I know someone who worked on cheat detection in chess using ML. The solution turned out to be rather amusing, but I won’t disclose it here for obvious reasons. If you figure it out, it’ll probably amuse you too.
This reminds me very much about a documentary I saw a while back about competitive fighting games [0].
A Pakistani newcomer ended up taking everybody by surprise in a big Tekken 7 tournament trough his unconventional way of playing.
This was apparently the result of Pakistani arcade culture existing in its own isolated underground niche, in which a completely independent meta for playing the game evolved.
International top tier players even traveled to Pakistan to learn and train that style of playing with local players to incorporate elements of it to their own.
Of the many spectacular moments and reactions, the best was Magnus winning a lost position and believing it won him the match (and implying Alireza has much to learn before being able to beat him). Magnus was still a professional when defeated, but emotions were running high at the point in the match.
Also, if you watch the game right after the Magnus victory, Magnus once again declares 'This is just game' before Alireza masterfully turns an amateur position into a victory over the world chess champion.
Chess is one of the few fields where dominance can easily stretch into several decades - if you're a young prodigy you may breach into top level in your teenage years and last well until your 50s or 60s. Of course you won't be #1 this whole time (check out Lasker's longevity though) but you will always remain a top contender.
FWIW this is why I've adopted Curling after playing hockey for a decade. It is an incredibly skillful and physical game and yet you see 80 year olds at the rink playing it. You can get good at it and be good for a long long time. You don't get too old.
Also the beauty of golf. You can enjoy it until your 70s, some even older. You can do outings with several generations. Has shorter tees for younger, older, ladies if they want to use the. It also has a legitimate handicap system so everyone can compete.
I also really love fishing, mostly for different reasons, but it's multi generational too of course.
I would like to differ on this. It's getting harder and harder to maintain dominance. Kasparov was the one to hold the longest. Magnus, even though he is one of the best ever, is already losing out to Alireza in bullet, blitz and even almost in classical.
Chess theory has a new Renaissance due to neutral networks and we will see newer GM's adapting to it.
This is not how I see it. Carlsen lost one insanely long online bullet match on lichess.
He narrowly lost an online banter blitz match. This is not blitz, since also you have to talk while playing, which does not seem to suit Carlsen's personality.
In classical, you can often "almost lose", except that Carlsen does not "actually lose", as exemplified by his ongoing record non-loss streak.
People are reading a bit too much into this loss. It is a big deal that someone was able to beat Magnus Carlsen at any time control, especially in this era where Magnus has seemingly reached a new level of chess skill, but bullet is by far the the easiest for a champion to make a mistake or series of them. Magnus is ridiculously strong at bullet but I’ve watched his live-streams and sometimes he blunders really badly, that’s just part of bullet. Although he is incredibly strong at bullet, probably 50-100 points higher than the world #2. Anyone not a high ranked GM wouldn’t stand a chance of beating him in a series of more than 5 games. But I’ve seen him lose to players he is obviously better than. He’s the #1 so they try their hardest. Nothing comes easily for Magnus.
The classical time control chess is boring. It really feels like an exercise in memorization.
I stopped watching those as almost every tournament ends in armagedon. Its a statement of the incredible skills top players poses, but its incredibly boring to watch draw after draw.
Quicker time controls are more dynamic and allow to play subpar move to throw off your opponent. Often you can see some crazy attacks.
I watch a variety of games on Twitch, and I am fairly sure that no player would claim they play optimally while commentating themselves and explaining their thought processes.
I think if anyone has benefited from the coming of AlphaGo and Leela, it's Magnus himself. 2019 was such a renaissance for him partly because all these intuitive positional lines with pawn sacrifices opened up, and I felt in the years previous to that that his love for the game seemed slightly on the wane as he regularly became mired in others' Stockfish prep (while still being able to mostly pull it out due to endgame technique).
In fact, it was Magnus himself (currently 29 years old, as of April 2020) who said his favorite chess player was himself, when he was around 23. That Magnus apparently saw things on the board that current (overwhelmingly dominant) Magnus can't any more. So even in chess there's a physical prime, just like in pretty much any other sport.
He said that (jokingly) before his fabulous 2019 year.
Right now he's spending a lot of time promoting chess24 with banter blitz, hanging around on lichess playing 100 games bullet matches, commenting on chess24 and other things that would profoundly ruin anyone else's concentration.
So, no big deal if he very occasionally loses (online!) games.
I am really curious if we are going too see players adopting AlphaZero tactics. Games I saw goes so against current intuition and it would be interesting to see chess evolving.
Current crop of GMs benefited greatly from short feedback loops by using computers, but they still operate in explored problem space.
For what it's worth, Magnus has recently hit an all-time ratings high after a very, very slow decline over the last 5 years. And he attributes his recent bump to studying the AlphaZero games.
Magnus is so incredibly strong that people think he's about to decline when suffering one (1) loss from another rising star in a niche online format. This is like when Capablanca didn't lose a single game between 1917 and 1924 and everyone acted like "the Schachmachine ist kaputt" when he broke his streak. The fact is that competition is incredibly tough and differences betwene player levels are imperceptible to all but the very most trained eyes. In fact that's why championships need so many games and tie-breakers - the people are so equal in ability that the most likely result from a match between to top level players is a draw.
He is. Carlsen is a unique player in many respects and he usually comes back even stronger from losses. To say that he is "losing out" to someone is a bit premature I would say.
> if you're a young prodigy you may breach into top level in your teenage years and last well until your 50s or 60s. Of course you won't be #1 this whole time (check out Lasker's longevity though) but you will always remain a top contender.
No. There is nobody 50 or older in the fide ranking ( top 100 ).
Anand is about 100 Elo points weaker than Carlsen at all time controls. It's impressive that Anand is still #15 at his age (50 years), but he's the only 50-year-old at that elite level (2700+ Elo).
The age distribution of the top 100 Classical players is:
16-19: 5
20-29: 39
30-39: 40
40-49: 12
50-51: 4
The 20s and 30s are really the peak ages for chess.
> Easily? No. The only player to have the top rating longer than 10 years is kasparov.
That's because you are looking at a FIDE list which starts in 1971. Mikhail Botvinnik was the world champion from a nearly uninterrupted period from 1948 to 1963 (he lost to Tal once).
Capablanca was undefeated from 10 February 1916 to 21 March 1924 and remained a contender for best player in the world until his retirement in 1931.
Drivers become aś good as they every can in pure pure driving skill in karting when they are still teenagers. All skills needed for driving fast are developed early.
Rest of the career in F3/F2/GP2 feeder series to F1 is just maturing psychologically, getting experience and learning stuff you need outside the track. Ultimate skill level is already there or not. Drivers will eventually fade out when their physical performance declines in late 30's.
(actual career performance depends on cars, teams, money, business and marketing)
Because Formula 1 - like most other sports - has such a dependence on an athlete's physical fitness to actually express the skill they have, I think it - and most other sports - is rather unlike chess.
The dominant risk when I ski is traveling to and from the resort. So I suppose your point stands if you only play from home. Even so, it seems a bit irrelevant to the discussion.
Maybe for you the travel to skiing is dominant, but I've known many people (UK acquaintances) who've been injured skiing but none who've been injured on route to go skiing. And that's just leisure skiing, in racing I'd imagine injuries are far more common.
They were responding to the assertion that skiing holds a larger risk of dying than the travel to the ski resort. Statistically, it seems more likely that a person would die in a car accident versus skiing.
"The rate of sustaining an injury while skiing or snowboarding on Swiss slopes was 2.8 per 1000 skier days on average from 2008 to 2010. The fatality rate was 0.7 deaths per one million skier days in the same period of time."
"In cars, one person died per 5.5 million passenger hours traveled."
So skiing seems 4x more dangerous.
Anecdotally, I've read that one hospital in the Swiss Alps was struggling money wise, because the ski season was ended early, and ski accidents were a major revenue for them.
According to [1], Skiing is 0.7 micromorts, whereas driving is about 400km per micromort. Therefore, the break-even point is 140km (0.7 * 400 / 2 way trip). If your local ski resort is < 140km away, the skiing is more likely to kill you.
That's per day of skiing, and a lot of ski trips are more than one day.
This doesn't take individual behavior into account though. A lot of people are skiing more cautiously than the insane risk takers who kill themselves in avalanches or falls in deep woods or backcountry. Also, the driving to the ski resort is likely to be more dangerous than regular driving because you're more likely to encounter icing, snow on the road, and low visibility conditions.
All in my guess would be that the driving is more dangerous for most skiers.
Injured skiing? Absolutely, and if you race it's a question of when, not if. But I was responding to a claim about deaths.
For the last decade, every ski trip I've done has required either 4+ hours of driving or a cross-country plane trip. Add in the fact that much of that driving is on icy, narrow mountain roads in storm conditions, and the stats that other people shared make it clear that driving is the bigger risk to me.
Chess fans won't have to wait long to see a rematch between the pair, as they face off once again on April 20 in the $250,000 Magnus Carlsen Invitational. The competition, hosted by Carlsen, will pit eight of the world's best players against each other for the record prize.
Yes, on chess24.com with two matches every day and commentary from top players from now until May 3. Probably on other sites too but chess24 is hosting the event and typically has the highest-quality commentary.
I had been following Alireza's rise over the past year on Chess.com. It's not entirely surprising. He often plays against Hikaru Nakamura, one of the best blitz players in world, who streams many of the games on Twitch. The gap between them had been closing and I think it's pretty much closed now.
This happened two days after Firouzja effectively defected from his homeland so that he could play Israelis. I see it as something of a credit to him that this is the worst behaviour he displayed in the aftermath.
To Appeal Commitie to Fide
during the blitz game with Carlsen when
I had 2 or 4 second my opponnet speak
Loudly in his Language and of course if this
will be allowed then every body can do this
and of course everybody lose their consentratoin
and I want to request appeal to check
with camera.
That didn't seem so bad. You can see with how much he was toppling pieces that he was having trouble with nerves, which would make the situation all the more frustrating. When players have an increment to play with rules should be decisive on "loss on time is a loss, doesn't matter the position". But here we have some edgecase which settles on some crazy sequence for black to ever win (if white didn't have pawns, the game would've been declared a draw)
Basically have some empathy, losing is rough & in a tournament most players are losing, for all we know he just needed to sleep on it & came around the next day
That'd be ideal, but you only control yourself. Empathisizing with someone doesn't mean you have to agree with them. It just means you don't need to call them out on it months later on a random HN thread when they've come around with a nice result. Maybe it'd be relevant if this article was about another argument with event moderators
From the video of the play, it doesn't look like Alireza threw a fit. Losing on time I'd be frustrated enough to whack the table. It is a tense moment. What seems unsportsmanlike is his interactions with the arbiter.
>I will add some additional information from the broadcast and what microphones picked up during the norwegian live coverage.
>After Alireza lost on time (he fumbled his king, not the bishop), he claimed that there was no mating material and that it should be a draw. There was then a pretty loud discussion at the table, when the arbiter ruled the game as a draw. Magnus claimed there was mating material on the board, the arbiter still ruled a draw. We could then hear Magnus say "Who's ruling is that? Is it yours?" since he thought the arbiter was influenced by Alireza. The head arbiter then came over and ruled a loss on time for Alireza since there was mating material on the board. They moved to the side, and the camera and microphones picked up a heated debate between the head arbiter and the Alireza team and they needed the rules explained to them. After a lot of fuzz, Alireza was shown the very clear rule that it is only a draw if there is "not mating material left by any means possible for Carlsen".
>Then Alireza changed his story and claimed that Carlsen spoke something in Norwegian and had disturbed him. The arbiter then said he should have stopped the clock and addressed it when it happened, and again Alireza claimed that this happened when there was 2 seconds left on the clock and it would be impossible. This was the second time he changed his story.
>The head arbiter ruled that he lost on time and if he had any concerns about Carlsens behaviour he should have adressed it at the table.
>Alireza and his team put in an official complaint, claiming that Carlsen said something in Norwegian and distrubed when Alireza had only seconds left on the clock.
>While the complaint was reviewed, the TV team showed the entire endgame. It shows Magnus spontaneously whisper a norwegian word when he blundered his C-pawn. Carlsen had at the time about 2-3 seconds on the clock, Alireza more than 8 and a completely winning position. If he wanted he had time to complain, but was winning on the board. They played for about 2 more minutes and Alireza fumbled pieces 3 times and lost a lot of time on the clock.
>It was only when he lost on time, all these excuses showed up. The jury overruled his complaint, and Alireza lost on time. He was extremely sympathetic in the interviews before this, but this circus after his loss was an embarassment for him and his team.
Yeah, not only did he throw his water bottle out of anger, he tried to appeal over something he lied about. Hard to care about him at all after seeing that behavior.
I'm not sure "shocks" is the right word. From what I understand, Carlsen already considered him his most dangerous opponent. Or at least a future rival.
hopefully, one day geopoliticism will go away. so called sanctions etc affect regular people. the teen can't even fly easily or represent iran due to sanctions
Request: would anybody higher rated than me (my Lichess classical rating is ~1670) be kind enough to mentor me in Chess (for as less as 1 hour in a week)?
Huh? Variants of lightning/blitz/fast chess have been around since the late 19th Century. They are very much games of chess. I’m not sure what the quibble is? Is untimed chess, which is uncommon for competitive play, the only real form of chess? Or is timed chess, which almost all competitive matches are, an acceptable form of chess, so long as the duration allotted to each player is __________?
There is no time format that is called “standard”, if anything, if somebody told me about “standard chess” I would assume they are talking about standard ruleset, in which case this article is definitely about standard chess.
I think you meant “classical chess”, which is a time format.
Why is Alireza Firouzja being referred to as "Iranian teen"? He's an international top player. I doubt that Carlsen was referred to as "Norwegian teen" when he was ranking in the top 25.
Nakamura is described as an American player, but he lives in Napoli. Levon Aronian is Armenian, but he lives in Berlin. Players often don't live in the country they represent.
But Alireza does not represent Iran, period. The other players are playing for their respective countries.
Btw, I think you are mistaken about Levon Aronian. See recent tragedy with his wife. Occurred in Armenia. He might be living in Berlin part time as its closer to all the action.
This is not a proof that he was commonly referred to as "Norwegian teen". The internet is vast and a proof of existence has little weight. But any data is better than not data, so +1 to you.
“Iranian teen” makes it a better headline, anonymizing him makes it more of an out-of-nowhere sports story. Stop looking for racism in everything, you’re looking to stir something up when there’s nothing there. (And I see you’ve edited your comment to remove the “this is racist” rant)
I’m more annoyed by the headline’s implication that Carlsen would find this defeat shocking. He wouldn’t. Magnus and Alireza have been acquainted for a few years now. They’ve played many times. Carlsen is fully aware of how strong his opponent is.
He might have been fazed for sure. Carlsen is famously grumpy about losing. And there's a big difference between losing a single game, and losing a match consisting of several games. It's much more difficult to dismiss the latter as a fluke.
Now obviously this wasn't a fully serious match format, but then again Carlsen prides himself on his dominance under short time controls.
after all, it was in rapid playoffs that he defended his world champion crown against both Karjakin and Caruana. It was only once it came to that when he would simply blow them out of the water.
I think you will find that focusing a bit less on subjective notions of “respect” and not being offended by innocuous things will make your life a lot less stressful.
Pretty frightening that you can’t see the obvious bias.
They could and should have named the “Iranian teen” in the headline instead of glorifying Magnus as some unbeatable chess god. Not to mention that in the actual article itself the hero image is of Magnus holding a trophy. For an article about how he lost.
There is no "obvious bias". Firouzja is an "Iranian teen".
The fact that "a teen" has beaten the undisputed world champion and number one chess player in the world for the last 10 years at anything involving chess is very surprising and called out in the title (also a lot more click-baity).
Believe me, if and when Firouzja achieves Magnus status and if he then gets beaten by a teen unknown to general audiences we will see a similar headline with Iranian replaced by the teen's country of origin and "Magnus Carlsen" replaced with "Alireza Firouzja".
Because "person beats Magnus Carlsen" isn't nearly as interesting a headline as "really young person beats Magnus Carlsen" - the latter gives us a sense that we should be surprised. I think you're seeing racism where there is none.
Chess, like olympic sports, is weirdly nationalistic and a source of national pride. I'm not much of a history expert, but I suspect that was largely caused by the soviet union deciding that they would be the best at it.
As for not using his name, try and write the headline both mentioning his name, and his age. It's just clunky.
One reason to do that is to make it accessible for your reader. They hopefully have heard of Iran, they can "understand" the headline. Even for people who know of the situation sometimes players get a preceding nationality because then you don't need to remember the names to follow along with who is who.
If anything it's nice to see some good press for Iran on an American site. I fully expect him to be retconned as "French teen" or "American teen" or whatever else once he gets his new federation.
Agreed 100%. If you're the editor thinking up this headline, you've got a choice between a) crediting established chess powerhouse Firouzja with a well-deserved victory over Magnus; or b) downplaying his accomplishments in order to make it seem like the reigning champion lost to a random high schooler.
"Established chess powerhouse" - not in the eyes of your average reader who doesn't follow world chess events, and most likely wouldn't be able to name any active chess player, with the possible exception of Carlsen himself.
It's CNN, not ChessBase. They have no reason to assume any chess-related who-is-who knowledge on the reader's part.
CNN's average reader couldn't pick Magnus Carlsen out of a police lineup. At that point you either try grasping at whatever semblance of credibility you have: "Chess prodigy finally defeats Magnus Carlsen in a blitz tournament", or go for those allegedly profitable clicks and title the article "Iranian teen SHOCKS Magnus Carlsen".
It's all trash. The headline is insulting to Magnus. It's insulting to Firouzja. It's insulting to the readers.
It also seems relevant that he is Iranian as he has notably decided not to play under the Iranian flag. Reading the article, multiple paragraphs are spent discussing this aspect of the story.
update: better than me. lol
Created a hn tournament (finished): https://lichess.org/tournament/rWPYf1fK
Created a second tournament: https://lichess.org/tournament/Wg6CHtmp