Chess

sufi

lala
Like a lot of people, I've got back into chess via the online thing since lockdown, although I've come to realize that I kind of find it more enjoyable in the abstract than in practice, as in, I really enjoy analyzing and understanding the game, solving puzzles and so on, but trying to find the right moves under pressure does my head in a bit.

One thing that has struck me, though, is how much difference the internet must have made to people starting out. Like, when I was a kid I played a few games once or twice a week and had a random assortment of second hand books to learn from. It must be a fairly different experience now you can basically hammer out games any time you want and access all sorts of information online.
online chess is great for kids - you got to work out how that knight moves or it won't let you move it!

you may enjoy this: https://aeon.co/essays/playing-chess-is-an-essential-life-lesson-in-concentration
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Fairly sure I'd be ranked nth in any group of n players, unless it included this one friend I play with who's even worse than me, in which case I'd be ranked (n-1)th.
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
@subvert47 - you're mostly a correspondence player, though, right?

@ tea / others - I'm RamblinDave on lichess, could probably be convinced to play if I'm online and not too tired.
 

subvert47

I don't fight, I run away
@subvert47 - you're mostly a correspondence player, though, right?
Not really, no. I do have a correspondence chess title (Senior International Master) but I've hardly played any serious CC in fifteen years. Just ten games in the Counties & District League (bd.1 for Nottinghamshire).
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
looking things up is part of the game (y)
When you say looking things up, do you mean like "Ah, this is just like the game between Bolokov and Pimpski in 1956" and opening a book that describes that game?

As opposed to feeding the moves into a chess program, which would pretty unequivocally count as cheating, I'd have thought.
 

subvert47

I don't fight, I run away
When you say looking things up, do you mean like "Ah, this is just like the game between Bolokov and Pimpski in 1956" and opening a book that describes that game?

As opposed to feeding the moves into a chess program, which would pretty unequivocally count as cheating, I'd have thought.

Correspondence chess is about analysis. You can use all sorts of tools to assist you in your analysis... books, databases, engines, your own previous analysis. Most CC organizations allow all of those. So, no, it's not cheating.

But engines (chess programs) are why I gave up playing CC seriously. They took all of the fun out of it for me. And that was 15 years ago. They're much stronger now. Stronger than the world champion even. Much stronger.

 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Correspondence chess is about analysis. You can use all sorts of tools to assist you in your analysis... books, databases, engines, your own previous analysis. Most CC organizations allow all of those. So, no, it's not cheating.

But engines (chess programs) are why I gave up playing CC seriously. They took all of the fun out of it for me. And that was 15 years ago. They're much stronger now. Stronger than the world champion even. Much stronger.

Yeah, I know it was a huge moment in both the chess and computer science worlds when Deep Blue beat Kasparov, but I find it quite depressing to think that a chess app that runs on a smartphone can now easily thrash even the best human players.
 

subvert47

I don't fight, I run away
Yeah, I know it was a huge moment in both the chess and computer science worlds when Deep Blue beat Kasparov, but I find it quite depressing to think that a chess app that runs on a smartphone can now easily thrash even the best human players.

Once you've accepted that computers are best at chess, it's actually quite interesting watching them play each other. The main site for that is the continually rolling Top Chess Engine Championship...


Stockfish and Leela are currently playing their umpteenth final together.

But the very strongest program doesn't play anymore: that's AlphaZero, a self-learning AI designed by Deep Mind (now part of Google). They gave it the rules of chess, let it play millions of games against itself for nine hours... after which it was the strongest chess player in the universe ever :)

The AI works on more important things now, serious science projects. Last year, apparently, it made a major breakthrough in protein folding.
 
Top