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When Chess Players Blunder
An anonymous reader writes: Joe Doliner has done a statistical analysis of mistakes in rated chess games. He used a chess engine called Crafty, which is capable of not only finding mistakes, but quantifying how bad they are. After crunching all the matches on chessgames.com in 2014, which amounted to almost 5 million moves, Crafry found only 67,175 blunders that were equivalent to a 2-pawn deficit or worse. With a pair of graphs, Doliner shows how mistakes decrease as player rating increases, as you'd expect. According to the trendline, gaining 600 rating points roughly halves the number of mistakes a player makes. He made the data and tools available in a public repository for others to dig into.
I would suggest that making half as many mistakes gains you about 600 rating points, rather than the other way around.
Unless those points can be magically sprinkled on a player in some form..
But hey, cause and effect seem to be highly, shall we say, flexible these days.
(yes, I know its all semantics here, but hey..)
A limited set of rules and a large set of possible moves. Somewhat similar to programming . That makes me wonder if a good chess player could potentially be a good programmer ?
Real chess players don't blunder... they make tactical bluffs - Just like professional poker players!
The rest of the article turns the board around, looks at it from Kramnik's position, and tries to get into his head to see what he was thinking. Personally, I think it's what I call "sniffing your own butt" when you get so inside yourself, you stop thinking about the rest of the world. You then perform bizarre actions which seem quite reasonable to you. This happens in groups as well. It helps to explain things like how pro-worker governments of the 20th century murdered millions of workers. There's just nobody there to second-guess your thinking, and even if there was, they would be heavily punished for speaking out and contradicting you. This is where crowdsourcing shines.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
This analysis does not make sense. I've tried to do similar ones, but there are several methodological issues involved.
My guess is that this study is largerly influenced by how early players resign.
Beginner (lower rated) players tend to play on much longer than grandmasters. Unless anyone resigns, the game ends in a checkmate. On the path to a checkmate, at some point, there will be a game-losing move by one player. Grandmasters will resign when they see the game will be lost, even when the actual forced mate is still too far away for the computer to see. Beginners might play on, artificially increasing the count of "game losing" moves, stemming from the concessions they have to make trying to avoid the inevitable.
It is not uncommon that a superficial computer analysis shows an end position of a GM game being a pawn or three down, but the deeper the computer analysis the more the evaluation drops. Two seconds per move by Crafty is probably not enough to refute top GMs.
Another factor is human nature. When facing a losing position, the losing player often tries to stir up some complications that makes it practically difficult for the opponent (games are played with limited time). These complicating moves are often quite bad from a computer standpoint -- but a human facing a certain loss is likely to sacrifice material for even a small chance of counter play. The study should exclude positions that are already winning / losing for one side.
It is an interesting article, but the one who made the graph should might want to change jobs.
The first graphs has four shades of blue blue and on top of that the areas are colored using gradients.
Plastic pieces fly across the room
This makes a great deal of sense if you stop and think about chess as a mathematical problem of sorts. While it's not been "solved" in the same way that checkers has, there is obviously an optimal solution for chess, and with greater player expertise, the closer they are getting toward reaching that solution, even if it's perhaps not humanly possible to fully solve it. The less experienced player is somewhat like a person who doesn't correctly understand how to balance an equation or who habitually forgets to carry numbers when adding, or some other analogy. A more experienced player is a bit like your calculus professor in college who might have forgotten to put a sign on a number or something trivial that doesn't really affect the process of work (even though the class dipshit feels like pointing out the prof's "typo"). A grandmaster is so good that you don't even understand their mistake when you were told what the mistake was.
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Yeah, a public repository on github. What was that other place? Oh yeah, sourceforge. I think google delisted them for serving malware. Kind of funny how that used to be hot shit in the open source world. If that doesn't prove your standards are too low, I don't know what does.
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I remember reading, some years ago, about a conversation between a distinguished scientific programmer and the head of NASA, shortly after the first moon landing. He commented that he was amazed that such a complex program as that on the Lunar Lander worked well. The head of NASA confided that, in fact, the sign of gravity in the code was in with the wrong sign, and it was only discovered by accident the day before the launch.
... the first moon landing. ... the sign of gravity in the code was in with the wrong sign, and it was only discovered by accident the day before the launch.
Do you have the details on this? It's a pretty good one if true.
(||) Nehmo (||)