Lacking Motivation, Magnus Carlsen Will Give Up World Chess Title (nytimes.com) 44
Magnus Carlsen is the world chess champion, and by acclamation one of the very best players in history. But on Wednesday he said he would not play in next year's world championship, voluntarily surrendering the title he has held since he won it in 2013 at age 22. From a report: Now 31 and a five-time world champion, Carlsen said he was "pretty comfortable" with the decision, which he said he had thought about for "more than a year."
"I am not motivated to play another match; I simply feel that I don't have a lot to gain," he said on the first episode of his new podcast, the Magnus Effect. "Although I'm sure a match would be interesting for historical reasons and all of that, I don't have any inclination to play, and I will simply not play the match."
"I am not motivated to play another match; I simply feel that I don't have a lot to gain," he said on the first episode of his new podcast, the Magnus Effect. "Although I'm sure a match would be interesting for historical reasons and all of that, I don't have any inclination to play, and I will simply not play the match."
Good on him (Score:1)
Re: Good on him (Score:2)
Chess? Isn't that already a "solved" game? (Through AI. Completely unbeatable.)
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Not even close.
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You are correct, and the first part of this short video [youtube.com] shows what wil eventually happen.
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Re: Good on him (Score:2)
Probably this will be a diminishing series, eventually even with orders of magnitude more computation and better algorithms they won't be much of an improvement over previous agents. This is because at this point the game is almost solved, strategies would be almost as good as the game allows.
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This is because at this point the game is almost solved,
What does that even mean? How do you "almost solve" a game?
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It means that you essentially can reduce the game to win/lose/draw based on who goes first assuming perfect players on both sides. Tic-Tac-Toe for instance is a solved game. Checkers was solved in 2007. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Oh, I realize now you might have meant more emphasis on the "almost" part. I don't know what the parent specifically meant in this context, but Chess is partially solved:
"Fully solving chess remains elusive, and it is speculated that the complexity of the game may preclude its ever being solved. Through retrograde computer analysis, endgame tablebases (strong solutions) have been found for all three- to seven-piece endgames, counting the two kings as pieces. Some variants of chess on a smaller board with
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Solved means you can find the best move (and prove it's the best move) no matter what your opponent plays.
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Almost solved means you can find the move that usually is the best, but you can't prove for certain it is the best, just that increasing computing power/better algorithms is failing to find a "better" move very often. You are asymptotically approaching the best move for every situation in chess.
Reason you can't solve chess without some exotic form of computation is it's such a large possibility space that computers can't of course evaluate every possibility. But you can train neural networks and other tri
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How close is it to solved?
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Chess is not solved. Although, I'd argue that if combinations are as important as grand masters claim, then it could be solved.
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AI has lost same matches, so until AI goes undefeated as a grandmaster for at least 5 major competitions, then you can say it's "solved".
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Yeah, I can understand that. I'm sure I'll make the exact same decision after 20 years as Grand Master. Oops, no, guess not: I'll be dead by then.
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Good on him for realising "Hey, I stand to lose a lot if I actually lose a match"
What exactly would he lose by losing the title, that he wouldn't also lose by surrendering it?
IOW he's bored with chess (Score:4, Interesting)
He's probably taken it as far as he can in almost 20 years. Sportsmen get fed up and quit too even if they're still physically up to it but someone with the intelligence of this guy has a lot more avenues open to him than say some ex-footballer.
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He's no slouch at poker apparently.
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True, and it will be super interesting if he pursues it. Coming from a game of complete information to one of incomplete, we'll see how he handles the variance aspect of poker that's not really there in chess.
Re: IOW he's bored with chess (Score:2)
Football isn't a solved game until we have more robots on the field.
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> Football isn't a solved game until we have more robots on the field.
BattleBots! Nothing more cathartic than smashing and grinding metal. With humans it's rare to see an arm or head get knocked off because of safety protocol, but bots can get splattered [youtube.com] yet no humans harmed.
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He isn't bored with chess at all. He is merely bored with the World Championship format.
If the World Championship was a proper tournament like it is in most sports, he would likely still be playing in it.
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"World Championships" in sports, unless they're team sports, are generally not that great. There's a World Tennis Championship, but nobody pays much attention to it, with the same true about the World Golf Championship. Boxing World Championships have a history of being even worse run than the Chess World Championship, with there being five separate organizations claiming the right to award the title. There are three heavyweight World Champions right now.
In fact, the World Chess Championship has been ste
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World championships in most sports are great. Most of the team sports have great tournaments, athletics are great, sailing is great, and so on. Apparently various martial arts have great world championships as well. Only extremely wealthy sports have lousy world championships, but there are luckily only a few of those. Even in those cases the format is generally just fine, it's just that the best athletes don't take part, because they make more money elsewhere. Boxing is a mess, of course.
Even chess has a g
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Not with chess. But he doesn't want the drudgery of months spend preparing for a single opponent. He'd rather play more tournaments, and I think the only thing left to achieve is a 2900 rating. I think he wants his chess life to be more fun. I couldn't blame him.
misleading snippet (Score:5, Informative)
The quoted text is quite misleading. Carlsen intends to continue to play chess full time. He just doesn't want to play the world championship match because he doesn't enjoy it.
A strange game (Score:5, Funny)
The only winning move is not to play.
Re:A strange game (Score:4, Funny)
Greetings Magnus Carlsen how about a nice game of global thermonuclear war?
He hasn't quit chess, just the title (Score:5, Informative)
Note that he said he's going to continue playing chess. I believe he's even playing a tournament today. It's specifically the world title match that he's dropping. He has talked about how he's just not motivated to do the months of preparation required to defend the classical chess title in a one-on-one match. He seems to prefer multi-player tournaments to matches, and shorter time controls (or even a mix of time controls) to the grind of hours-long classical games. The combination of preparation and exhaustion that go into winning classical chess matches isn't doing it for him anymore.
In the podcast [chess24.com] where he talked about it, he spent more time (and had more fun) talking about poker and betting on football matches.
Just another example of... (Score:2)
The Great Resignation [chessquestions.com]
Format (Score:5, Informative)
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Lost to a kid (Score:2)
Are we sure this isn't because his ego was bruised when some 16 year old Indian kid beat him in a game a few months ago?
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Are we sure this isn't because his ego was bruised when some 16 year old Indian kid beat him in a game a few months ago?
Not Magnus; he loves that sort of thing because he loves chess. But like all right-minded people he's sick of FIDE and their shitty organisation.
Re:Lost to a kid (Score:4, Informative)
Are we sure this isn't because his ego was bruised when some 16 year old Indian kid beat him in a game a few months ago?
He was hoping for that possibility. He wanted the challenger to be someone from the next generation. Instead he got the same guy he beat last year in somewhat humiliating fashion.
https://chess24.com/en/read/ne... [chess24.com]
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He's right (Score:2)
Why go through that hell? He's already earned his place in the pantheon. Unlike the good ole days Russian chess superstars, he has other options in his life.
Maybe he wants to get a Girlfriend. (Score:1)
Lacking Motivation (Score:1)