how to cheat at chess
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- čas přidán 14. 12. 2022
- Magnus v. Niemann
Are you cheating with a bot or just playing like a bot?
This is a really vulnerable moment for me as you will soon learn I am an embarrassingly bad chess player. - Věda a technologie
To make sure it's clear to people watching this video Carlsen was not on a 53 game win streak. He was on a 53 game no loss streak. The record at high level chess for consecutive wins is 20 or 21 unless someone broke that record.
Yah cuz winning 53 games of chess at the profesional level in a row would be insane lmao
I'm on a professional streak of never losing, not even once.
@@culwin that’s solid work
@@xGotDemFragzJRx Yeah almost impossible for any of the best players in history.
@@dannygjkHe is probably joking, and probably played like 2 games and won/tie
That idea that he sacrifices the queen like a bot might do reminds me of a time I sat in with the chess club in high school, and there was this puzzle about how to achieve checkmate from some seemingly hopeless position, which did happen in some big game. Everyone was throwing out ideas and the instructor kept shooting them down, and eventually it went quiet. I just said, "sacrifice the queen." The guy next to me was like, "NOOOOO" and the instructor was like, "yes", and walked us through how this sacrifice offset one other piece by a single square, opening up some diagonal move allowing mate to happen after a bunch of other moves. I sat there looking like this galaxy-brained genius who'd figured out this thing nobody else could, but I only said it because it was the only idea left on the table after everyone else had already said their thing, and it seemed like a taboo. I had no idea how to actually do it.
I played against the guy who yelled "NOOOOO" one time. He checkmated me in like a couple of moves then said I was a good player. Thanks, man.
I've coded a few games, decades ago. You do see computers making these "unusual" moves. When it happens with games you've coded, you can think it's messed up, but then things suddenly turn around many moves later (exactly like one of the games in the AlphaGo tournament). When I've analysed them I've found that the only reason that these moves make sense is if you can do a deep enough analysis to determine that there is a guaranteed potential technical advantage, which means they cannot be successfully replicated by humans without the deep search capability of a computer. I've also noticed that you often never observe from subsequent play just what advantage the computer originally saw when it made the move. The reason is that computers don't always make the compensating payoff move as soon as they can, they just move to _keep that option open._ They often keep rolling forward that option without exercising it, until the human makes a mistake that creates a better option for the computer (or the computer just sees a better option), and it then moves to roll that option forward, and so on. That makes it harder to learn just by playing the computer, because there may be a lot of moves between sacrifice and realised payoff, and the observed payoff may not be the one the computer originally saw when it made the sacrifice. You can make the computer show its current best line of play, and I assume that is what these players do when they use the engines to practice, but humans are always up against their limited search depth compared with computers if they try to replicate that except in the exact same position.
That DOES compute!....terrific answer from a suspected Trolling chess 'bot!...😁....trying to gain a psychological advantage by convincing future human opponents... Remember ..you're beaten BEFOREHAND.... "Nice try carbon based skinsuit".....DIABOLICAL chessbot!👺
As a beginner, there have definitely been times where I played what was evidently a mistake and the analysis tool was like "wow, yes, that's what I would've done too! You're so smart :)" because it saw a sequence of winning moves that I couldn't have predicted - and indeed, because I _didn't_ predict it, my follow up move is guaranteed to get a "...aaaand you're losing now" from the engine. Always makes me laugh when that happens 😅
I’m curious how you can cheat at chess with a vibrating butt plug.
@@SloverOfTeuth in modern chess computers are a huge component of preparation. A2/H2 are super common from computers and having a chess brain you can see these moves then begin to see situations when these games are made despite not being able to see so far into the future. Also, the randomness it injects into the game hurts prepared players. Magnus himself says he plays a young player strategy where he plays suboptimal lines to throw opponents out of their preparation.
I like her nerdy sass. "If your child was so smart then why doesnt he just spend 5 mins to do his homework and then go sleep." I feel like she been tempted say this to people directly. lol
I fucking love her.
I feel for the child with parents who live vicariously through them to make up for their own shortcomings in life.
Lol
lol
@@horscategorieyeap
You not mentioning the "Chess has more positions than there are atoms in the observable universe" trivia was a real subversion of expectations
Tbh you can probably say that about most games.
@@RunstarHomer yeah but chess seems (at first glance) much simpler than most games
Thats only if you count illegal boards. legal boards is a much more reasonable 10^40. Go on the other hand....
I dream of a day where people stop having this exact conversation:
1) "Chess has more positions than ___."
2) "Well that's only if you count wrong."
3) "This other game has more."
Like, come on. Please stop doing this.
How many possible positions are there for players on a football field, or for a bowling ball in a lane?
That anecdote about playing checkers in the office was infuriating, I lived through so many similar situations myself. Physics students can be quite something sometimes.
sometimes... lol
@@acmhfmggru The difference is that in tic tac toe you can just know by heart what to do in each situation. In checkers you can't. You would still need a computer. For humans it will still be an interesting game. It's like it if said in the news that someone finally solved chess and has an AI that will always win (or hold a draw or whatever). That wouldn't mean that humans playing chess with other humans suddenly becomes pointless.
@@luxshokk Some of the top chess players often play checkers casually in between games. If the top chess players with their extremely good calculation abilities still find checkers difficult enough to play and not trivial to draw, then I doubt random "I don't play checkers" guy (and "she's just bitter" over here) can easily win.
@@luxshokk Finding a game unapealing =/= being a condescending prick. Elon comment was spot on, I prefered turn based and real time strategy games over chess since forever for many reasons.
@@Derzull2468 you couldn't have said it better. You can find a game unappealing, but you don't have to be a condescending prick about it
Note: The "first move advantage" thing is not purely psychological, because when chess engines play chess engines, white wins more often than black (of the 0.01% of games that *aren't* draws, which, fair enough.)
She acknowledged that in the video
To be clear, a lot more than 0.01% of games are wins for one computer or the other. You're off by several orders of magnitude in fact, in the 2020 edition of the Computer Chess Championship for instance there were 26 decisive games out of 200.
The number of draws depends on how powerful the hardware is and how much time is allowed to "think" per move. The longer the time between moves, the more likely a draw is. So if you want "interesting" games between computers that don't end in a draw all you have to do is reduce the time available until they stop drawing their games. I couldn't find the rules for the Computer Chess Championship but I'm pretty sure it's set in such a way so as to minimize the number of draws instead of setting it up so as to get the "best" possible games.
@@oscarprieto9013 The Computer Chess Championships are a bit of an outlier for our purposes because in those, the engines are intentionally given specific openings to play, which artificially reduces the number of draws far below what happens when chess engines are freestyling.
Anyway, the goal here isn't to find interesting games. The goal here is to determine whether white having a higher winrate than black is caused by human psychology vs. by white being objectively (although by only a tiny amount, to be fair) stronger than black positionally.
@@tudornaconecinii3609 The advantage of playing first is actually very substantial relative to the small differences between top players.
If you look up common openings like the Ruy Lopez or Queen's Gambit on Wikipedia the diagrams should make plain why this is to anyone who knows the moves: basically the early initiative the player of the white pieces possesses can be converted to enduring structural advantages. Win rates for the first mover are much greater at high levels and significantly greater even at much more modest skill levels.
The vibrating anal beads story was the most hilarious thing of the year to me, I could picture Niemann moving slightly on his chair to better "feel the move"
It resulted in a 19 year old being singled out and having a metal detector waved over his ass in front of a world stage. It was an awful thing to suggest and it had a serious impact on public perception of him, and that's regardless of whether or not he was cheating.
@@HighFlyActionGuy Did the metal detector speak for itself tho?
I love how it started on chess streams and Reddit and then was picked up by a far right German tabloid and then ballooned from there
@@lazydroidproductions1087 "ballooned" - I see what you did here
@@ExecutionSommaire I didn’t mean nothing by it! You’ve read far too far into this!
Today was the day, that youtube actually recommended an interesting Video from a small Creator :)
Came to say same.
79th like
@@the_gammaman1st like
For me it was the String Theory video. Instantly subscribe after that and after I saw titles and thumbnails for the other videos she had.
If we like and comment we can help her grow.
My understanding of moves "looking computer-y" is that there's a difference in risk/reward calculation between players and computers. Computers will regularly make moves that humans, even very good ones, would probably consider either too dangerous or too slow. A strong human player can see a "risky" move which could (say) sacrifice material to generate a strong attack, but they might be unable to confidently calculate forward enough to know for sure that it will work. A computer would be able to see the same move and know its not risky at all, and go for it. Conversely computers will often do things that just... *look* like a pointless waste of time, but actually aren't? A subtle slight repositioning of a piece that doesnt obviously generate attacking potential or neutralize danger, but has some strong importance far down the road. Something a human, even a very strong one, would probably consider a waste of time, failing to see the long term value that move could provide. At least this is what ive learned from watching chess streamers -- im not very good at chess myself.
Actually, sacrificing material for an advqntage can be a very human thing to do. _Taking_ material and then defending perfectly for 20 moves in a passive position until they can untangle is the kind of thing that humans try to avoid and computers love to do.
@@greenUserman that, too. Computers can see the light at the end of the tunnel in locked positional games where humans feel crushed
It's true and a lot of it lies in the justification for the moves. See, if a player was to completely change what they're doing after every single move made on the board, then they're going to find themselves trying to do an insane number of calculations. Meaning that they're very likely to make mistakes or run out of time, so you're better off playing with (or forming during the game) a solid plan on how to win and trying to make it work as best you can (all the while, trying to figure out what your opponent is plotting to do against you). This is why even grandmasters constantly study and practice various positions, so that they already know what the plan is should they find themselves in that very situation during a live match. (When you see them taking 30 minutes to make a move, that's not a great sign; you know their plan has gone awry and they're now having to improvise).
When spectating games (and especially when watching them in hindsight) you can often find the reasoning behind their moves when you consider how these moves effect those plans of theirs, as they're going to be presented with a lot of questions from their opponents during the game. "Do I want to trade these pieces?", "he's attacking my knight, how am I going to react?" etc. You'll find time and time again that players will often try to make the moves that will best aid their plans, whilst avoiding things that are counterproductive to them.
Chess bots, of course, do not work like that at all. They will happily recalculate the position after every single move that they and their opponent make, completely changing what they're doing on the fly. They'll make the best move, simply because it's the best move. They don't care if a move is gonna trash their plans. They don't even have plans. What they're doing is making a lot of calculations to figure out every possible combination of moves, 20 steps ahead or more, so that it can simply make whichever one brings them closer to winning whilst causing the least damage to their position. This lack of adherent to any sort of plan leads to some very bizarre-looking behaviour.
As an example, a real player typically wouldn't set themselves up for a flawless attack and then as everything is going to plan, scrap the whole thing at the last minute, and push a random pawn for what is (to us) seemingly no reason, because a completely different way to win in 10 moves, rather than the 11 moves your plan would have taken, has presented itself. Real humans would just go ahead with their already calculated plan of attack, it doesn't matter if it's not the absolute optimal, 100% efficient way to win, so long as you're comfortable that your plan is going to work. You're not even going to waste the time trying to figure that out. In the human's mind: The clock is ticking, and I'm winning, so let's go!
One of the key factors in Niemann's cheating was just how unreasonably perfect his play was. From recollection he made less than a third of the mistakes of the world's best players, yet kept that ridiculously high standard through every single game no matter how exhausted. It was particularly on show when it mattered, and particularly obvious in unusual or difficult situations. People just can't play every move absolutely perfectly like that, computers very much can. And that's a very key factor in play looking computery. As well as the more typical (especially to lower players) awkward moves. They will switch rapidly between playstyles and do moves no player would ever dream of because the learned experience over thousands of games says "don't do x play". But computers looking at billions of potential moves can say when that move is optimal, and doesn't have a specific playstyle beyond just doing the best move.
Well then sometimes you get rookie players beating more experienced ones because the rookies have no clue what they’re doing, which throws off the experienced guy. Suppose an experienced player had the idea to replicate this, throw in a couple of bold and risky movies that just don’t seem like the optimal choice to a human but that computers might do, that would probably throw off their opponents
3:05 I run a math tutoring business and my job these days consists mostly of talking with parents who have no idea what their child is even learning, and I cannot possibly describe how cathartic this mini-rant about Aiden's mom was.
One of Magnus's positions that he said in an interview is that the level of competition is so stiff, and the difference between winning and losing is so close, that all a player might need is someone to have a binary signal that "something about this turn has a good move available" and that would be enough to turn the game on its head. Like, Niemann didn't need to have a full computer engine available to him, but rather he'd just need someone to cough in the audience on turn 55 to know that something needs a closer look.
Resigning because you suspect somebody cheated with a single cough and no concrete evidence is still pretty extreme. I feel like a normal response would be to play it out and examine all the video footage later. In a best case scenario he would be able to flex that he won despite the cheating, in the worst case he just loses. It sounds like he made a mistake and was mentally compromised, and subconsciously wanted something to blame, and the easy scapegoat is his opponent who has been caught in the past.
@@gogokowai Yeah, he definitely got tilted, the threat of someone cheating got to him I think, to some degree. But I think the general consensus in chess is that at the highest level when you are playing black, you are going for the draw at best, not for an outright win. So this was a very surprising result.
It almost sounds as if he was excessively paranoid...I guess being at the top gets to you sometimes
@@gogokowai some important context:
- Carlsen didn't resign that game or the next game, he played this game out and decided to pull out of the tournament after it. Then in a different tournament he had to play against Niemann again and decided to just not play that one game, resigning after 1 move because he couldn't just forfeit that single game otherwise.
- The decision of Carlsen to pull out of the tournament came only the next day, after having reviewed the full game with his team, and after having contacted the tournament organization about his suspicion and after being told by them that nothing could be done about it and there would be no investigation, but they would start doing the absolute basics to prevent cheating for the rest of the tournament (metal detectors, radio wave detectors)
- The "single cough" thing is not a suggestion of how Niemann would have cheated, it is just to show how little a top player needs to get a significant advantage in a game. At the top level, if there is a winning move, and you tell a superGM there is a winning move, they will find it. So it's not "I think he cheated because someone coughed on move 50", it's "I think he cheated, I don't know how, but even a cough at the right time is enough for a big advantage so he's probably found a way". If you know you'll be alerted when there's a good move, that even gives you a double benefit as a top player: 1) you will find the good move and 2) you don't need to spend time trying to figure out how good the position is (which is a large part of top level chess, and is something a lot of their allotted time is spent on)
- Finally: Cheating has been an open secret in top level chess for a while. It's just extremely hard to prove someone is cheating unless you catch them literally with their pants down (Like with Igor Rausis).
@@nolifeorname5731Are you implying that a content creator would leave out details for the sake of a more cohesive narrative and that I assumed the worst and started spreading misinformation in the comment section? That would never happen.
Except in tournaments it is “touch move”. Once you touch a piece you have to move it. So if your partner wants to tell you not to move the piece he can’t give you a signal when you touch it. I never thought of this but that’s probably to circumvent cheating as you described. I realize it could still be done by say gesturing towards the piece but it wouldn’t be easy.
As a chess lover but hopefully not a snob (I haven't solved checkers) who recently started binging your videos, I just wanted to address a couple of your kinda open questions/statements:
1. Regarding making a surprise move when someone has been studying your game: this is totally a thing! It's just called a "variation" or, if specifically prepared, well...a "prepared variation." It's less exciting though because *usually* this happens like 20 moves in, between top players.
(In a weird way chess sort of is solved, for like, the first move. And then kinda less solved for the 2nd move. And much less solved for the 3rd move. And so on. It's all theory and "book" [memorized] moves for crazy good GMs until a variation happens).
2. The first move advantage is definitely a real thing: Playing as white is sort of like being...the home team? You are "expected" to go for the win, get maximum points for your tournament game, while when playing as black, players often intentionally try to play for the draw. Here is why:
There's a concept called "tempo" - if playing with tempo, it just means, the other player needs to "respond" to your moves. You are in control and "asking questions of your opponent." You are like hey I am attacking this piece, what will you do now? Getting this "tempo" concept down is really key - I have tutored kids at chess quite a bit and I introduce the idea pretty early on.
Well, with mediocre players like me, this doesn't make a huge difference. But at the very top level of the game, the basic idea is, white starts with tempo, and if everyone keeps playing super accurately, they can maintain their tempo. Even though playing 1. e4 looks innocuous enough, you are actually "attacking" both the empty c5 and d5 squares. You are saying to black, "these are mine now, what are you going to do about it?" So a very good, very aggressive player, can maintain this tempo throughout the opening and into the later stages of the game, which is why white does have a first move advantage.
Anyways, longer than I intended. Kinda rambly. Hope it made sense. I really like your channel, keep up the great content! =)
I went through a chess phase in my 20s which lasted a couple of months. Turns out, I liked the idea of chess way more than I liked playing chess. Also, as somebody who used to give piano lessons, parents and grandparents are often terrible judges of how inherently talented their kid is at something.
24:00 that's not why they think he cheated. some very good chess players have said his moves seemed unnatural (the type a computer would find but a human wouldn't), and on top of that niemann showed he couldn't explain his thought process in the post game interviews
Around 9:00, when you're discussing the magnitude of cheating, I think it's important to remember that the people that are bad at cheating are the ones that get caught.
I'm glad you mentioned "The Turk" , that's a really weird piece of chess history. The guy who built that thing was a real inventor, he just built it for fun to show off at a party. Much later though, some royal wanted him to bring it back out to show his friends at another party. He was busy working on steam engines, he didn't actually want to bother with the fraudulent thing, but they were SO enamored with his "invention' that he was practically commanded to fix it up and bring it.
"The chess speaks for itself," from Hans after his match with Magnus will always be hilarious to me.
That will always be a legendary line, no matter which way you felt about the whole situation.
Then he proceeded to lose every set after iirc. what a meme.
Yeah it’s like “I dunno I played the game and won, that’s how chess do.”
I don’t think I could come up with a more analytic answer than that if I were asked the same question. Granted I’m no chess player but still
@@WaluigiisthekingASmithHe had a great tournament in Spain. Of course the immediate aftermath of something life changing would be game changing
@@lazydroidproductions1087a top GM could easily come up with a more analytic answer. Hell, I'm not even titled and I can tell you "oh I beat chessnerd123 because he missed a tactic on move 31 that would have given him a winning position"
Just look at Kasparov going over his wins.
Chess? I'm still trying to master cheese!
I never have cheese. It's been solved.
Thank you for defending checkers! I had an argument about how "chess was superior" and me saying that I enjoy chess and checkers was somehow unacceptable.
People who think Checkers is beneath them are losers.
Magnus was mad because he lost in an endgame as black. Practically never happens to him. It was a big deal because he's the greatest endgame player of all time. So for him to lose to someone rated below 2700 in an endgame as black sent the chess community over the edge.
Also... Hans gave some of the worst commentary ever on his chess game. So it made a lot of people suspicious...
There's no significance to him having the black pieces in this scenario.
@@karans6762 You dont know anything about chess if you believe that.
@@thechesssavage6400 What if he was playing purple vs mauve? What's your belief on that? How about if he was playing banana green vs crystal pink?
How about if chess pieces were donuts with chess symbols on them and he was playing glazed pink with sprinkles vs chocolate filled with powdered sugar?
Hint: In all those cases it is up to the player, not the paint or type of wood or pigment in the plastic. Or the glaze.
@@d3nza482 If purple went before mauve it definitely makes a difference. The opening repertoire is so different between black and white because there is a functional difference between the sides
@@d3nza482 So, you don't really know anything about what people are talking about right now, and I'm gonna clue you in. When you are talking about chess "white" and "black" are also ways of saying "the player that goes first" and "the player that goes second". Pigment is irrelevant, because no one is talking about pigment of the chess pieces when they're talking about chess.
I'm not sure if you covered it, but iirc the deep reinforcement learning-based chess engines like AlphaZero have a distinct flavor to their moves vs. the ones with handcrafted evaluation engines like Stockfish. both will beat a human every time, but AlphaZero is known for being ruthlessly aggressive, playing dramatic sacrifices and doing a lot with pawn position. You can even tweak the engines so that they toy with their opponent, or play defensively, etc. So I think maybe there's so much room above human play for the machines that the concept of "top engine move" isn't so well defined, in terms of catching cheaters. Not that I think Niemann cheated, like you said there's no tangible evidence, just a fun fact on chess software.
Oh so we can make the computer mean or we can have it play like the terminator lol thats awesome
You might find it interesting to know that Stockfish nowadays also uses a neural network in its evaluation function, i.e. it is no longer handcrafted. It is not a deep network like that of AlphaZero and it does not need a GPU to evaluate (its uses the CPU's SSE.AVX/AVX2/AVX512 instructions).
So we worship the engine now as if it's omniscient and always producing the best moves, but we also did that for engines 10 years ago. Engines now crush the engines of yesteryear. Over the years I would expect the same to happen to the current engines. We won't know if the recommended moves are best unless chess is solved
When I played chess competitively as a teen I remember us all agreeing that the only people who think chess players are smart are non-chess players (i.e. people don't play in a club or in tournaments). Stereotypes suggest that there could be a cultural difference between Sweden and the US on such a matter, I guess.
It's not orange Pepsi, it's orange juice in a Pepsi bottle. Magnus used to always drink OJ during games until some sport physiologist told him it was a bad idea.
An interesting fact about the OJ - I wonder is that due to sugar contant🤔
I have no clue what you are saying. And what does Sweden have to do with anything?
@@jonathanbush6197 Sweden is the country I and the other chess players mentioned am from.
With so few comments, maybe I will be the first commenter who notes that an early version of a chess computer immediately sacrificed its queen for no reason because it had been trained on GM games where that sacrifice was frequently a winning line.
That's hilarious to me.
Have you considered doing stand-up? Your delivery/demeanor is excellent and the fact that you are fucking hilarious. 🇦🇺♥
Ha I appreciate this comment because most people hate my jokes!
@@acollierastro OMG, they have no idea you're taking the piss in between jokes do they? Lmfao, the sarcastic conversational narrative is priceless. Be appreciated, consider emigration.
@@acollierastro No problem, R mean rook, K mean King, + mean check, and # mean checkmate (I actually responded in the wrong comment but heh)
I agree. Dr. Collier is very entertaining. Taking a course with her would be a blast.
@@robertvarner9519 I was thinking this when listening to her talk about doing adjunct teaching. I wish I could have taken my astro class with her as the lecturer.
"Is Aiden so smart, or have you been calling him so smart for his entire life, and for the first time, he's confronted with the fact that he can't get stuff right away. And maybe math is a little harder than he thought and it doesn't just come easily, and he's too scared to fail. Too scared to look at the worksheet and not understand, so he just doesn't do it."
Brutal truth. Love it.
Either brutal truth or prejudice against ADHD kids, depending on Aiden's conditions.
I knew kids who were plenty smart, but lazy. They didn't have anything wrong with them, they were just slackers who didn't want to be bothered living up to their mother's dreams for them. I know this because I myself am one. Gifted classed all through school. But I never had to study. I would read the text book during the first week of class and then go off memory the rest of the semester. I'd do homework on the bus to school. Then when it got hard and I actually needed some study habits, I didn't have them, and I didn't care enough to start trying at that point.
Her comment hit home with me because it summed up my own experience quite well. I just don't have any ambition. I like to write, and have written 3 novels, but never bothered to try and query them with an agent or even self-pub them. I get a few beta-readers, and if they like it, that's enough satisfaction for me. But I know I'm lazy and I also know her words perfectly describe people like me.@@falquicao8331
Aiden is Bakugo
@@falquicao8331 yeah i had this experience. i was put in 3rd grade math during second grade an voila! my grades were better. I wasn't a struggling perfectionist. I would just rather play with markers and crafts if you aren't teaching me anything.
it is also possible the 2nd grade teacher just didn't like me/had a weird bias against me/had a weird teaching style, and the 3rd grade teachers were grading me accurately. who knows. I was a very bullied neurodivergent little kid; i dont think i realized what school was for. it was just the place where we did fun puzzles but the people were mean and loud.
There was also postgame interviews with Niemann where he struggled to explain his moves against Carlsen and againstbAli Reza - i.e. wasn't able to tell the interviewer the lines he saw that would have justified the moves he made
This reminds me of the cheater sleuths analyzing speedruns in gaming, where they count frames and calculate odds of certain patterns occurring. It's so much fun to learn how they do it.
Something dream something something
I wonder if the Chess Federation ever offered Niemann amnesty in return for disclosing his method. I know that happens occasionally with speedrunning as well as in motorsport like Formula One.
The Loeb reference went crazy
One thing that complicated the image of niemann was that in a later interview, following another game, he was not able to explain some of His best moves.
You can't possibly know how spot on you are on the "amount of cheating". Cheating like Nieman has been found to cheat is so obvious that it is like the guys is screaming out loud "I am a cheater, get me". But actually, any elite player knows that they just the slight hint of " you are better in this position" twice or three times in a gamewould make them almost unbeatable. This is what makes cheating so scary at chess; smart cheating is virtually undetectable
The idea of him using a vibrating buttplug to cheat is so funny I choose to believe it.
It does explain his videos.
“Math was a little harder than he thought, and he’s just too scared to look at the worksheet and not understand so he just doesn’t do it, and so he’s failing.”
I’ll admit it, that cut super deep.
There's actually a very important factor you seemingly missed in your research. The main way that people think Hans cheated who actually know what they're talking about isn't engine help but a prep leak - he seems to have studied a very specific, off-beat line the night before, which Magnus happened to play into. It's astronomically unlikely unless someone had leaked to him that Magnus was planning to do that.
This is interesting! Do you think that counts as cheating? I don’t know if I do. If Magnus is discussing his strategy pregame and Hans studies it, I mean.
@@acollierastro It's definitely cheating. Prep is not casual discussion, it's intensive, computer-aided study of specific lines, often with anonymous partners using burner accounts. If you know what lines your opponent is preparing and they don't know anyone knows, you've essentially violated the only information inequality that can exist in an open-information game. The point is, you had to have done something untoward to even *get* that information.
I think this is what he SAID he did. If you don't believe that he had prepared this very specific line, then you believe he is lying about it. Why would he lie... (did he get the best move from a computer instead of from doing his homework the night before)?
@@Pablo360able I disagree - prep spying is not against the rules of the tournament so it isn't cheating. I mean, it's definitely scummy behavior, but it's not the same as using a computer during the game.
And yeah, if you had to hack a website or something to get it you might be breaking some rules / laws. But if it's just that you get one of Magnus' team to talk to you, that's not cheating.
That said, prep leak is pretty unlikely, Magnus hasn't stayed on top of the world in chess without having an incredibly airtight team. And really deep prep is maaaybe 20 moves, and the game went for 57, with as others have mentioned, Niemann outplaying Carlsen's notoriously strong endgame. Carlsen doesn't have some magic prep for endgames that you could get from a leak, he just calculates really accurately.
@@Pablo360ablethat alone would not be cheating. it’s a players responsibility to keep their prep private
"There's no such thing as a bad buzz." -- Hans Niemann, probably
My brother was one of the students sho was too stifled by the school environment to do well...
He dropped out, immediately got his ged at like 15 then taught himself how to program before joining the airforce a few years later. Hes now by far the most financially and imo socially successful person in ny family.
Yeah that whole too bored/smart for school is a real thing.
honestly, reaching the endgame without blundering means you’re actually p good at chess
Magnus based his assessment not on the moves, but on Niemann looking unconcentrated during the game. Also his post game interview (where the player and a commentator analyse the game) contained some rather egregious errors. If someone plays like they're possessed by stockfish and then in the interview say they could also have done this other thing (confidently blundering a piece and the game) it makes people wonder.
but none of this matters
Even if perfectly play by both sides would result in a draw (which, I agree, seems most likely), it's still possible for white to have a real, non-psychological advantage due to having the first move. Note, for instance, that opening theory is highly asymmetrical between white and black - there are many openings in which white is able to make a strong attack and seek an early checkmate, whereas the strategic considerations for black usually focus on equalizing first and then setting up a counterattack. I suspect that if one looked at the set of games featuring only moves that a reasonably strong chess player would be able to calculate as "good moves", more of those games end up as a win for white than as a win for black.
Sorry, immediately after writing that I realized it might read rather like "man explains things to women". I didn't mean it that way; I was just musing to myself about whether the first move advantage is real or psychological, and if the former, in what way it could be real.
@@stevenklinden As I understand it, the modern chess computers learn by "AI". The computer just plays itself countless times, and slowly improves. If that's the case, I would assume you could look at the results, and see if white has a real advantage. I assume it does, but very small.
If perfect play from the opening position is a draw, then technically there are only psychological advantages.
@@ronald3836 Only on a very broad understanding of the word "psychological". Since the players aren't perfect calculating machines, there can be, for instance, achieving a position in which it is - objectively - more difficult for your opponent to calculate optimal play is advantageous, and it seems a bit misleading to me to call that merely a psychological advantage.
@@stevenklinden I agree that psychology only really comes into play when you are close to perfect play. E.g. a computer with a 32-men endgame database would have to be taught to distinguish moves that easy for moves from moves that are difficult. Otherwise the computer might play a series of drawing moves that even an amateur chess player might be able to draw against.
The argument about how he is young and has not lived in a world without chess bots is actually such a good point! Also the match in the end is hilarious😂
i love that you put your game at the end. that is the most gangster display of humility i’ve ever seen. you are a treasure lollll
Super controversial I know, but I'll put this out there as someone diagnosed long before it was a dime a dozen diagnosis... But A.D.D. is a thing. Your comment about "Aiden is so smart, he's just bored". I 100% get your point, and some kids are just brats, but that's something I've always heard and dealt with my entire life. It's not necessarily boredom it's like an impassible brick wall that'll ruin your life unless you find your own ways to circumvent your brain. No amount of "Just knock it out in 5 mins and take a nap", It's sitting there for hours, trying your hardest to just get it done, and your brain kicking and screaming and doing it's damndest to push you in another direction. I've always heard the same thing, even now in my professional life "Oh, you're so smart, if you just applied yourself!". Oh sure, I'd love to, let me jump right into that and just knock out everything with my perfect motivation and focus. It's nuanced and complicated. Anyways, Rant over. Just throwing it out there.
As someone with ADHD, I had the exact same thought during that section. I really wish I had been diagnosed and treated for it as a kid, because it's exactly this sort of "if you're so smart why don't you just sit down and do it?" attitude from my parents and teachers that made school absolute hell for me :(
(And not to mention the anxiety and depression which is often comorbid with ADHD, and gets triggered by struggling with completing work...)
The brick wall is real.
@@MayaPasricha I was diagnosed at 13. To put that into perspective of how long ago THAT was... I was in the last phase clinical trials of Adderall. As in, It was just barely approved for use by physicians and I had to have regular checkups and bloodwork done to make sure it wasn't screwing something up.
Anyways, To my point. Even diagnosed and on meds it doesn't make it go away. It just takes the edge off. I mean, Sure, the meds help you focus but it's up to you to focus on THE RIGHT THINGS. I take a different med now but there are millions of times I took my adderall dose and then hyperfocused on a video game. But I have done some amazingly creative stuff when my mind behaves too.
tl;dr Diagnoses and medication don't change the core issue
Same. With adhd. I would test really well but never had care nor motivation to do daily work as it didn't interest me. It always manifested as a lack of motivation for that which isnt fun rather than being slow or dumb. Sucks fr. Luckily I always enjoyed tests elsewise id have never pass High school. FWIW I had excellent grades in AP classes and did extremely poorly in my middle range classes, because AP classes were interesting and so i chose them. Wish I stayed on my meds
I've had this problem my whole life. Never went to a doctor about it unfortunately.
This problem still halts me from time to time. My undergrad years were very good but it took me 18 days to apply to one grad school because I just couldn't get myself to do it.
This is becoming one of my favorite channels, always awesome stuff!
re: the first move advantage thing.. general rule of thumb is that in the opening of a chess game, white is playing for an advantage while black is playing for equality. you can see this reflected in the way that a lot of theoretically established openings for white have the word "attack" in their names (the keres attack, the english attack) but never "defense," while for black it's exactly the opposite (sicilian defense, king's indian defense etc, but no "attacks"). white's advantage is very important and real on some level, but it exists in an interesting sort of dissonance with your 100% correct hunch that chess is basically definitely a draw.
One thing important to mention in how a chess engine works is evaluation functions and search. Right, when the board is in some position, the computer will give it a score, like "this position is +0.837," or "that position is -1.936."
These evaluation functions do not have to be very good. In fact, the best computer engines often use fairly cheap and easy to calculate functions and then they search the game tree in an order that roughly looks like "best first." For complicated reasons of memory efficiency it's actually a form of branch and bound search in most cases. It plays for both sides until some depth is reached or it looks really bad for one side. If it does, that branch is abandoned because obviously neither side wants to play bad moves if they can play good moves instead. Effectively it propogates the acceptable limits of cutoffs down the tree and keeps evaluating positions for every possible move.
So the computer doesn't actually know better than you about a position. It just thinks about millions of promising future positions faster than you could and lets that information decide what move it should make now.
There is however another kind of engine that has recently become prominent. Neural network engines. This is where the engine uses some giant mess of linear algebra to learn how it plays when it's thinking really deeply, and uses it to train it to play like that in one move. Then this can be used to train an even bigger mess of linear algebra to play like that one did at really high search depth but in one move.
These neural networks are far more complex and slow to compute than the handcrafted, relatively simple evaluation functions of traditional engines, and it's harder to know if they actually "understand" chess or not, but the benefit is that their evaluation function without even thinking multiple moves deep is already master level, and they can still search down the tree to improve on that.
Finally, it's off topic, but there are LLMs. Basically, ChatGPT can help you cheat at chess, but it's more like the level of a good human player than a godlike incomprehensible superbeing the way the others are.
It's also worth noting that when it comes to Chat GPT, as with a lot of things, it will also occasionally (and confidently) produce something that's an outright fabrication. An entirely invalid move, like moving a pawn three spaces. Chat GPT doesn't seem to have the strongest grasp on the actual rules of the game and will occasionally attempt to break them unless you plug it into software that locks it into viable moves.
@@JaMaAuWright I think "strongest grasp" is an overstatement. Chat GPT doesn't know the rules of chess at all. It doesn't even know what a rule is. What it does is things that look similar to chess moves.
Chat GPT wouldn't help you cheat at chess, it's considerably worse at it than even basic computers from 20 years ago.
Super interesting your long trains of thought that seem unstructured at first, but they are the opposite. You've gotten yourself a new subscriber!
I think a nuance that might be missed here is that when chess players are this good, any sort of indication is an amazing, amazing help to them. Sometimes, there are these incredibly hard to spot errors that the other person does. Since it's so much about pattern recognizing, it means that a blunder that one player at the top misses, the other might miss to, because it's happening somewhere obscured to them. If Niemann's plug vibrated once when it was a crucial move, that would likely be enough for any of these players to find the right move. The knowledge that "there's only one good move, and it's winning" just does something ephemeral at that level, to where they'll just 99% of the time find the right move if they have that knowledge, as compared to maybe 20% if not.
Strong chess players (GMs , IMs, National Masters like myself) regard physicists in such high regard but some professionals that I know hold excellent chess players in very high regard too. A funny anecdote is that when I had a major (medical) operation back in 2007, the doctor was flabbergasted that he was performing an operation on a chess master. I've been using chess engines a long time, since the mid 1980s when they were much weaker. It took awhile before desktop computers were supplied with multiple microprocessors. Once that happened, the combination of fast hardware with good software made chess engines much stronger. I have not been able to handle them since around 2005 or so, when old Fritz 6 and Fritz 7 were state of the art, rated maybe FIDE 2700 or so. Nowadays a recent version of stockfish running on some kind of a monstrous piece of hardware is a little over 3600 strength. It could spot Magnus Carlsen a pawn and a match played at such odds would be fairly close.
Here's a funny story about a chess player and a physicist. Albert Einstein and Emmanuel Lasker (the second ever world chess champion) were good friends and they would visit each other to talk all the time. The problem was that Lasker only ever wanted to talk about physics while they were together, while Einstein only ever wanted to talk about chess.
@@michaellisinski2822 Wilhelm Steinitz paid a visit to Paul Morphy down in New Orleans at least one time that I know of, a few years after Morphy had quit playing chess competitively.. However, Morphy agreed to meet with Steinitz only on the condition that they did not talk about chess or play chess. I don't know much more about that incident but it struck me as rather funny. Steinitz was perhaps the strongest player in the world at the time with the possible exception of Paul Morphy.
Even Carlsen would get destroyed in a match vs a strong engine if Carlsen had only pawn odds. For the match to be close Carlsen would need a minor piece odds.
I want to mention that there was this iconic series where Kasparov did best Alphago when chess engines where just about getting to the point where it would be impossible for players to beat but not yet to the point there was no hope at all.
There are a lot of video essays on it. It was last stand of humanity vibes.
Wow what you said about math being scary when it start getting hard is so real that stopped me before but you’re really helping me get into this stuff as an adult
First move advantage is absolutely a thing. It's like the Gawain and the green knight where they agree to take turns chopping of each other's heads. Having the first swing is a big deal:
1. Mathematically, you've had more moves than your opponent, unless you make a mistake and lose a tempo. This means the first-move advantage would decrease the longer the game goes on, except
2. The 1st move stops certain moves from your opponent. You took the best move, which in many cases means they can't take the move they wanted to play. So you can maintain disproportionate control through to the midgame.
3. Moving first means you have more control over the opening you play. If I know you're a Sicilian player, I can play a queen pawn game that you're not as comfortable with. Or at lower levels, the first move advantage has more room to take the other player into a weird opening they never played before.
I still think chess will be a draw when it gets solved, but there's definitely 1st move advantage. Even in tic-tac-toe, there's very clear 1st move advantage. If the game is played imperfectly and doesn't end in a draw, it's almost always the 1st player who wins.
In tic tac toe you can be doomed already from the second piece. First guy places middle, If the second one places in one of the middle squares(not the corners) you have a forced win for the first player... This is the only "strategy" I ever found in tic tac toe, after a lot of searching through bored days in my youth. I did not explore fully other starting positions, as they were obviously inferior, but I believe I fully explored starting center. But it is kind of fun being able do declare your victory on the opponents first placement!
The best first move actually isn't in the middle, it's a corner. Oddly enough.
@@silphv I think this is what I remember.. I solved 3x3 tic-tac-toe sitting in the car when I was 10.. Now I have to do it again.
@@silphv the corner is maybe more likely to trick a careless opponent (or a child) but I don't know if you can can call it better, since either move is a trivial forced draw as long as both sides play sensibly
@@dm9910 That's just how the game is. If both players play optimally it's a draw. Which includes starting in the corner. I dunno, look it up, it's not really an open question.
@@silphv I'm not disagreeing with the claim that going in the corner is *an* optimal move. You claimed that the corner is a better first move than the middle. I'm disagreeing, on the basis that they are both optimal moves.
that is really fascinating. first video of your i saw, was about crackpots in physics, and the second - the one when you've totally put yourself into their shoes (without aggression part)!))
as far as I understand it the first move advantage essentially means that white gets to decide a whole lot about the opening of the game because black is always catching up. also another sign of cheating you didn't mention (or maybe I wasn't paying attention in that case my bad) is that cheaters will take an unusual amount of time (both unusually long or unusually short) to make their move. In online chess cheaters will most often take the time it takes to input their opponent's move into an engine and get the best move out to play their move, no matter what move. Whereas sometimes a move is obvious and you would expect someone (at a certain level of course) to play it instantly, or sometimes it's hard to spot and you would expect them to think about it for a while. So when they take roughly the same amount of time to play every move this is also a possible sign of cheating
Uhm I seem to have typed out a whole ass essay in your comments. Sorry
Love your podcast!!!!!❤❤❤
Back in the late 80's, I had a Chess program for the Commodore 64. The program was actually printed in the pages of a magazine (in machine code), and I sat for hours typing it, and saving it to a tape (as in audio cassette) drive.
The principle was that each piece had a 'value', based on its importance. A pawn would have a value of 1, a bishop might have a 5, a queen 10, and the king a 1000 (an 'impossibly high' value, because the whole game hinges on not losing him). The game had 10 levels. On level 1, the program would look at the current positions on the board and consider the score after every possible move, as well as every possible response. This took about 2 seconds. At level 5, it considered every possible move, through 5 iterations of moves and responses, trying to maximize its attack score, and minimize the potential losses. Because of the limited processor speed, you could literally prepare and eat a sandwich, between each move, above about level 7, once the pieces were developed to the point where more than one or two of them had attack/defend options.
As things progressed, chess engines were loaded with databases containing every tournament chess game ever recorded, along with the calculated win/loss statistics for every move, for practically every configuration of the pieces on the board. One basic advantage is that, the computer should never ever blunder (lose a piece needlessly, because it didn't consider the opponent's very next move, or next few moves). So, the program knows the best moves, by the best players, in every game that has ever been recorded... and, because of today's processing power and speed, it can weigh every possible move and response for 10, 20, 30 moves into the future. If the meat-based player gets creative and does something wholly unusual (as related to the database), it can recalculate and 'preview' the new scenario, in milliseconds. I'm sure there are layers of even more clever concepts baked in, as it's been a while since I've thought very deeply about any of this.
besides the history of cheating i think the other reason ppl believe niemann cheated even though there isnt solid proof of it is just that hes so unlikable lol. dude is just annoying
Also, Magnus' PR. Starting with the name. Shame his parents weren't more creative. Calling him Optimus Prime or Megatron would have made it all so much more entertaining.
I love you Angela…seriously.I’m addicted to your videos.
18:00 ish -- one non-null tic-tac-toe result that can arise is when you have a stroke mid-game. while there are a few downsides under this situation, strokin out mid-game has many advantages. the most reliable of these is that you no longer have to play tic-tac-toe of course but there is another related one that can occur if you are lucky which is that you dont ever have to play the game, or really any game, ever again
In the 1970s, there was an article in Scientific American (I think it was Martin Gardner's column) on making a simple computer using matchboxes and M&Ms to play tic-tac-toe.
the NPR clips in your videos really crack me up!
I'd really like to see you do a similar video about the KataGo AI and the researchers who effectively broke it.
Did you see Wargames? The Matthew Broderick movie from the '80s? They actually forced the computer to play tic tac toe against itself to illustrate that some games are unwinnable and should not be played, or at least are of this type and you know that going in. You get to see the computer learn this. Obviously this is a movie and it's all fake but it was still pretty neat, especially in an era when people teaching computers had learned on punch cards
29:11 this music is awesome 😅 well played with that first movie advantage!
I was at the first tournament where a computer beat an active grandmaster. It was in Long Beach, in the late 80s -- Deep Thought vs Bent Larsen. Bent tried to play into complications against the machine, and it just out-calculated him. Mikhail Tal was at that tournament, but he signed the "NC" (no-computer) list, meaning he didn't want to play any machines.
We all understood that history had just been made, and it was interesting (and in some ways a bit depressing) because we knew where the trend was going -- we just didn't know when we'd get there.
All that said, I don't think modern computers have "solved" chess as far as humans are concerned. They have become excellent coaches and training partners, and that will continue. But humans still have to put in the work.
I made it briefly over Elo 2200 both in USCF and FIDE in 1999, and then life got in the way and those numbers came down. Finally made a return to competitive chess last year after being out for 20 years... and found myself in a sea of young people (sometimes -really- young) who could freaking PLAY. They were 2-3 categories better than their ratings, all because they had been studying and playing online during covid, and now they were showing up and very hungry. It's an interesting (if painful) time to get back into the swing of things.
FYI, we play tic tac toe wrong. It was originally 3 mans morris (from Rome I believe). Where you each only get 3 pieces and once played you move them around trying to get 3 in a row.
The game later grew to 6 and 9 man morris which is the currant popular game. Though I have heard of 12 and 15 though they sound impossible to play.
I was that child who refused to do homework. I did the work in class, and aced the exams, but when I got home, I just didn't want to think about it any more. This wasn't because I thought I was so much smarter than anyone else, but because my school was so slow and behind in the curriculum. I had already learned everything they were teaching from my older brother, years prior.
There were so many other things that I could spend my time doing rather than something I had already done many times before.
In a human game part of the first move advantage is you can practise from after the first move while the opponent has to either predict your first move for practice from before the first move.
Actually the best way to cheat is to hide a mirror on the ceiling so that you can peak at your opponents pieces
When I was studying computer programming, one of my first programs was a Tic-Tac-Toe game. I was able to write an algorithm such that the computer would either win or draw, but never lose. This was not a brute force algorithm as Angela seems to be suggesting, but rather an abstracted procedure which guaranteed a non-losing outcome.
This is extremely common. Basically ever computer programming degree will have this excercise or similar.
My dad told me a story about when he had the opportunity to play against some chess grand-master (I forget the name). My dad was an amateur, and used some very unconventional moves in the early game. According to his story, my dad's non-standard opening baffled this grand-master, who then stood up and threw the board across the room, shouting "Why must I let this idiot beat me".
I'm not sure how much of that story was true, but my dad was a sailor. So . . . grain of salt and all that. But the point is that someone who is so well trained in the "proper way" to play a given game, just might be thrown off balance by someone who has no idea what they're doing.
Seems unlikely.
If their levels were closer, perhaps, but a GM isn't going to be rattled by sub-optimal moves in the opening from someone well below their level.
Instead, it's actually the other way around - the GM is going to know exactly how to punish the suboptimal play and cruise to victory.
Now, two GMs against each other and one of them can surprise the other with computer preparation - in that case, it's usually one deviation from the established main and side lines, and the advantage is largely in time gained as the opponent is unfamiliar with it and has to think longer while the other can blitz out the move.
This is why, in these cases, the GM "defending" will often play moves that complicate the position and make it unclear, to get the other GM out of prep so they are back on even terms and thinking on their own.
your dad is a liar lol
Not true. It is a story attributed to Nimzowitch
Not even a little bit plausible. A novice playing a weird opening might throw off someone with more a little experience than the novice, but a GM would not have any trouble destroying them. The only way I could see if is if it were like a blindfold simul and the GM was playing 20 boards and just lost track of your dad's. Even then, the whole throwing the board thing sounds made up.
Funniest Headline I ever saw in a NewsPaper - "Local Company Invents New Form Of Energy" ...Actually fell off my chair that time and had Physics Lab later that day :D
I love your channel so much
New favourite channel.
Currently at Level 3 stockfish my level . Great discovered check at the end. Brilliant
4:40 lmao "a new childish prodigy"
thank you for including the music credits, because I was going to ask you and now I don't have to wonder
So cool! Like the style of this channel
From what I understand magnus played a specific variation that he only played like one or two times before and somehow hans was prepared for that specific one, which according to some high level chess players(Hikaru and Gotham chess who are content creators so there's some possible alternative motive there)i s extremely unlikely to have happened. Also there's this whole controversy with han's mentor also being some sort of cheater but i'm not sure about that one.
On a tangential note, it has become more clear to me that a parent telling their child they’re a genius can be a form of abuse. I mean, there are actual geniuses but I have the feeling those are the minority of people who are being told they’re a genius and it’s setting those false positives up for a lifetime of feeling like a failure. And letting everyone suffer with them.
The thing about first move advantage is that chess isn't solved. So, most people agree that if chess was solved it would most likely be a draw ("a chess game, when played to perfection, ends in a draw" is a real saying, not just a meme). But, as long as it isn't, it's been observed that most non-draw games end in white winning. Even for engine games, which are thousands of time better than the best human players.
Thoroughly enjoying my man (Gell) superiority moment here
For the record, it's "Lee"-chess. The Li is short for Libre, French for free.
All you can say about lichess level 3 is, it doesn't violate the rules of the game, but it violates all the rules beginners learn in the first lessons, like not letting pawns take your pieces.
what I dislike with lichess lvl3 is that it sometimes plays very well then just hangs their queen when you attack it with a pawn. It's still stronger than me
Great video! Thank you. You might want to do a video on "Go" and the trauma of the grand master Go players. The real question is whether or not there is ANY game (except driving cars in the real world) that humans always win against computers?
Bishop's mate still gets enough players unawares to always be worth a try for maximum incredulity.
The drama was quite interesting. It sparkle quite intensive disscusion, what should be considered proof of cheating, which methods are reliable, a lot of analysis (even fake one)...so yes, the drama was fun. Anyway I think he didn't cheat in that one specific game. magnus either had just a bad day or he already suspect hans of cheating and it affect his gameplay, because he just played poorly (for his standart).
In the mid 60's my class as a group wrote a Tic Tac Toe program with a memory of 512. It was a 5 bit teletype computer, learning to be crypto technicians, repairing crypto machines. Slow and cumbersome, it played and tied or won. It was electro mechanical. All characters and numbers available by a carriage shift that went to caps, numbers and punctuation. We were also required to be able to fix each memory card, a flip flop with several discrete transistors.
27:15 I was stunned that she jumped straight into a Bullet game, and while speaking no less.. Then realized halfway though that the game is pre-recorded and fast-forwarded hahaha!
"Cheat a little bit."
I can just picture, cheaters across the planet laughing their lungs out.
Going to the bathroom and having a phone in there has actually been done by a grandmaster in a tournament. I think more than once.
3:40 - as someone who was thought to be "bored" in high school, I can answer this one. I was neither bored nor struggling to understand. I just didn't care. When I got to college and was paying money out of my pocket, I did very well because I was motivated to care.
The game of Nim is very simple and is solved, but its the _second_ player who can always win.
There’s really so many ad breaks, honestly good for you
People with the ability to figure out how much to cheat to avoid being caught, probably have enough moral fiber not to cheat
that outro was so brave lol
"Is this the worst game of chess ever played?"-I wasn't playing it, so no.
Although I am not a good chess player at all, to me chess falls into the same category as poetry or music or walking in the forest. Just looking at a complicated position and enjoying how it turns the cogs of the mind is like breathing fresh air. The rational brain is trying to guess the 5th or 6th move in a variation, the lizard brain is constantly signaling weird things like excitement or elementar danger and the whole procedure turns the days into nights.
There is also betting on individual chess games and tournament play both informally and commercially - and not in trivial amounts.
omg belated welcome to chess doc!!
Great Vid... they say that there are 10 *111 and 10*123 power, of possible chess moves. I would think a little less given the actual game-play and limitations of the types of pieces.
A sidenote I find important: Chess is not only not solved YET. From our understanding of the universe we cannot solve chess. There are more possible chess positions than atoms in the observable universe. So even if each atom stored one position, we couldn't assess all unique positions. We have solved chess for all positions with only 7 pieces and are on our way to 8 pieces though, the so called table bases.
Traditional engines work by rating each position and then min-maxing the value in a decision tree of a depth of typically like 20 moves ahead or so. A big part of that is counting material (I have a rook, my opponent has not) and then piece value is modified by freedom of movement and so on. Anecdotally, the crucial change in Deep Blue, the IBM computer that beat Kasparov in 1997 in comparison to its losing 1996 predecessor, was that of semi-permeable pawns: Pawns that you can take an opposing piece with to open a lane for one of your pieces. Those would have a sligthely different value from static pawns and apparently that just tipped the balance towards computers. Nowadays, neuronal networks are employed, though to my knowledge, Stockfish, the strongest chess engine, uses a combination of neuronal network and classic engine components, and there was just a brief reign of pure neuronal networks like AlphaChess and Leyla.