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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!
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.
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. --
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.
I realize that they have to make money, but I find the sponsor logos on their jackets rather tacky.
I guess you won't like Carlsen's new television advertisement for adult incontinence diapers: "For an impenetrable defense."
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
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
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
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
In this context, a total order satisfies transitivity. But being "better" in chess doesn't necessarily satisfy this property. What this means is that on average, player B wins against player A more frequently, and player C wins against player B more frequently, but player A could also win against C more frequently, making it impossible to state that any single player is the "best." This can occur because different players can exhibit particular strengths and weaknesses in different aspects of the game.
Note that it is important to talk about the above in terms of 'average' performance. Although chess is deterministic, there are random sources of variation in skill, in that a given player does not consistently choose the move that reflects their true skill level (i.e., they sometimes make a mistake, or they have a flash of insight).
For an interesting, rather counterintuitive, and simple example of non-transitivity, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontransitive_dice .
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.
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