make money, they get a similar thrill from it as, say, a mathematician gets from understanding and solving deep math problems.
Very apt analogy. Most math faculty members in my department stopped being productive in the last third of their career. After a while, it just gets old. Proving yet another theorem no longer excites them.
Most faculty also teach as well, their paychecks for most part are well earned.
The reason the contributions usually drop for mathematicans is less to do with losing interest and more that they simple don't have the mental capacity they did in their 20's and 30s into the 50s .
The comment is from the world champion of 1850s . Being professional back then was considered equivalent to gambling. Professional sports or hobbies wasn't thing till early to mid 20th century. The early Olympics even had amateur only rules.
There is more to life than being a chess player or a mathematican. His point is more to do focusing/obsessing on a single narrow subject, given morphy's own experience I would say he is more than qualified to make that comment.
I have to say I don't really like this quote. The first part smacks of superficiality i.e. learn chess enough to be able to show off in polite society. The second part I think simply denotes a misunderstanding of what playing chess well means. You can play chess well without being a GM.
In my family I had/have two people who plaid chess well (2000-2300 range) without wasting their lives in any way. They held full time jobs, had families and enjoyed the game at a pretty serious level. If anything chess helped them stay mentally active and engaged well into their 90's.
The point is it exponentially harder to break the 2500 / 2600/ 2700 barriers . It is hard work.
The reason it is hard work is because beyond a point the preparation is a lot about memorizing and remembering a lot of lines variations not improving on your understanding or theory. That's also why older you grow it is harder to be at the top, understanding is not diminished at 40+, however memorizing abilities are.
You will have to understand Paul morphy story to understand to why he said something like that.
He was the world best by a good distance and he quit playing at 22. He had struggles and was consumed by it. After spending most of your formative years and not finding the meaning in the life despite having won pretty much everything can be life altering. He is known as the pride and sorrow of chess with good reason.
It's true I didn't know about Morphy when I made my comment, I read on Wikipedia afterwards.
In context the quote has different connotations. However, having taken it at face value, I stand by my comment.
Nothing in the Morphy quote explicitly addresses the technicalities of becoming a world class chess player.
In general playing chess well means something else to the general public than to a GM level player. My comment was made having the former interpretation in mind - Morphy was obviously talking from his (very different) point of view.
I didn't take a quote out of context, the context was not provided. There is no a priori expectation that somebody should read a Wikipedia page to find out the missing context behind a quote.
> Its shifting goalpost fallacy.
There's no fallacy here. I have my opinion, I stand by it regardless of the quote's context. I understand that Morphy didn't mean what I thought he meant. It's just that my opinion on the usefulness of chess is still the same.
Indeed. I didn't mean to attack Morphy, I just interpreted the quote on its own, thinking it was made by some random person (in different places in the thread people had quoted various writers etc. not necessarily great chess players).
> That's also why older you grow it is harder to be at the top, understanding is not diminished at 40+, however memorizing abilities are.
I'd like to see some evidence of that.
However, what does decrease with age is physical stamina. And classical chess tournaments, oddly, take a lot more physical stamina than you might think.
Counterintuitively, the whole faster/blitz chess systems have been good for older chess players.
There is evidence of decreasing memory with age, many brain function related diseases like Alzheimer higher risk for older people. Senility and memory loss are commonly related.
Also certain types of information is more easier learnt when you are younger like multiple languages. I believe there is research on learning pedagogies for senior citizens having different approaches than children factoring in the ability to learn quickly.
Most mathematicans and many other scientists achieve the peek before 40, while there are exceptions like Euler or gauss it is not common.
Even in tech you find a lot more younger workers than other more stable technical fields as the learning curve is recurring and steeper than in other fields
I wouldn't disagree there is more physical stamina required for tournaments, however I doubt it so difficult for players in their 40s/50s cannot manage it without loosing competitive advantage.
> The second part I think simply denotes a misunderstanding of what playing chess well means.
The quote is from Paul Morphy, the best player of the 19th century. He practically invented playing chess well. And he hated it, he felt he should have become a lawyer and did something useful with his life.
+1, Paul Morphy might have been the most fascinating and influencing chess player of all time.
When he was still actively playing, he seemed almost unbeatable, and nobody understood why. Somehow Morphy intuitively knew when to start an attack and when he did, it magically always worked out, while other top players at that time often saw their attacks turn into nothing and would soon lose afterwards.
It took a decade until an a dedicated studier of his game, Wilhelm Steinitz, figured out the logic behind it.
His theory of positional play changed the way people looked at chess and meant the start of the modern chess era.
Morphy himself didn't live to see this, after quitting chess he became increasingly schizophrenic and eventually died penniless and alone.
> The quote is from Paul Morphy, the best player of the 19th century.
The point was taken, see my comment below. I didn't know the context behind the quote, I understand that Morphy didn't mean it the way I took it.
Nevertheless, I think that under the general interpretation of what it means to know chess well (which is surely different from Morphy's), I stand by my idea that knowing chess well can be a positive thing.
> Sounds like the disagreement is just about what is required for "playing chess well".
I think so. I'm getting a lot of flak over it though :-<
> If we raise the bar to 2500+ maybe you will agree?
I can't say. I do have an acquaintance who is at ~2600 level who is also a well adapted guy. He's not a full time player anymore, though.
I have no opinion on whether chess performance at a GM level is bad for you. All I wanted to say was that you can get pretty far with chess (I think a level of 2000-2300 qualifies as pretty far for the general population) without it affecting your life negatively.
See my edit. I just don't feel comfortable dropping his name here. I wanted to make a general point about my impression of the impact of playing chess on people, I don't want to turn this into some personal thing.
Well the pool of 2500+ players is significantly larger. It just immediately raised my attention because 2600 is superrare, and prior to 1990s only select few ever had a higher rating: it is really something special.
(Also, verifying the plausibility of statements by internet users is a personal hobby of mine, hope you understand)
Googling "Australian chess grandmasters" I get the following list: Walter Browne, Max Illingworth, Darryl Johansen, Temur Kuybokarov, Moulthun Ly, Ian Rogers, David Smerdon, Anton Smirnov. The guy I'm talking about is on the list, I won't give the exact name.
> verifying the plausibility of statements by internet users is a personal hobby of mine, hope you understand
> In my family I had/have two people who plaid chess well (2000-2300 range) without wasting their lives in any way.
Although seemingly not so far away by sheer number, the 2000-2300 elo range is worlds apart from 2500+ (GM) levels, in terms of how much effort (and talent) is required.
> Although seemingly not so far away by sheer number, the 2000-2300 elo range is worlds apart from 2500+ (GM) levels
I know that. My point was that a score of 2000-2300 can still qualify as knowing chess well. Didn't know Morphy was a top level player when I made the comment.
"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life." - Paul Morphy
Frighteningly apropos
EDIT: After becoming the greatest chessmaster of his time, Morphy retired from chess at 22. He then had a rejected marriage proposal, failed legal practice, and died at age 47.
"After becoming the greatest chessmaster of his time, Morphy retired from chess at 22. He then had a rejected marriage proposal, failed legal practice, and died at age 47."
Put another way, after abandoning chess at 22, he lived another 25 years, fell in love, and was given wide latitude to live a life of comfort and pursuing his passions owing to his family's wealth. Unfortunately he developed something akin to paranoid schizophrenia before the world knew how to effectively treat it.
Really hard to sum up an entire lifetime in a couple sentences. Pointing out only a few bad things is just as misleading as only pointing out a few good ones.
There are certainly some negative examples. But
"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life." is way too harsh imo. You learn dozens of things that help you in life & business as well:
-pushing yourself to the limit
-how to learn best
-how to get back on track after defeat
and much more. For me, getting the GM title was sort of a life school. I'll profit from the journey my whole life.
The oppurtunity cost is huge though. That level of dedication, focus, and intellect applied to a productive endeavor like science, technology, or business is likely to push science forward or create millions of dollars of value.
Hikaru says becoming a GM to like getting two PhDs.
If studying and playing tons of chess very well brings you joy, by all means go for it. The wasted life part seems very harsh and judgy.
Sure, the oppurtunity cost is big. And I'm not saying it is the best way to put out value in the world.
Two PhDs sounds like a lot. After all, most GMs get the title before their twenties. But such comparisons are very hard anyway. But it is also possible to get the title while pursuing another career path, you don't have to focus 100% on chess.
As you say, the wasted life part is way too harsh and based on only some madly crazy examples in chess history.
Paul Morphy also played at a time when chess was much less respected than it is today. You couldn't make a living off chess and it was viewed similar to gambling.
Something also to keep in mind is that even if you become a GM making a career out of playing chess tournaments is REALLY hard, it is sometimes hard to break even because you have to pay travel costs to go from tourney to tourney.
Out of playing tournaments, sure, but that's not the only source of income they have. Not even the main one. Tutoring is likely among the best options.
> I know that Hacker News likes the idea that if you work hard enough then anything is possible [especially when there's so many easily available resources], but when it comes to becoming a grandmaster it has to be said that it's painstakingly hard
That article agrees with what the parent poster said, based on my skimming it. That article documents the great lengths those women, and their parents, went through to achieve their mastery. It also indicates their may be cognitive differences between high-level chess players and good amateurs.
I suspect it's even harder than that. Chess GMs have a certain kind of mind, and no amount of training will give you that if you're not born with it.
I honestly don't understand the "If you work hard enough you can do anything" mindset.
To me it's clearly, obviously, objectively wrong - because otherwise you'd be able to take take absolutely any random child and turn them into a chess prodigy, a musical prodigy, an art prodigy, a literary prodigy, a sports prodigy or a STEM prodigy just by hot housing them.
There's no doubt a lot of talent is wasted by circumstance. But does anyone really believe that at the top levels, hard work will compensate for lack of aptitude?
Edit: Polgar experiment. Inconclusive without a bigger sample and a control group, surely.
I think the problem is that people interpret the "do anything" part as "become #1 at anything" (i.e., "prodigy" as per the parent post).
I would say something like "get to the 80th percentile at anything" (or even 95th) would be much more accurate, though, that doesn't sound as catchy. Heck, in many areas you don't even need to work _that_ much or hard to get to the top 20% or so, it's just a matter of a reasonably informed and structured approach, exercised over time.
The article mentions that chess GM level is probably more like 99.9th percentile. At that level you need to be both very talented and practice very hard.
> I would say something like "get to the 80th percentile at anything" (or even 95th) would be much more accurate, though, that doesn't sound as catchy.
In many areas (sport, art etc.) being in the 80th or even 95th percentile means failure.
Well, no - if you'd become a "#100 ranked in the world" quality software engineer, you'd be making bank, and if you'd be in the top 10%, you'd still be very comfortable.
If you'd be a #100 chess player, you might support yourself with chess somehow (e.g. coaching), but you have to really be at the top and win tournaments to get any meaningful money just by playing; and if you're top 10% then you're likely spending money to play chess and need a different profession to afford that.
So unlike software engineers, you have to be among the few very best in order to make it your profession, that's a big difference.
Watch grandmasters. Especially playing bullet/blitz.
These are just a different species of human.
The "I'm intelligent and I know the rules" is rated 800.
The "I'm pretty good at chess" is rated 1200.
A 1600 player will beat a 1200 player 9/10 times.
A 2000 player will beat a 1600 player 9/10 times.
A 2400 player (grandmaster) will beat a 2000 player 9/10 times.
People like Eric Rosen and Levy Rozman base their entire career around studying, playing, and teaching chess on Twitch and Youtube. Hours and hours a day. They are really, really good and play in competitions.
But even they are not at the grandmaster level.
EDIT: To use an analogy, reaching grandmaster status is comparable to playing in the NBA.
When I watch super grand-masters calculate tactics, or play simuls while blinded, I know that they are just built different in a way that I was either never built for, or would have had to begin my training early during development.
Even an IM (International Master) is blown away by the waya GM (Grandmaster) thinks/analyzes. Levy does a video with Hikaru and he looks like an amateur in comparison.
The video where they analyze tricky positions on their own and then compare notes is pretty illuminating. Hikaru's thought process is just different from an IM.
To be fair to Levy, Hikaru is the best blitz player alive and one of the top 20 classical players. Hikaru is better than your typical grandmaster by about the same amount that a grandmaster is better than Levy (250 rating vs 150 rating points).
There are inter-college Chess competition. A few US Universities are serious about it and they do have people getting scholarships to play on the chess team.
Great, a top comment that aims to discourage people from even trying. It's unclear where you got this stuff from (maybe you're a grandmaster too?!) but this is well beyond what the author says. He mentions 2 hours per day for 10 years and that it's about consistency, not total time spent.
This Neal Stephenson quote is relevant too, I think:
Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
When you're young, to some degree, anything is possible. But everything isn't. You gotta pick how you spend your time and once that choice is made, the time doesn't come back.
So true.
Professor. Husband. Father. Now I'm just trying to eek in GMing a tabletop adventure. That is the extent that my time+ability will allow...and I'm not sure I'm that good at any of them (impostor syndrome)
What makes it even harder is that chess elo is a zero sum game. You not only have to reach a certain level of skill, you have to be better than other people and beat them. Those other people have also been training for 10 years since they were four years old. There has never been a person who became a GM who started chess older than 17; other than him it's almost exclusively under 14. If you aren't top 5% (~1900 FIDE) within the first year of starting to play, you don't have the talent.
I cannot stress enough how impossible it is for anyone as a late teen or older to decide to become a GM. It has never happened. You might as well be 22 and decide you're going to start training for the olympic ice skating team. It's just not going to happen.
A Croatian player named Stjepan Tomic is trying to do exactly what you are claiming is impossible: https://www.youtube.com/c/HangingPawns/videos The odds are clearly against him, but we'll see how it goes.
I know, I watch his channel a lot. He has been training hard for three years and is still only 19XX elo. He doesn't have a chance. He may get a FM title eventually though.
I just watched his most recent game (153) where he makes a mistake he says he "can't explain" (starting at 18 minutes) and that after having made it he immediately resigned (apparently not even waiting for his opponent to play). He also says at other moments in the video that he was "terrified" of this or that.
Isn't it possible that superior players simply have "better nerves" and self-confidence that let them stay calm in stressful situations, and avoid mistakes that other players make sooner or later?
> and that after having made it he immediately resigned
This is an absolute mistake and is a bigger reason that he won't become a GM than his age.
Most chess players should NEVER resign. Ever. I mean it.
1) Chess below grandmaster is a game of mistakes.
It's actually one of the things I hate about chess and why I don't regard it as so much of an intellectual pursuit as people think. You can be playing an amazing game and then suddenly one thing you missed will kill you.
GM Ben Feingold has a great quote (paraphrased): "The reason why you are rated 1900 is that you will play a bunch of moves, finally hang a piece and I will beat you. The reason why I am rated 2400 is that Magnus will play 80 moves that are all slightly better than mine and I will lose."
2) Your opponent has to be able to capitalize on the mistake
If you hang a piece, the opponent cannot disregard the fact that it is a trap. At 1400, it's probably a hung piece. At 1900 it has a 40/60 chance of being a trap. At 2100, it has a 60/40 chance of being a trap.
Your opponent doesn't know you made a mistake so don't tell them. Pull out your poker face and play on. I have won countless games that I should have lost because of this.
3) Playing down a piece actually makes you a stronger player
Okay, you're down a piece. Are you just going to sit there and lose? You might as well try something first. Maybe there's a positional upside, maybe the defense got weakened, etc. Sure, you're normally going to lose. However, being down a piece has a way of knocking you out of your normal play style.
4) Being unable to convert an advantage makes the opponent frustrated
The number of people who get complacent after taking a piece is quite large. Lots of people lose after being up a piece because they let down their guard. And then they lose.
And there is nothing more frustrating than being up a piece and playing someone who is mounting an excellent defense. Your instincts are screaming that you shouldn't be having to put in this much effort and you have to resist them.
5) People play computers so often that they forget that playing a human is a completely different game
People get tired. People get frustrated. People get inattentive. People want to go home already.
All of these things can lead to mistake.
Below Grandmaster, chess victories generally go the person who makes the second to last mistake. You're always the last mistake if you resign.
> I cannot stress enough how impossible it is for anyone as a late teen or older to decide to become a GM. It has never happened.
I have been a serious chess amateur for the past 20 years. I am now stronger than I ever have been (mainly because access to training materials has improved greatly in that time), I have no doubt that I could improve more if I devoted time and effort into more focused training like I have done during competitions. I know one or two people like me. I think the thing stopping me and the other people I mention from climbing the Elo ladder is lack of interest and motivation, not ability. You develop different vistas concerns and interests at 35 to 40 than you did at 12 to 20
My point is that with time, it is possible to improve and stating categorically that because no late teenager has ever become a grandmaster, none will sounds wrong. At one time we believed that ladies couldn't become grandmasters, the chinese could not beat westerners, grandmasters could not be minted before the age of 15 etc.
Unless we reach a truly post-scarcity society where people don't have to work, I doubt that someone who has picked up chess as an adult will be able to become a GM.
> What makes it even harder is that chess elo is a zero sum game.
It's not zero-sum though, because as more Chess players enter the ranks the pie itself grows larger, meaning there will be more total players who can attain an Elo of 2,500+ and thus become a Grandmaster.
Zero-sum typically means that the entire pool is of fixed size, but that's not the case here. I'd say that Chess is win-lose but not zero-sum.
> If you aren't top 5% (~1900 FIDE) within the first year of starting to play, you don't have the talent
People will think this sounds insane, but it's so true. Honestly top 5% even sounds a bit low.
Everything gets exponentially harder the higher up you get. If you're not dominating immediately you're quite literally never going to reach the very top (Like >0.1% kind of top).
The caveat to this is that it's a year of dedicating yourself to the thing, not doing it on and off casually for a year.
so for people who likes chess: What level/rating is a good target for playing chess as a hobby, without trading away your life as would be needed for GM or other high statuses?
Your question has no answer. Different people have different aptitudes and desires and time to devote. There's no rating above which everyone should feel proud and below which everyone should feel ashamed. People should play chess for fun and if they want to set targets, it's likely most fun to set them on a personalized basis, a bit above wherever they are now. Hobbies are supposed to be fun. Each person should do what they judge is fun. :)
I know someone (a little) who is a grandmaster. He obtained the title maybe around age 17 (+/- 2y) after doing it basically full-time through his youth, with strong family support, after showing strong promise at age 3. I'm pretty sure he and his family are glad of it, and it was a lot of work. His brothers and father are also very good at chess and have taught (rated, but not IMs I think).
I'm very glad (AFAIK) he didn't have to abuse his body etc to get to that point. That doesn't seem worth it.
> If you like chess, then play chess! It's a fun game with an amazing depth and a huge player base. But if you're just starting out: Please forget about having "becoming a grandmaster" as a goal.
I could not agree more. You can waste your entire life becoming excellent at chess and that's all you will gain, being excellent at chess. It is a myth that chess makes one smarter or more intelligent at other things in life. The skills are not transferable.
That said, sure, there's a lot to chess that does transfer, such as: learning to concentrate for an extended period of time, accepting losing, learning to consider multiple possible solutions and uncertainty, etc. However, I feel that if one just plays chess and nobody makes some of these connections to real life some of these skills simply don't translate.
My kids and I play almost every day. They love the game, try to win but I taught them not to care about winning or losing at all. It's much healthier that way. There have been cases when one of my kids might lose eight or more games in a day and not win a single one. Someone who is invested in this game could easily crumble and have a bad week because of something like that. In his case, he could not care less, he knows that sometimes you win and other times you do not. The following day he might have ten wins in a row, and that's fun enough.
The other problem is that, in order to ascend through the ranks you have no option but to become a human database. This is what can consume a lifetime of study. Just learning a few openings, counterattacks and end-game strategies can elevate someone in ranking. That isn't super hard and I still consider it fun "sport" chess learning.
To get much beyond that you are going to go up against people who devote every living minute to shoving a database of games and strategies into their brains. Which means you have to do the same. To what end?
I often say that if you are going to study that hard for nothing you might as well study something like medicine and actually get something of value in exchange.
It's a different title, however. It is Woman Grandmaster. It is not at all easier for a woman to obtain the regular Grandmaster title. A subtle difference perhaps, but nevertheless a difference.
It makes sense that if the participation rate for women is lower, then the attrition rate is also higher, no? Or what was your point?
There is a variety of possible reasons this is happening, and the same effects can be seen in business (smaller ratio of female CEOs than employees) and other competitive sports historically dominated by men.
Most likely because the dedication required to reach grandmaster level, essentially wasting your life away for a game, is socialized out of women in most cultures because they have to have responsibilities and be care givers. It's becoming less and less true though, at least in western culture.
> But even relative to the total number of female players, much smaller % reaches GM.
Less women also have access to top-tier coaches and the training available to their male counter-parts.
It's not just that fewer women play - it's that there are less females in the community, in the form of role models, coaches, competition, etc.
Note that the top female in chess history (and her sisters, who are both highly accomplished chess players) were heavily coached by a decent player himself from the age of 4-onward. But how many women get that similar type of opportunity?
I found this interesting: "Most active Grandmasters are living in Russia. A whopping 256 Grandmasters are registered under the Russian Flag. The United States of America has 101 active Grandmasters, while 96 Grandmasters are playing for Germany." That's:
pop gm gm per 1e7
US 333091348 101 3.0
RU 146001137 256 17.5
DE 84070834 96 11.4
Chess has been a huge part of Russian culture (compared to the US) for like a century. I imagine we'd have more with state/popular support. I doubt the average American can name any American player besides Fischer, even though we've had the current world #2 for years (Caruana, although he may slip to #3 this month).
A tad bit unfair re: Caruana, considering he's flipped back and forth between the US and Italy a bit, most recently as 2015. Hikaru Nakamura is a bigger personality, he might have marginally more name recognition, though generally the point is well made.
Hikaru is making inroads with streaming culture, so honestly the group that might know him best are younger people, not even necessarily chess players. He's known for... well, being exactly himself, and it fits perfectly with the rest of streaming culture, so honestly it's a great match.
While we're talking about money, Hikaru has 4.4k subscribers [0] on his twitch channel, of which he makes $2.49 per (so $11,115.36 per month), in case you were curious about what kind of monetization he's able to create out of this.
he has >1M subs on youtube, and I hear CPM on chess content is among the highest in the industry, so he's probably making quite a bit more even without sponsors
If you're a novice (or even club) player and you've never seen a video of him solving puzzles, do yourself a favor and watch one [0]. The goal is to make the best move (usually winning a piece or forcing mate) as fast as possible. Chances are he can find the best move before you can even locate both kings on the board, unless you have some practice solving puzzles.
It really seems impossible. The puzzles I'm proud to have solved in a minute or two he will literally solve in 2-3 seconds.
Really drives home the difference between a GM (though Hikaru is fast even for a GM) and the average player.
Russia actually has even bigger factual ratio, because a lot of GMs in other countries are from exUSSR, which usually means 70% Russia, 20% Ukraine and 5% Kazakhstan. I just checked three top players in Australia, two of them are clearly exUSSR guys.
I've stopped playing chess as a teenager having reached ~2360. I was national youth champion, a vice-champion, 5th in the world at one point. I played 100+ games every year. Each game could last up to 5-6h. Some games were exhausting, some not. After each game you had to prepare for another one - study your opponent's games, prepare openings and variants. This effort took tool on some and older players were visibly weird, plenty were alcoholics. I used to say that football (soccer) players have bended legs, chess players have bended minds.
Anyway, if you want to make chess your profession (you don't need to be a GM to make a living), keep your mind healthy!
The choice of color scheme in the "Chess Grandmasters Per Country" pie chart doesn't strike me as particularly well thought through, especially in terms of accessbility.
IM checking in. My cousin became a GM while still a teenager.
There will come a point sometime in your life (for me that was the ripe old age of 14 or 15) when you realize that you are simply not smart enough to make the cut. When that point come, the best thing to do is bail, play for fun and focus on academics.
"There will come a point sometime in your life (for me that was the ripe old age of 14 or 15) when you realize that you are simply not smart enough to make the cut."
Chess playing ability is not a good measure of intelligence.
If you can remove opening preparation (and all preparation) I think it probably is. Calculating moves is a good measure of working memory and is an important aspect of intelligence. There are certainly other things that are important, like creativity, but anyways, intelligence is probably not a specific enough word for this to be meaningful. But as an example, I think I'm intelligent enough in a lot of ways but my ability to calculate far ahead is held back by my mediocre working memory.
Yes brute force RAM that works with these types of problems is of important, and is the reason why the vast majority of us would never be able to become a grandmaster no matter how much of our lives we devoted to it. Here's a clip of GM Peter Svidler talking about his memory: https://youtu.be/ssBcIg3cEPI?t=3622
In the same way, most of us would never be able to compete at any given physical sport no matter how much time we put in.
I think the poster was just generalizing there. Playing chess at the GM level just requires an astounding leap in working memory and recall to be able to remember similar board positions and then further thoughts on end-game and mid-game macro strategy.
Chess playing ability is probably a good correlation with higher intelligence (if intelligence is measured by strong working memory)
I think it is safe to say when both players have had the same level of training and same level of interest that the better player has better analytical ability. I can't see why else there would be a difference in chess ability at that point.
competitive drive is also about how you feel about winning or losing. A competitor "needs" to hate to lose or love to win - it helps. Just look at the world champion (of chess) - he can be a sore loser, because he has very strong feelings about it. He has a competitive drive way above mine, and many others.
If you were an IM at this age (14-15), you were actually stronger than myself at this age. I believe it is not about being smart enough, but more about what you are willing to invest (time/energy/finances). I understand everybody that says it is not worth it to go for the GM title or more.
But saying you are not smart enough is a limiting believe I don't really like, especially if you got so close. Certainly not everybody has the ability to get a GM title, but 99% that get the IM title can also get the GM title with the right work.
It's been featured on HN numerous times [0]. Will always be free and has an extremely interesting tech stack.
Note: lichess isn't just about playing chess with other people online. They have great "training" section (e.g. how to mate in X moves, pick the best move available, etc). I almost enjoy the training section more than playing against someone else.
There's a big difference between looking at a "puzzle" (and knowing that there's a solution), and playing a game (and not knowing if there's a solution to any position).
Puzzles are good for when you're still learning how to look at basic things: forks, pins, etc. etc. But you need lots of experience in-games (especially with the "lack of knowledge" about whether or not a pin is possible in any position).
Puzzles are much easier than playing a game. Focusing for just 1 to 2 minutes on a particular board state is much less tiring than focusing for an hour over a "Rapid" game.
Shameless plug, but I just made a site that lets you practice solving lichess puzzles without looking at the board: https://puzzle-vision.com
Code probably isn't ideal as this is my first time messing with React, but I'm hoping some people find it useful. I need to automate keeping the db updated as well, it's a couple months behind latest lichess open db.
Access to opportunities has to do with socio-economics.
His point was that simply existing with a darker shade of skin does not preclude you from being a GM due to any innate (in)ability. It's generally considered in bad-faith to presume an author is making a political statement that they very clearly aren't making.
I do not believe everyone has the mental capacity to become a grandmaster. In case you think that's overly harsh, I'll expand that to say I'm almost certain I do not have the mental capacity to become a grandmaster. It just takes a different type of analytical thinking ability.
The best way I've found to think about this is that, physiologically, there's nothing stopping your brain or mine from being the brain that holds a GM mind.
However, in order for that to have happened, we needed to have our brains manipulated a very specific way as children, when plasticity was at its highest, into learning how to think the way that best fits with being a chess GM. Since that didn't happen, our minds have settled into patterns of thinking that are very hard to now undo or rebuild, and likely not as well suited for chess.
Could we tear down how we think about problems at a fundamental level and rebuild ourselves to think like GMs? Yeah, probably. Could we do this while maintaining any amount of day job, social life, or literally any other aspect of a natural human life? No, probably not. Changing not just your opinion on a topic, but literally how you think, seems pretty insanely hard to do after childhood/adolescence.
I don't love the phrase "mental capacity", maybe "mental configuration" is more accurate.
> here's nothing stopping your brain or mine from being the brain that holds a GM mind
Is it really true everyone has the same mental potential?
For the specific case of a chess GM, it could be many people have the potential. Or maybe not.
There are some easy tests to quickly observe and compare mental traits between people.
For example, some people can juggle many distinct numbers in their head at once. Their brain is like a computer memory. Personally I start to fall off around 4 variables when doing mental math and don't believe I can increase that significantly. Do I have (or ever had) the same potential as someone who can juggle 50 variables in their head?
We have different capacities. That is why some become a GM at 12 and some are stuck an IM for life. And it extends beyond just being a GM or not. No one atm is as good as Magnus Carlsen for example, yet have been training at even younger ages.
"I am definitely not believing that is has to do something with Biology. People telling “female are just less smart” or some bullshit like that are living under a rock and not in the 21st century."
I'm happy to read that. So many guys have hard thoughts about women on this topic.
I'm nevertheless sad that women are not more present in "guy's stuff". They might reverse this way of thinking and put themselves forward. But the education even in developed countries is still deepening a gap gender. E.g. dollies/ make up/dance for girls, cars/ shirt/football for boys. We don't mix enough "gender interests" and we inculcate this difference in kids even not on purpose. I hope it's changing
> E.g. dollies/ make up/dance for girls, cars/ shirt/football for boys. We don't mix enough "gender interests" and we inculcate this difference in kids even not on purpose. I hope it's changing
Another side of it would also be boys in girls hobbies I think. There is no reason boys can't dance, except cultural. It is perfectly fine sport/art.
I'm very interested in this male vs female subject with regards to games (chess, video games). I don't think it has to do with intellect, but there has to be some biological difference.
I don't know why everyone is so afraid of men and women being different biologically. Men are physically stronger, that's a fact. Why can't other differences exist?
Whether or not there is a difference in biology, most likely there is something much more overt that swamps that difference.
Girls get the message early on that their abilities are unwanted in areas that have traditionally been the province of boys. A bit later many get the message that they are appreciated for the sexual opportunity they represent and their abilities are minimized.
I've read too many stories of women who faced this in STEM subjects, and it is apparently even worse in the gaming community.
There’s very convincing evidence that the average intelligence is the same for man and women, but the variance is slightly higher for men.
This means that you’ll find more males at the tails of the distribution, and guess where the chess champions are.
Speaking of scientific evidence, it is also well documented that men and women have different preferences in activities they like, since the very first few weeks of life. This might also play a role!
I played chess extensively as a young girl. I was in chess club throughout elementary and middle school. Friday night was tournament night. I was always the only girl there in a room of 100 guys. It's extremely daunting - especially because idiot elementary boys will make smug comments about getting an "easy" victory because they're playing The Girl. There was nothing more satisfying than watching their faces as I dismantled them move by move. It's a huge confidence builder to be underestimated and then win. I credit playing chess with my ability to stick it out in tech as I experience a lot of the same smug sexism. If you have a daughter that you want to be involved in tech, I highly highly recommend playing chess with her. It's a huge confidence builder and a great place where the only thing that matters is how good she is at the game.
I recently started playing blitz games on lichens.org. It has a similar rating system. It takes 10 min a game and I have been having lot of fun. Wish it translated to fide points.
I gave up playing chess seriously after watching the one grandmaster I ever played compete in the US championship, and learned that he was driving a cab to make ends meet.
If you want to have a more engaging round like real life battles, try to play chess with a clock. Give 15-20 min to each one without any adding system, or 5min (or less) if you want to play FPS-ish chess.
There are some apps to simulate these clocks. See also adding systems if you want more variety.
Although there is a lot of memorization required, especially at top-level play (opening theory and your opponent’s preference, as well as preparation), the most beautiful aspects of chess are brilliancies involving quiet positional moves or explosive piece sacrifices that seem unbelievable at first. Search for “Stockfish NNUE sacrifice” on YouTube to see examples, or the AlphaZero vs. Stockfish playlist on chess.com’s YouTube channel.
For anyone thinking that it might seem more possible than others are saying, remember that many online and country rating systems are equivalent to lower FIDE ratings—adding as much as 250 points to what you have to achieve from where you are now.
It's crazy how low the percentage of women chess grandmasters and black chess grandmasters is. I wonder how many grandmasters are aged below 15 years old. It's amazing how players play against each other despite the age difference.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] threadIs that not a viable strategy on the new engines?
On the other hand traditional algorithms might not be very good at positional chess when on a budget, wheras even weak human players can understand basic concepts like putting your rook on an open file. Then it gets even more complicated with the NNUE position evaluation models - maybe even with a one-move budget the neural net is still implicitly strong at understanding several moves ahead, and could still beat a strong human player.
Without knowing much about chess, I'd be inclined to say this can't possibly be true. Predicting human chess moves given an ELO rating sounds like a much easier task than training it to be good at the game. It is a different task alltogether, but until you reach relatively high elo scores, I'd expect a fake human ai would have a much easier time simply because it only needs to plan a few moves ahead to mimic the mindset of a lower level player.
There are many chess AIs on chess.com specifically designed to play "like" a specific grandmaster or well known chess streamer. I don't think any titled player would not be able to guess they're playing a computer if they played a few games against the AI without being told. It's very well known that computer moves are very different from human moves, even the ones specifically designed to represent a human.
https://maiachess.com/
As a modest 1400 blitz player, I definitely evaluate future states. That's not all I do, but it's certainly one thing I do. AlphaZero can also run just intuiting the next move without evaluating any additional states also fwiw. Though it is much better when it is allowed to do so.
> Consider the task of picking apples from a tree. You could easily make a machine to do that. But what if you had to make a machine that to an onlooker (who couldn't see the robot's "face", let's say) would appear to be a human picking apples from a tree? That would be much harder.
This is a very deep and nuanced task, made doubly difficult by obscure robotic hardware requirements. Not a great parallel.
> There are many chess AIs on chess.com, specifically designed to play "like" a specific grandmaster or well known chess streamer. I don't think any titled player would not be able to guess they're playing a computer if they played a few games against the AI without being told. It's very well known that computer moves are very different from human moves.
Maybe? A quick google suggested Maia is a close match to what I was suggesting. People are suggesting it does feel like a human in the thread. https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/k4o6z1/introducing_m...
Humans see fewer candidate moves. They regularly miss quiet moves that are the strongest. They often calculate to a certain depth (even a very shallow one) and stop based on gut instinct. But it’s still just trees of moves with some eval function.
I don’t think it’s fundamentally that hard to mimic, and it would actually be genuinely interesting for didactic purposes. But for fairly obvious reasons it’s not a priority outside of a couple of projects.
I submit that you're wrong there: https://maiachess.com/
However, even as a weak player, Maia is exploitable in a way that even novice humans are not. For example, it loves to give up obvious back-rank mates and almost never protects against it (e.g. with h3). It is easy for humans to spot if they are in danger of back-rank mate (especially if you’ve been burned before) and defend against it, so it does not happen much even at low levels. But Maia, game after game, gifts you an obvious mate in 1.
> Internally, MultiPV is enabled, and with a certain probability depending on the Skill Level a weaker move will be played.
Within the constraints of the depth and calculation times it determines the best move, but depending on MultiPV it will deliberately not play that move and play an inferior one instead.
Here is a game I just played that illustrates this phenomenon:
https://lichess.org/PiIFqI2c/black
The engine plays well before making a series of random blunders no human would make. You can try this yourself by playing the different Stockfish levels on lichess.org. You will be unable to find a level that makes for an enjoyable game. There are some new engines that use neural networks to try and play similarly to how humans do [1]. I can't comment on their success, but their lack of wide adoption by the chess community signals to me that it is still incomparable to humans.
[1] https://maiachess.com/
* You have to win a bunch of games against grandmasters, earning 'GM Norms', in order to become a grandmaster yourself.
* It is normal, at some contests, for lower-ranked players to pay to attend, while GMs are paid for attending.
* It is widely rumoured some contests are "norm factories" where fee-paying players get matched up with washed-up GMs who essentially throw the game.
* There are even rumours of contests where an aspiring grandmaster's parents offered cash to their opponents. There are even rumours of contests that took place only on paper.
I know that Hacker News likes the idea that if you work hard enough then anything is possible [especially when there's so many easily available resources], but when it comes to becoming a grandmaster it has to be said that it's painstakingly hard. If you actually intend to become a grandmaster you'll essentially have to make your full life be devoted to chess for years. We're talking about making it your full-time job for at least 10 years. Yes, that's how hard it is. Today there are countless of IMs (the title just below GM) that has played since they were small kids, won a bunch of tournaments when they were teenagers and yet they realize that becoming a GM is so much work that it's not worth it.
If you like chess, then play chess! It's a fun game with an amazing depth and a huge player base. But if you're just starting out: Please forget about having "becoming a grandmaster" as a goal.
Chess also has a very decent rating system (either the official FIDE rating or the ratings on online chess servers) so another way of setting yourself an achievable goal is to pick a rating (i.e. 1700 on Lichess) and then work towards that. Rinse and repeat!
Then someone gave me the book Word Freak and I lost any interest in playing in a tournament. The people that win Scrabble tournaments memorize dictionaries as their full-time job hoping to make $20,000 in tournament prize money per year. I can't compete with that.
It's still amazing to me though that the winner of the 2015 French Scrabble Tournament didn't speak French.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/21/424980378...
All of his strategy tools and anagram skills would've helped him but he still had to memorize 386,000 French words that he didn't know the meaning of.
I know the chances of me being on the PGA tour or being an Olympic level skier are basically 0%, but that doesn't stop me from improving myself and even competing in golf tournaments sometimes (I'm not a good enough freestyle skier yet to compete, but that doesn't mean I think it's impossible).
It's not about winning the tournaments, it's about constantly improving myself and testing myself at the highest level I can qualify for.
It's so confusing to me when I see people completely write themselves off. "Oh I'm 30, there's no way I'll be [a scratch golfer, able to do a backflip on skis, etc]". Maybe it won't happen, but why completely write yourself off before you even try?
But if improving oneself involves doing lots of practice that itself isn't fun, then that's exceeded the limit of what I'm willing to do recreationally. I'm only putting that level of effort in something I don't find fun into one thing in my life: work.
I was more talking about the attitude of the person I responded to. They saw someone world class perform and then "stopped trying for any of the harder tricks." I don't understand that attitude. It's basically "I don't think I'll ever be world class, so why try anything at all?"
Sometimes, you can try hard and just be not very good at something, and it was witnessing his performance which made me understand that "middling decent" might need to be a lifetime pre-occupation to attain, for me.
Nowadays that I do it as my main job, it is nut as fun. Once you have to learn yet another framework or technology, it becomes "a chore" (that I am paid to do.)
I also play chess as a very light hobby. I am only ~1750 at Lichess and would be happy to be better, but apparently I am at the point that to improve I would have to dedicate a lot of time to read books and memorize openings/middle games etc. I decided not to do it because I would not enjoy it at that point.
I played pretty high level scrabble and devoted 3 years of full-time effort to it (while holding down a menial job). I wasn’t particularly talented but I was willing to put the work in. Until one day I woke up and realized it was a total waste of time and moved on with my life.
During that time I heard it put even more pessimistically about chess. That 10 years of dedicated effort allowed you to maybe see most of the game.
There are people who devote their whole lives to Scrabble, poker, chess, backgammon, basketball etc. Many are horribly adjusted people and some of them end up incredibly skilled at a game. And a few of those people can end up making a living at it.
The average person just can’t comprehend the skill gap between the people who live their lives around a game and themselves.
There was an NBA benchwarmer named Brian Scalabrine who said about good YMCA basketball players, “I’m closer to LeBron James than you are to me.”
It’s nearly impossible to even fathom how good truly top-level game players are.
edit: I would say some (not a lot) great people. I really do think it is an exception, but they are out there.
But from my position, it's easy to watch the pros play and think "wow, that looks doable in 10 years of hard work". Yet so many people have put in that much work and still are effectively as far away from those pros as I am.
It's the unknown unknown. I used to play a lot of ball and lucked into playing pick up with some good college players and even ex-pros who played over seas. Until I had that experience, I had no idea how much better they were.
There's also nuance in the sport that requires knowledge to see the difference between top players. For example, when I started training BJJ all black belts were the same - as in they easily kicked my ass. After a few years of training, they still easily kick my ass, but I can feel the difference and have some idea just from our rolling which ones are better than the others.
So with these hand waving assumptions, Brian's comment holds true if the ymca players are <= 84th percentile of basket ball players. Sounds reasonable to me.
There's fewer than 500 players in the NBA. There are hundreds of millions of people in the US (being US-centric initially to try to do the YMCA comparison), so probably a few million that play frequently as amateurs? One in a hundred? Let's call it 3 million out of 300,000,000, to work with relatively round numbers.
So being in the best 1 out of 100 - top 99% - is a z score of 2.3. Being in the best 500 is then much smaller even than THAT! 99.983%, z score of 3.481. The single best one? 99.99997%, z score of 4.991.
So if you define closer by z score, they "good amateur" YMCAer is closer to the worst in the NBA than that person is to Lebron, but I think it's more meaningful to define closer by "how many people stand in between you and them" - and the answer is millions for the amateur.
And I think that shows that work alone only gets you so far compared to talent. If you and a million other amateurs all start putting in ten hour days, the vast majority of you aren't getting to the NBA - it's just not big enough.
But in the absence of a reliable way to measure absolute skill, the z score one does seem about as good as we can get, though it can't truly answer something like "Lebron vs Jordan" - and you also would get different numbers depending on which population you picked. Population of the world, population of the US, population of the basketball-playing world, population of people who play basketball at least once a month? That's gonna change the denominator for the percentiles for the Scalabrines and Lebrons both.
NB: I'm a huge LeBron fan and a huge Magnus fan.
A rating difference of 400 points means that the better player will score 0.9 on average (where 0=loss, 0.5=draw, 1=win).
A typical hobby player might have a rating of 1600. A good player at a chess club will have a rating of around 2000, meaning that they beat the hobby player around 90% of the time. A low-level grandmaster will have a rating around 2400, meaning that they beat the strong club player 90% of the time. The top few chess players in the world have ratings around 2800, meaning that they beat low-level grandmasters 90% of the time.
You might think the top human players are nearly perfect, but the top chess engines running on an average desktop computer are probably >800 Elo points above the top humans, and they're getting about 100 Elo points stronger every year, based purely on algorithmic improvements (not computing power).
You would think that a low-level GM would be able to achieve more draws against the super GMs, but somehow the ratings indicate they don't. It may be that the super GMs deliberately avoid drawish lines against much weaker players and try to keep the game complicated.
Scalabrine closer to LeBron James than the likes of me are to him? He's a lot closer. But I considered it an absolute privilege to be on the court with these guys. Fact is, they were actually really nice. I got a compliment on my rebounding. The second time I walked into the gym when this NBA player I'd played against was there, he came over and said hi. He came over to say hi.
Very true
An uncle of mine is a state chess champion in India, has often reached national level, but finds it hard to compete for this reason.
He says most people who play and win at national level have sponsorships--so they practice chess full time.
So its hard to even become a national level player without doing this either full time, for for many many decades (decades, not years)
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-man-vs-the-machine-...
https://youtu.be/8-OGKGmxSbw
I believe his claim: if we tried, we could turn "any healthy newborn" into "a genius".
László Polgár raised his children focusing on chess. His two daughters became the best and second-best female chess players in the world.
Judith being the youngest had that kill instinct at an early age.
The sibling dynamic is something I did not appreciate until I had kids of my own.
I'm the oldest child, and my youngest sibling definitely doesn't have, "that kill instinct".
I don't. Intelligence is partially heritable, which is also the problem with his experiment. He was himself a leading intellectual, the probability that his daughters will inherit his high intelligence is pretty good. (it's not that much known about the mother, but I assume he married someone with above average intelligence as well).
There is likely tremendous potential that we as a society waste by not providing resources and opportunities for and and encouragement of better education at earlier stages of life.
Personally, I learned to read by 3 years old, but not because I was a prodigy -- but because my mom spent numerous hours encouraging me and building in me a love of it. I am confident more than 50% of children can learn to read by age 5 - meanwhile in the US we don't expect that kind of success until after a few years of schooling.
In comparison, Hou Yifan, the 2nd strongest female ever, women's world champion at the age of 16 (!), was #59 in the world at her peak rating in March 2015, and is now #81. (Although she's been busy with university studies the last few years)
Judit is still very involved in chess, and is an excellent online commentator. e.g.
Norway Chess 2020 with Kramnik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5h-lj6z8x0
2020/21 Candidates, Round 11 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVsAfGhoeWk
See "Women's Highest Ever" rating table on the right: https://2700chess.com/women
Well that's bullshit.
The main reasons adults don't start chess and reach grandmaster levels at the same rate as those starting as children is the lack of free time and the lack of desire to put in the effort. Those two things eliminates the vast vast vast vast majority of adults, but it's not a factor in your hypothetical.
If some adult wants to spend 10 years of their life mastering chess, and didn't have to worry about work, life, dating, children, etc, they'd have about the same chance as a child of becoming a Grandmaster eventually. The chance is still extremely low for each, of course.
I'd wager that free time (and overall lack of responsibilities) is the vast vast vast vast majority of what factors into children excelling at chess.
Am I a bit off when I say "they'd have about the same chance as a child", all else the same? Maybe. But it's certainly closer to reality than the original post I responded to.
I don't agree, but I cannot prove my position. It's an interesting question that also applies to other fields (music etc.). My opinion is that when a child starts a certain activity at a young age, that activity "burns" its patterns into their brain like a language. I see that effect with one of my kids: although we started learning to play an instrument at the same time (and I can guarantee you with 100% certainty that he didn't practice more than I in terms of number of hours), his way how he handles the instrument and the music is completely different from mine: completely natural (like a mother tongue), recognizing patterns without needing to think about them,... I am certainly not the first who made this observation. The question is why chess should be different.
I'm one who has excelled in a handful of hobbies to pretty high levels while holding down a day job. Started golf at 23 and 4 years later I'm a low-single digit handicap. Started skiing around the same time and I'm working up do doing backflips off jumps, while already being able to do several tricks off jumps, slide rails, and drop moderate sized cliffs.
I'm not trying to brag, and I'm not saying that those are even extraordinary or comparable to anything professional. But I've had people legit tell me that the only chance I have of being a scratch golfer or do a backflip on skis was if I started as a kid. Which is obviously ridiculous to me, and I'll prove them wrong in the next few years.
MY POINT: Take a bunch of adults like me and give them the resources to practice golf or skiing all day every day? You'll eventually get someone who can go pro (which I'm saying is the equivalent of being a grandmaster for this conversation). At what rate would they go pro compared to kids? Who can say. I'd wager it's a lot closer than people in this thread are thinking.
We will see :)
But, as I mentioned in my other comment, don't underestimate the physical impact of age on your body. A young body can tolerate and recover from a lot of physical self-inflicted abuse and overtraining. Take a child: starts training skiing at the age of 10, wins a gold medal at the age of 20, body starts to degrade at age 25 (joints, testosterone level,...). Try the same as an adult at the age of 30 or 40 with a body that has been already degrading for one decade. It's good that you have learned several tricks as an adult, but will your body tolerate the literal mistreatment that is necessary to go from "several tricks" or even backflips to "professional level"? A pro is not somebody who can do a complicated trick on a good day. A pro has must be able to reliably perform the trick dozens of times in a competition. This last step from 90% good to 100% perfect is the hard one.
That's logically not true. It's not like there's a huge pool to choose from. There are less than 1800 GMs right now in the entire world.
And it also depends on what we mean by all this. Learning the pieces? Most children learn the rules of the game at some point, I'd imagine. That takes a way too many people.
Actually starting to try? There are a few examples I can find of people being around ~1700 rating when aged 18+ and making it to GM (Jonathan Hawkins, Jacob Aagaard, John Shaw)
Ye Jiangchuan didn't learn the moves until they were 17. Still young, but not crazy young.
> There are tens of thousands of adults learning the rules of chess each and every day.
How many find they have a massive passion for chess, without having a job, a significant other (or pursuit of one), any worries about money/bills/etc, or have children or family to take care of? That, and they can't have found their passion for chess during their childhood.
Probably almost zero people fit that bill. You basically need a lottery winner or trust fund person who doesn't care about having an abnormal life of chess with minimal upside in the small chance they actually reach the GM level.
But those are all not related to the fact that they have an adult brain, which is my point.
You're going to have real trouble finding an adult that is sufficiently motivated to become a chess GM, has an enormous amount of free time, willing to dedicate the next 10 years of their life purely to chess, etc.
A friend of mine stopped playing chess competitively at the age of 50 because, as he said, he didn't have anymore the necessary physical stamina to learn and practice for hours and hours every day. Age /is/ a factor, even if the external conditions are identical.
"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."
Only with age I can appreciate how true that quote is. There was an article that came up not long ago about GMs selling games for others to earn their GM norms. And the sad truth is being GM in chess doesn't put a food on the table.
The very peak of the players can make a living some as coaches or streamers but not everyone can be a 'winner'.
And in those jobs being good at chess is only part of the equation. You have to be personable, someone that people aspire to. Physical attractiveness is also never a bad thing in the world of streaming. I once chatted with concert violinist. She was not happy about trends in the soloist community. "The moment I saw an exposed midrift in a concert hall, I knew I would never be a soloist."
That's life in general. Even at my company when choosing photos of people to profile to for recruitment posts on LinkedIn, it's pretty clear they lean towards attractive people.
I also notice that with Company Profile page, where who they show is not really indicative of who comprises the company.
There have been several studies on this. Apparently being an attractive woman is a net negative when it comes to being hired by other women (6% fewer callbacks than the same resume with less attractive photo attached in one particular study).
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1705244
I used to work with an ex-military guy (extremely bright, hard working, excellent leader, etc. etc.).
He was about 64 inches (1.63 meters) tall, balding, and not the handsomest fella. He told me point blank: "I was never going to become a general or achieve any other extremely high rank simply because I didn't have 'the look' or physical stature of a general."
Compare Canada where, beyond not having photos, even gender-based pronouns have been removed from performance reports in order that reviewers not risk gender bias.
That would be gender-blind but also ignores the fact that absolute scale actually matters in war sometimes - running speed, ability to lift and load heavy tank shells for a few hours etc.
One might argue that actual physical strength doesn't matter much. One way to check this claim would be to look at recently granted medals for valor, and see how many of them are related to absolute (not relative) physical prowess.
Indeed, the higher up you go, the more your job becomes about leading and the less it becomes about individual feats of strength. I think you're thinking about the military a little bit wrong here -- this isn't the Roman era (when centurions led from the front and had to be legitimate physical badasses). Being higher up in the military nowadays is a lot more akin to being a paper pusher director at a company.
Medical and fitness are different things. Lots of people can pass the fitness tests but still flunk out for medical reasons. Diabetics. People who get cancer. Failing eyesight. Sever allergies. It is very possible to ace the fitness tests while still failing the medical.
If there was one, there was at least a ton of exceptions to the rule, male and female.
EDIT: Though I didn't work with any generals. There are only several hundred U.S. generals, and that number is capped.
Take Thatcher or Merkel. Both women for whom this arguably matters even more, not attractive, and not even coming from a background that lends itself naturally to climbing hierarchies. Kohl, Merkel's mentor used to often refer to her as his "Mädchen", ('girl', but diminutive, only used for children) and she basically back-stabbed him and took control of the entire party.
There's definitely ways for unattractive or more generally, people who nobody expects to rise to power to do exactly that.
This New Yorker profile from a few years ago is a long read but very much worth it if you want to get a overview. The beginning recapitulates a lot about her childhood so you might want to skip that part if you're only interested in her career.
https://www.insider.com/how-chess-was-more-sexist-than-its-p...
Similarly, a Brigadier General is not the same rank as a General, despite some commonality in word choice between the two ranks.
"These titles are sometimes criticized and some female players elect not to take them, preferring to compete for open titles. For example, Grandmaster Judit Polgár, in keeping with her policy of playing only open competitions, never took a women's title."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIDE_titles#Women's_titles
Another good example is Xyla Foxlin, who walks a similar line with a YouTube engineering/maker channel and has been very explicit about her approach: "I refuse to “act more like a man” in order to achieve legitimate and respectable success in the professional world. I happen to be someone who embraces her femininity and feels powerful in cute shoes and sparkly makeup, and I don’t see how any of that makes me less of an engineer." [0]
[0]: https://medium.com/1517/beauty-and-the-invisible-beast-c2a8d...
You mean like this? https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/715141
We always instead played checkers, for real - always encouraging and teaching, but no patronizing wins for me - it was a long time until I could actually take a few games. Great memories, and he was gone too soon.
I did play some in HS & college, very much enjoyed some intense games, and still think it was good advice.
The Paul Morphy quote is spot on, save maybe for great champions like Garry Kasparov, who also went to to greater things. I suppose the same could be said about many pursuits where only a few get to truly earn a living, such as acting, music, sports - it becomes what you make of it but perhaps chess is a bit more extremely consuming?
Mid/high level players to progress up are in large degree forced to study positions memorise lines etc. To large extend its a competitive memorisation game.
This is natural step in high level chess, its like a precopmutated hash table, the more upfront work you can precomputate the less time you need to spend over the board on that move.
I play chess for fun and as casual hobby, and i think its a great way to exercise your brain. Thinking about board and evaluation positions. It translates into real world too.
Its also one of the last few things i can do and not get distracted by anything else.
I'm really struggling to parse this. Can you reword it?
This is what the mentor in the movie means: some become good, some foolishly pursue nothing. The game can be addictive. But to be great is the rarest thing.
> ..seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armor, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Chandler
I guess it was always a thing even back then?
Hmm… any way we can turn chess into a proof of work algorithm? xD
That's what quickly got me out of chess, when it was me playing with my brother as a kid it was about thinking really hard and trying to explore as many options as I could - it was really about who can think faster and outsmarting eachother since we only knew the rules.
When I decided to look into chess I found out it was about learning openings, recognising patterns, traps, etc. I didn't feel any smarter learning those, I just learned more about chess. You can draw up silly strategic methapores with any activity, but chess does seem to have that Sun Tzu status.
You do need to understand phases of the game, set up strategy, estimate your position, know when to attack or to defend, and have confidence in your technique.
Mind you, that is only for the plain master title (FIDE or even a national master). Grandmasters are a whole new level in comparison, aliens.
Chess has this poetic image of playing around with kings, queens and pawns that lets artist paint grandiose metaphors about real world, but at the end of the day spending a bunch of time on chess is going to make you good at chess, doubt it will do much better than any other similar hobby for transferable skills.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy
“… the focus on those pure, well-defined, and easily discernible objects like triangles, or more social notions like friendship or love, at the cost of ignoring those objects of seemingly messier and less tractable structures.”
but studying hard topics can teach you thinking tactics for analyzing problems and looking for thr big picture.
I mean... I am charitably trying to find interpretation/context in which this is meaningfully true, and failing. In which way is bitcoin more "computer money" than any other money these days?
I purchase things, pay my bills, obtain payment, invest, and do all my transactions at least 95% digitally, with "computer money".
Uncharitably, I could call Bitcoin "that, but less practical / more wasteful". Charitably, I could say "There are specific goals/circumstances where Bitcoin has benefits".
But I feel it's decades late to be "first iteration of computer money", unless there's some squinting and extremely specific ad-hoc defining that I haven't imagined. Even the "Money" part (as practical transactional currency) is these days increasingly less relevant,by proponents and pundits alike, as opposed to "investment vehicle" or "storage of value".
(as for chess, I don't know; I gave up when I realized how much memorization, as opposed to developing of understanding, was involved to get much better; it may indeed enable self-knowledge and mold character at some level beyond the ones I've achieved. Therefore, I cannot contribute to discussion on whether Chess is practical/efficient/meaningful way to grow those characteristics - i.e. hammering rocks for 5,000hrs probably grows character at some level but may not be sufficiently practical/efficient to matter. I respect it like a do Golf - it takes immense skill, dedication, and investment to develop it to a high level, and world-class players are incredibly good at it; but it's not a skill I desire to grow myself anymore).
Emphasis is on how minting, the creation of new money, is strictly enforced by the protocol (software), and decentralized. Further, it is hard-capped.
As such, it's money that is born digitally, natively. This extends to ownership, which is just a bunch of private keys.
But let's agree to disagree there. Even then, money has multiple roles: unit of account, store of value.
Currently, Bitcoin plays the role of storing value. Like a savings account, or "digital gold". Not for payments. It might play a payment role in the future on layer 2, or it might not. Too soon to tell.
The first iteration of computer money is called 'regular money'. Nobody uses cash anymore, we all use computer money.
I don’t know, their fans complain quite loudly.
Wasted in what sense? Aren’t we all playing made up games and solving artificial problems at the end of the day? Most GMs probably aren’t doing it to make money, they get a similar thrill from it as, say, a mathematician gets from understanding and solving deep math problems.
Very apt analogy. Most math faculty members in my department stopped being productive in the last third of their career. After a while, it just gets old. Proving yet another theorem no longer excites them.
At least they collect a decent paycheck, though.
The reason the contributions usually drop for mathematicans is less to do with losing interest and more that they simple don't have the mental capacity they did in their 20's and 30s into the 50s .
Maths is very tough field to do research in.
There is more to life than being a chess player or a mathematican. His point is more to do focusing/obsessing on a single narrow subject, given morphy's own experience I would say he is more than qualified to make that comment.
In my family I had/have two people who plaid chess well (2000-2300 range) without wasting their lives in any way. They held full time jobs, had families and enjoyed the game at a pretty serious level. If anything chess helped them stay mentally active and engaged well into their 90's.
The reason it is hard work is because beyond a point the preparation is a lot about memorizing and remembering a lot of lines variations not improving on your understanding or theory. That's also why older you grow it is harder to be at the top, understanding is not diminished at 40+, however memorizing abilities are.
You will have to understand Paul morphy story to understand to why he said something like that.
He was the world best by a good distance and he quit playing at 22. He had struggles and was consumed by it. After spending most of your formative years and not finding the meaning in the life despite having won pretty much everything can be life altering. He is known as the pride and sorrow of chess with good reason.
In context the quote has different connotations. However, having taken it at face value, I stand by my comment.
Nothing in the Morphy quote explicitly addresses the technicalities of becoming a world class chess player.
In general playing chess well means something else to the general public than to a GM level player. My comment was made having the former interpretation in mind - Morphy was obviously talking from his (very different) point of view.
And yet you still claim that your point is correct if quote is taken out of context.
Its shifting goalpost fallacy.
> Its shifting goalpost fallacy.
There's no fallacy here. I have my opinion, I stand by it regardless of the quote's context. I understand that Morphy didn't mean what I thought he meant. It's just that my opinion on the usefulness of chess is still the same.
In his defense I don't think morphy intended for people outside the chess world as a general statement.
I'd like to see some evidence of that.
However, what does decrease with age is physical stamina. And classical chess tournaments, oddly, take a lot more physical stamina than you might think.
Counterintuitively, the whole faster/blitz chess systems have been good for older chess players.
Also certain types of information is more easier learnt when you are younger like multiple languages. I believe there is research on learning pedagogies for senior citizens having different approaches than children factoring in the ability to learn quickly.
Most mathematicans and many other scientists achieve the peek before 40, while there are exceptions like Euler or gauss it is not common.
Even in tech you find a lot more younger workers than other more stable technical fields as the learning curve is recurring and steeper than in other fields
I wouldn't disagree there is more physical stamina required for tournaments, however I doubt it so difficult for players in their 40s/50s cannot manage it without loosing competitive advantage.
From physics genius to dissapearing one day with no known fate.
The quote is from Paul Morphy, the best player of the 19th century. He practically invented playing chess well. And he hated it, he felt he should have become a lawyer and did something useful with his life.
When he was still actively playing, he seemed almost unbeatable, and nobody understood why. Somehow Morphy intuitively knew when to start an attack and when he did, it magically always worked out, while other top players at that time often saw their attacks turn into nothing and would soon lose afterwards. It took a decade until an a dedicated studier of his game, Wilhelm Steinitz, figured out the logic behind it. His theory of positional play changed the way people looked at chess and meant the start of the modern chess era.
Morphy himself didn't live to see this, after quitting chess he became increasingly schizophrenic and eventually died penniless and alone.
The point was taken, see my comment below. I didn't know the context behind the quote, I understand that Morphy didn't mean it the way I took it.
Nevertheless, I think that under the general interpretation of what it means to know chess well (which is surely different from Morphy's), I stand by my idea that knowing chess well can be a positive thing.
I think so. I'm getting a lot of flak over it though :-<
> If we raise the bar to 2500+ maybe you will agree?
I can't say. I do have an acquaintance who is at ~2600 level who is also a well adapted guy. He's not a full time player anymore, though.
I have no opinion on whether chess performance at a GM level is bad for you. All I wanted to say was that you can get pretty far with chess (I think a level of 2000-2300 qualifies as pretty far for the general population) without it affecting your life negatively.
2600 rating on sites like lichess or chess24 is much more plausible, it corresponds to roughly 2150-2300 fide rating.
Yes. He's a pretty well known Australian player, not sure how active he is anymore though. Now has a full time academic career.
Edit:
After verifying on the FIDE website, I see his ranking is around 2500 now. He is a GM though.
(Two of them are from exUSSR, and the last one has a surname that sounds Chinese)
(Also, verifying the plausibility of statements by internet users is a personal hobby of mine, hope you understand)
> verifying the plausibility of statements by internet users is a personal hobby of mine, hope you understand
https://xkcd.com/386/ not sure it's the healthiest hobby, but I guess I understand.
Although seemingly not so far away by sheer number, the 2000-2300 elo range is worlds apart from 2500+ (GM) levels, in terms of how much effort (and talent) is required.
The Wikipedia section about his abandonment of chess is tragic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Morphy#Abandonment_of_che...).
I know that. My point was that a score of 2000-2300 can still qualify as knowing chess well. Didn't know Morphy was a top level player when I made the comment.
Frighteningly apropos
EDIT: After becoming the greatest chessmaster of his time, Morphy retired from chess at 22. He then had a rejected marriage proposal, failed legal practice, and died at age 47.
Put another way, after abandoning chess at 22, he lived another 25 years, fell in love, and was given wide latitude to live a life of comfort and pursuing his passions owing to his family's wealth. Unfortunately he developed something akin to paranoid schizophrenia before the world knew how to effectively treat it.
Really hard to sum up an entire lifetime in a couple sentences. Pointing out only a few bad things is just as misleading as only pointing out a few good ones.
A long time ago, someone characterised chess as a DOS on the mind.
Hikaru says becoming a GM to like getting two PhDs.
If studying and playing tons of chess very well brings you joy, by all means go for it. The wasted life part seems very harsh and judgy.
Two PhDs sounds like a lot. After all, most GMs get the title before their twenties. But such comparisons are very hard anyway. But it is also possible to get the title while pursuing another career path, you don't have to focus 100% on chess.
As you say, the wasted life part is way too harsh and based on only some madly crazy examples in chess history.
Hikaru made a really enlightening video about the economics of pro chess playing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hWlbsAVRN0
what do you have to say about this article? https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200507/the-grand...
Hard work will get you there, and in their case, hard work meant they were literally born and raised as human chess-playing experiments.
I honestly don't understand the "If you work hard enough you can do anything" mindset.
To me it's clearly, obviously, objectively wrong - because otherwise you'd be able to take take absolutely any random child and turn them into a chess prodigy, a musical prodigy, an art prodigy, a literary prodigy, a sports prodigy or a STEM prodigy just by hot housing them.
There's no doubt a lot of talent is wasted by circumstance. But does anyone really believe that at the top levels, hard work will compensate for lack of aptitude?
Edit: Polgar experiment. Inconclusive without a bigger sample and a control group, surely.
I would say something like "get to the 80th percentile at anything" (or even 95th) would be much more accurate, though, that doesn't sound as catchy. Heck, in many areas you don't even need to work _that_ much or hard to get to the top 20% or so, it's just a matter of a reasonably informed and structured approach, exercised over time.
In many areas (sport, art etc.) being in the 80th or even 95th percentile means failure.
I've encountered these people and it's always a case of being insulated from the reality of what the "anything" in question is.
They all descibre chess as been what they were introduced and chose to pursue [1], but they were educated in many areas.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r
If you'd be a #100 chess player, you might support yourself with chess somehow (e.g. coaching), but you have to really be at the top and win tournaments to get any meaningful money just by playing; and if you're top 10% then you're likely spending money to play chess and need a different profession to afford that.
So unlike software engineers, you have to be among the few very best in order to make it your profession, that's a big difference.
These are just a different species of human.
The "I'm intelligent and I know the rules" is rated 800.
The "I'm pretty good at chess" is rated 1200.
A 1600 player will beat a 1200 player 9/10 times.
A 2000 player will beat a 1600 player 9/10 times.
A 2400 player (grandmaster) will beat a 2000 player 9/10 times.
People like Eric Rosen and Levy Rozman base their entire career around studying, playing, and teaching chess on Twitch and Youtube. Hours and hours a day. They are really, really good and play in competitions.
But even they are not at the grandmaster level.
EDIT: To use an analogy, reaching grandmaster status is comparable to playing in the NBA.
A 3544 engine (Stockfish) will beat a 2882 player 10/10 times.
So 8 wins and 2 draws is winning 9/10.
---
A 660 point difference between Stockfish and Carlsen should be a 1 - 10^(-662/400) = 98% win rate for Stockfish.
More than likely, that's 96% win, 4% draw, 0% loss.
I think Hikaru plays him at rook+knight odds or something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dQzTnvsNG4
Or even Minefield: https://youtube.com/watch?v=EtKWLgOX60U (I don’t think Nakamura is playing optimally w.r.t. being in a guessing spot, but he’s fast)
Source: Local (non-US) player got one of these.
Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
When you're young, to some degree, anything is possible. But everything isn't. You gotta pick how you spend your time and once that choice is made, the time doesn't come back.
I cannot stress enough how impossible it is for anyone as a late teen or older to decide to become a GM. It has never happened. You might as well be 22 and decide you're going to start training for the olympic ice skating team. It's just not going to happen.
Isn't it possible that superior players simply have "better nerves" and self-confidence that let them stay calm in stressful situations, and avoid mistakes that other players make sooner or later?
This is an absolute mistake and is a bigger reason that he won't become a GM than his age.
Most chess players should NEVER resign. Ever. I mean it.
1) Chess below grandmaster is a game of mistakes.
It's actually one of the things I hate about chess and why I don't regard it as so much of an intellectual pursuit as people think. You can be playing an amazing game and then suddenly one thing you missed will kill you.
GM Ben Feingold has a great quote (paraphrased): "The reason why you are rated 1900 is that you will play a bunch of moves, finally hang a piece and I will beat you. The reason why I am rated 2400 is that Magnus will play 80 moves that are all slightly better than mine and I will lose."
2) Your opponent has to be able to capitalize on the mistake
If you hang a piece, the opponent cannot disregard the fact that it is a trap. At 1400, it's probably a hung piece. At 1900 it has a 40/60 chance of being a trap. At 2100, it has a 60/40 chance of being a trap.
Your opponent doesn't know you made a mistake so don't tell them. Pull out your poker face and play on. I have won countless games that I should have lost because of this.
3) Playing down a piece actually makes you a stronger player
Okay, you're down a piece. Are you just going to sit there and lose? You might as well try something first. Maybe there's a positional upside, maybe the defense got weakened, etc. Sure, you're normally going to lose. However, being down a piece has a way of knocking you out of your normal play style.
4) Being unable to convert an advantage makes the opponent frustrated
The number of people who get complacent after taking a piece is quite large. Lots of people lose after being up a piece because they let down their guard. And then they lose.
And there is nothing more frustrating than being up a piece and playing someone who is mounting an excellent defense. Your instincts are screaming that you shouldn't be having to put in this much effort and you have to resist them.
5) People play computers so often that they forget that playing a human is a completely different game
People get tired. People get frustrated. People get inattentive. People want to go home already.
All of these things can lead to mistake.
Below Grandmaster, chess victories generally go the person who makes the second to last mistake. You're always the last mistake if you resign.
Never resign.
I have been a serious chess amateur for the past 20 years. I am now stronger than I ever have been (mainly because access to training materials has improved greatly in that time), I have no doubt that I could improve more if I devoted time and effort into more focused training like I have done during competitions. I know one or two people like me. I think the thing stopping me and the other people I mention from climbing the Elo ladder is lack of interest and motivation, not ability. You develop different vistas concerns and interests at 35 to 40 than you did at 12 to 20
My point is that with time, it is possible to improve and stating categorically that because no late teenager has ever become a grandmaster, none will sounds wrong. At one time we believed that ladies couldn't become grandmasters, the chinese could not beat westerners, grandmasters could not be minted before the age of 15 etc.
It's not zero-sum though, because as more Chess players enter the ranks the pie itself grows larger, meaning there will be more total players who can attain an Elo of 2,500+ and thus become a Grandmaster.
Zero-sum typically means that the entire pool is of fixed size, but that's not the case here. I'd say that Chess is win-lose but not zero-sum.
People will think this sounds insane, but it's so true. Honestly top 5% even sounds a bit low.
Everything gets exponentially harder the higher up you get. If you're not dominating immediately you're quite literally never going to reach the very top (Like >0.1% kind of top).
The caveat to this is that it's a year of dedicating yourself to the thing, not doing it on and off casually for a year.
I'm very glad (AFAIK) he didn't have to abuse his body etc to get to that point. That doesn't seem worth it.
I could not agree more. You can waste your entire life becoming excellent at chess and that's all you will gain, being excellent at chess. It is a myth that chess makes one smarter or more intelligent at other things in life. The skills are not transferable.
That said, sure, there's a lot to chess that does transfer, such as: learning to concentrate for an extended period of time, accepting losing, learning to consider multiple possible solutions and uncertainty, etc. However, I feel that if one just plays chess and nobody makes some of these connections to real life some of these skills simply don't translate.
My kids and I play almost every day. They love the game, try to win but I taught them not to care about winning or losing at all. It's much healthier that way. There have been cases when one of my kids might lose eight or more games in a day and not win a single one. Someone who is invested in this game could easily crumble and have a bad week because of something like that. In his case, he could not care less, he knows that sometimes you win and other times you do not. The following day he might have ten wins in a row, and that's fun enough.
The other problem is that, in order to ascend through the ranks you have no option but to become a human database. This is what can consume a lifetime of study. Just learning a few openings, counterattacks and end-game strategies can elevate someone in ranking. That isn't super hard and I still consider it fun "sport" chess learning.
To get much beyond that you are going to go up against people who devote every living minute to shoving a database of games and strategies into their brains. Which means you have to do the same. To what end?
I often say that if you are going to study that hard for nothing you might as well study something like medicine and actually get something of value in exchange.
But even relative to the total number of female players, much smaller % reaches GM.
There is a variety of possible reasons this is happening, and the same effects can be seen in business (smaller ratio of female CEOs than employees) and other competitive sports historically dominated by men.
Less women also have access to top-tier coaches and the training available to their male counter-parts.
It's not just that fewer women play - it's that there are less females in the community, in the form of role models, coaches, competition, etc.
Note that the top female in chess history (and her sisters, who are both highly accomplished chess players) were heavily coached by a decent player himself from the age of 4-onward. But how many women get that similar type of opportunity?
Hikaru is making inroads with streaming culture, so honestly the group that might know him best are younger people, not even necessarily chess players. He's known for... well, being exactly himself, and it fits perfectly with the rest of streaming culture, so honestly it's a great match.
While we're talking about money, Hikaru has 4.4k subscribers [0] on his twitch channel, of which he makes $2.49 per (so $11,115.36 per month), in case you were curious about what kind of monetization he's able to create out of this.
If you're a novice (or even club) player and you've never seen a video of him solving puzzles, do yourself a favor and watch one [0]. The goal is to make the best move (usually winning a piece or forcing mate) as fast as possible. Chances are he can find the best move before you can even locate both kings on the board, unless you have some practice solving puzzles.
It really seems impossible. The puzzles I'm proud to have solved in a minute or two he will literally solve in 2-3 seconds.
Really drives home the difference between a GM (though Hikaru is fast even for a GM) and the average player.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_records_in_chess...
Anyway, if you want to make chess your profession (you don't need to be a GM to make a living), keep your mind healthy!
Chess playing ability is not a good measure of intelligence.
In the same way, most of us would never be able to compete at any given physical sport no matter how much time we put in.
Chess playing ability is probably a good correlation with higher intelligence (if intelligence is measured by strong working memory)
I can't recommend enough lichess.
It's been featured on HN numerous times [0]. Will always be free and has an extremely interesting tech stack.
Note: lichess isn't just about playing chess with other people online. They have great "training" section (e.g. how to mate in X moves, pick the best move available, etc). I almost enjoy the training section more than playing against someone else.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26910579
Puzzles are good for when you're still learning how to look at basic things: forks, pins, etc. etc. But you need lots of experience in-games (especially with the "lack of knowledge" about whether or not a pin is possible in any position).
Puzzles are much easier than playing a game. Focusing for just 1 to 2 minutes on a particular board state is much less tiring than focusing for an hour over a "Rapid" game.
Many like me enjoy puzzles because it a problem to solve like any other type of pzzule not because it helps in the learning the game.
Knowing that a puzzle(chess or regular) has a solution does not take away the joy of solving it.
Code probably isn't ideal as this is my first time messing with React, but I'm hoping some people find it useful. I need to automate keeping the db updated as well, it's a couple months behind latest lichess open db.
As if access to opportunities has nothing to do with race.
His point was that simply existing with a darker shade of skin does not preclude you from being a GM due to any innate (in)ability. It's generally considered in bad-faith to presume an author is making a political statement that they very clearly aren't making.
However, in order for that to have happened, we needed to have our brains manipulated a very specific way as children, when plasticity was at its highest, into learning how to think the way that best fits with being a chess GM. Since that didn't happen, our minds have settled into patterns of thinking that are very hard to now undo or rebuild, and likely not as well suited for chess.
Could we tear down how we think about problems at a fundamental level and rebuild ourselves to think like GMs? Yeah, probably. Could we do this while maintaining any amount of day job, social life, or literally any other aspect of a natural human life? No, probably not. Changing not just your opinion on a topic, but literally how you think, seems pretty insanely hard to do after childhood/adolescence.
I don't love the phrase "mental capacity", maybe "mental configuration" is more accurate.
Is it really true everyone has the same mental potential?
For the specific case of a chess GM, it could be many people have the potential. Or maybe not.
There are some easy tests to quickly observe and compare mental traits between people.
For example, some people can juggle many distinct numbers in their head at once. Their brain is like a computer memory. Personally I start to fall off around 4 variables when doing mental math and don't believe I can increase that significantly. Do I have (or ever had) the same potential as someone who can juggle 50 variables in their head?
I'm happy to read that. So many guys have hard thoughts about women on this topic. I'm nevertheless sad that women are not more present in "guy's stuff". They might reverse this way of thinking and put themselves forward. But the education even in developed countries is still deepening a gap gender. E.g. dollies/ make up/dance for girls, cars/ shirt/football for boys. We don't mix enough "gender interests" and we inculcate this difference in kids even not on purpose. I hope it's changing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis
But that's hard to separate from the fact that there are just so many more males in the pool of chess players.
Another side of it would also be boys in girls hobbies I think. There is no reason boys can't dance, except cultural. It is perfectly fine sport/art.
I think that one can't exist without another.
I don't know why everyone is so afraid of men and women being different biologically. Men are physically stronger, that's a fact. Why can't other differences exist?
Girls get the message early on that their abilities are unwanted in areas that have traditionally been the province of boys. A bit later many get the message that they are appreciated for the sexual opportunity they represent and their abilities are minimized.
I've read too many stories of women who faced this in STEM subjects, and it is apparently even worse in the gaming community.
This means that you’ll find more males at the tails of the distribution, and guess where the chess champions are.
Speaking of scientific evidence, it is also well documented that men and women have different preferences in activities they like, since the very first few weeks of life. This might also play a role!
There are some apps to simulate these clocks. See also adding systems if you want more variety.