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22-Year-Old Norwegian Magnus Carlsen Is the New World Chess Champion
ardmhacha writes "Magnus Carlsen was able to force a draw in the 10th game of the World Chess Championship to claim the title with a 6.5 — 3.5 score (3 wins, 0 losses, 7 draws) over Viswanathan Anand. Carlsen became the youngest ever World No. 1 in 2010, but withdrew from the 2012 championship cycle and so has only now been able to add the World Champion title to his No. 1 ranking. He won three games and lost none. His first two victories came when he was able to convert small advantages in the endgame into wins. The third (in game 9) came after a blunder from Anand."
FINALLY!!! I was wondering if that was possible anymore.
It's been more than fifteen years since Deep Blue beat Kasparov. Certainly humans don't stand a chance against modern chess software and hardware.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Computers have moved on to more intellectually challenging games . . . like Jeopardy.
I wonder how Watson would do playing "Wheel of Fortune" or "The Price is Right" . . . ?
. . . and a "Computer Family Feud" . . . priceless!
"The Raspberry Pie was the first to hit the buzzer, before the iPad!"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I realize that they have to make money, but I find the sponsor logos on their jackets rather tacky.
Some time around the seventh century, a new board game appears in India. Its pieces include a counsellor, elephants, chariots, infantrymen, horsemen and a king. Called chaturanga, it's the ancestor of modern chess - and a game of war. But if chess in all its variations has been used historically to illustrate battlefield tactics and probe new strategies, today nothing's changed. Teams at the Swedish national defence college in Stockholm and the defence science and technology organisation in Australia are studying the game afresh in an attempt to understand better how to gain military success. In Sweden, the researchers are using real players. In Australia, the team has run tens of thousands of virtual games - with some clear messages for their military sponsors.
On the face of it, the bloodless, low-tech game of chess might seem to bear little resemblance to modern warfare. "But it resembles real war in many respects," maintains Jan Kuylenstierna, one of the Swedish researchers. "Chess involves a struggle of will, and it contains what has been termed the essentials of fighting - to strike, to move and to protect." By studying chess and other adversarial abstract games such as checkers (draughts), researchers can strip away some of the confusion of the battlefield and identify the factors that are most important for winning, says Jason Scholz, who leads the Australian work. "The strength of this approach is our level of abstraction," Scholz says.
Imagine chess replacing actual war.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
The only thing we Indians we were good in besides IT and today we got beat. Alright who wants their servers fixed.
In that ending, the only side that had winning chances was the side with the pawns. Magnus was playing for the win.
-- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --
Watson would fail miserably, because it wasn't designed for those games. It's like asking how Deep Blue would do at checkers. It doesn't play checkers. It plays chess.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
It's been more than fifteen years since Deep Blue beat Kasparov. Certainly humans don't stand a chance against modern chess software and hardware.
Nonsense. As Kurt Russell demonstrated in The Thing, it is possible for even a very bad player to absolutely destroy a seemingly unbeatable chess computer, as long as you're drunk enough to quell any tendency toward impulse control.
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
Maybe he's just earning a few bucks:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/11/20/2218252/bp-hired-company-to-troll-users-who-left-critical-comments
Wikipedia: "Carlsen modelled for G-Star Raw's Autumn/Winter 2010 advertising campaign with actress Liv Tyler." and "Carlsen was selected as one of the "sexiest men of 2013" by Cosmopolitan." He's a pawn star.
Bet lost! He gets more pussy than an animal shelter. More ass than a toilet at a diarrhea convention. He's basically a chess rockstar and parties like one, too. A lot of the older chess players hate him for that. "Disrespecting the game". Sure, but he smoked you like a smoked a joint.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
At the time, Deep Blue was the 259th most powerful supercomputer in the world with special purpose chess chips, a regular desktop today would be strong but not that ridiculously much stronger.
That is true, but software has also improved. We have better chess algorithms (especially pruning algorithms). But, even more importantly, we have better databases of previous games, and opening moves. Playing good chess has less to do with thinking, and more to do with remembering, than most people realize.
Computers have moved on to more intellectually challenging games . . . like Jeopardy.
Don't forget Rock, Paper, Scissors.
Here in Norway everyone has followed the game online instead of doing actual work. DNB, our largest bank, had to block access to the live coverage. Almost everyone streamed the game making their network slow and it made real work difficult.
(Norwegian source: http://e24.no/media/dnb-maatte-stenge-tilgangen-til-sjakk-vm/22641053)
"he, who has quotes in his signature, is a douche" - unknown.
I read the articles and am kind of a novice chess player but I can't figure out what this "huge blunder" that Vishy made? He was playing white and didn't respond properly to an attack from black? This would be huge, right? Isn't it typically when playing white you play to win and black you play to draw (that one-move advantage is huge)? So the fact that Carlsen got a win as Black was huge, right?
Can someone explain the details of the mistake to me? The commentators and commenters all make it seem obvious but I can't tell what's going on.
I've always wanted to be good at chess (I equate it to being "smart") but I've never been able to be very good at it.
"You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense." - C.S. Lewis on Intelligent Design
Lol. I didn't stand a chance against Sargon III back in the day. Good for this guy!
More music, fewer hits
They're chess grandmasters, but they are still not able to deduce that "beating" is not necessarily a mathematical total order.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
What's interesting about that game that a lot spectators don't realize:
1. Before the match, the computer (and computer programmers) analyzed all of the historical games by Kasparov and his most favored openings; any human at the level of Kasparov will have a very long footprint of history, while Kasparov didn't have any historical games of the computer to look at and to analyze
2. Both matches (1996 & 1997) ended after 6 games with the computer only winning by a 1-2 points, even without #1
3. "The rules provided for the developers to modify the program between games, an opportunity they said they used to shore up weaknesses in the computer's play that were revealed during the course of the match. Kasparov requested printouts of the machine's log files but IBM refused, although the company later published the logs on the Internet" (wikipedia Deep Blue page). I don't think this should have been allowed; the software should be true AI and learning without assistance
4. "Kasparov demanded a rematch, but IBM refused and dismantled Deep Blue." (wikipedia Deep Blue page) Kasparov and others never had another chance to beat it, after finally having a small history of games to analyze its playing style.
However, despite this, I think that a computer will most likely still reign supreme, but to be completely fair, I think it would require a history of games for the opponent to analyze and no human intervention during the match. However, the programmers can add in a "learning" module of some sort that analyzes each game afterwards, but no human intervention (e.g., programmers tweaking lines of code) is allowed during the match of games -- only before or after.
And on a related note, my main gripe with Watson was the physical responsiveness. There were times when the human hand reaction time could just not match the computer physically.
I would like to see a computer play blitz games against a world champion, as long as my gripe with Watson is ensured that they can't move physically faster than a human's reaction time.
The G
... TCEC 2013, sort of a computer Chess World Championship has end its 4th round. The winner of the previous stages is an open source engine: Stockfish, and it will play the Superfinal (48 games) against the second player: Komodo. The winner of previous years, Houdini, ended in third place.
Well, a "properly prepared" Watson wouldn't be Watson any more. The games Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, and The Price is Right have little in common in terms of the type of algorithm and program needed. Jeopardy is about looking up relatively common factual information, Wheel of Fortune is about guessing phrases, and The Price is Right is about estimating prices -- all worlds apart when it comes to which algorithms would be used.
I suppose the point is that even our most "intelligent" programs and computers are still programmed to be good at one, and only one, task. It can perhaps be reprogrammed to perform a slightly different but almost identical task, but you can't use a program that is designed for one task and expect it to perform reasonably at some quite different task. Different tasks require different algorithms and sometimes even different specialized hardware.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
The computer would not need a history of games of the opponents.
Computer chess has moved so far ahead of human players that Carlsen would have been utterly destroyed. These days, spectators watch the game with chess computers on the side, since the chess computers can tell properly which player is ahead, while spectators wouldn't be able to tell properly.
Chess engines such as Houdini, Stockfish and a variety of others have ratings well above 3100. Carlsen has a rating of 2872. He would be crushed.
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
Except that the Watson programmed to diagnose diseases is still called Watson. A Watson programmed to guess prices would still carry the brand name "Watson."
There's a perfect xkcd for my sig but I'm too lazy to look it up. sudo someone go find it.
The strength of computers at chess is a bit of a complicated subject. Chess computers are really only very good at one thing (calculation), while the bulk of the program is there to cover up the weaknesses (everything else) as best as possible. When you see a human vs computer match the majority of the heavy hitting is really just the computer selecting moves from a database of human games, relying on human strategy, to carry it through hopefully to a winning position. However while all this is happening it's calculating and (somewhat badly) evaluating millions of positions, which means it doesn't make any tactical mistakes.
For some reason a computer playing from a database of pre-selected human games just doesn't sit as well for me as if the computer were actually finding the best moves through it's own calculation.
Also of note is that even with the massive database and relentless calculation, humans can beat computers at correspondence chess where the humans can spend enough time to calculate out everything just like the computer does. It's the time limit that makes their calculation so strong.
But to answer your question more directly, computers are rated somewhere around 3500 (although their rating has more to do with beating other computers), while Magnus Carlsen is rated 2870. However despite a 600 point rating difference, I'd expect he'd draw the majority of games against computers in a match.
I was watching a live stream of the match, which also showed the next moves suggested by Houdini. Interestingly both players were pretty consistent in selecting the highest ranked moves. The exceptions were the "blunders" which lead to Anand's defeat.
Anand certainly wasn't on form, and is aging, but I can see him still coming back next year. (And good job Carlsen!)
And what a finish to the Championship, the players actually playing out the reduction to King versus King.
By the way: Wherever you live, it's likely your local chess club would like you to drop in for a game (or to learn.) You don't have to be a Grandmaster to enjoy over the board chess.
utterly destroyed
I would say easily beaten in a match, but definitely not utterly destroyed. In 2003, Kasparov drew with X3D Fritz. In 2006, Kramnik was beaten 4-2. Grandmasters still have draws and sometimes wins; that is not utterly destroyed IMO. I think utterly destroyed would be straight wins with 0 points. I'm also curious about different timing (e.g., 10 minute games) and chess variations (e.g., Fischerrandom/Chess960 and Capablanca chess).
ratings well above 3100
Computer chess ratings aren't accurate for computers (as they're banned from tournaments and humans progress from bad to the best so hard to push rating beyond 3000). 3100+, when translated, simply means a bit better than Carlsen, but we have no idea about its true rating. During the 1st 9 matches, all chess engines gave every move by Carlsen a sub-optimal (meaning there are many branches that could lead to optimal, but can't go enough plys/levels deep to determine) to optimal rating. The 10th match had the only bad move by Carlsen that I remember. I don't think Carlsen would be utterly destroyed against a "3100" elo rated chess engine, but probably beaten 3 to 2&1/2.
The G
Computer engines like Stockfish win, hands down. In fact I was running Stockfish analysis alongside some of the games and within seconds it had identified bad moves, like when Anand failed to take a pawn, or when he moved a rook instead of a pawn that allowed Carlsen to win instead of draw. Deep Blue was on the erge of being better than humans - 10 years later, chess engines are miles better than humans.
== Jez ==
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