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.
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.
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.
@@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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lol same. I figured out a way that worked for me to improve really quickly and then promptly lost motivation. Still find high level chess really fascinating and I like how you don't have to be very good to appreciate calculations even at the Grand Master level (unlike a lot of sports/games which often require a level of proficiency/understanding to grasp how good people in the top level really are).
@@민정-q3m I heard Hikaru talking about how he could calculate multiple lines at once then file them away and come back to them like tabs on a computer. So I tried replicating exactly that. I played multiple games at once (on between separate tabs) against bots that were at or slightly above my elo. I'd start with like 3 games at once, then as I got better I quickly went to like 6 or 7, then I upped the bot elo and went back to like 4 games, and so on and so on. So yeah, that's my secret: play a bunch of games at once. Then when you go back to playing one game it feels like you have all this extra memory space and processing power compared to before. I also did zero studying on openings and theory, I'm sure that if I coupled the multiple tabs/games practice with studying some actual theory I could break 2000 elo in well under a year (I started at under half that). Maybe it was just a strategy that happened to work really well for me and other strategies tend to work better for other people, but it was some of the fastest I can remember ever improving at a skill. I just don't have interest in playing chess any more. I've gone through phases of interest in other games but this is the only one I've felt like I found a cheat code. (In poker for instance I'm convinced to get to the professional level you need to brute force learn how to do the statistics on a dime coupled with some decision theory study). And I kinda have other hobbies I'm obsessed with which take priority over mastering games that I'm already better than the average person at (but nowhere near the level of a more serious enthusiast).
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.
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.
@@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.
@@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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
@@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.
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 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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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)!))
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.
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
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
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.
Thanks for this. I was reading in Bletchley Park Brainteasers that Alan Turning had the lowest rating of the chess club. I wonder if he used those games to learn through losing. Like the difference between 10,000 hours to mastery vs 10,000 mistakes to mastery.
There are 255,168 possible games of tic-tac-toe. When rotations and reflections of positions are considered the same, there are only 26,830 possible games. The number of games is higher than the state space. Keep in mind, you can take different paths to get to the same state.
Magnus just played poorly against Hans. It is easy to cheat at chess online but very difficult to do it in person at a FIDE sancioned event. Poor sportsmanship by Magnus to accuse his opponent of cheating with no evidence
Possibly....but Hans has cheated, admitted to cheating, and been shown to have cheated more than he admitted. So maybe Magnus is a poor sport...but Hans is a terrible person. He should not be allowed to compete at the highest level anymore since he has no ability to demonstrate he "isn't" cheating....and we all know, you can't prove negatives.
@trepidati0n533 The point is, no matter how well respected a player is. They themselves are not the best impartial judge on whether they were cheated against or not. This applies to Garrett Adelstein and Magnus Carlsen
I think typically when someone says they play like a computer instead of a human it means more like they played a move that makes the position super complicated. Like people like positions that are simple and the moves being intuitive. Sometimes computers find a line where you have to keep making the best move over and over again which is super hard for humans to spot. I don't really think Hans did that this game, but whatever. Also I heard another story of people cheating and it was so clever, but they got caught. So basically they had one guy watching the game and they had a system where depending on where their friend sat in the venue they would know what move to play. I think they got caught because they figured out that he kept glancing away at the board.
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
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.
From the big chess content creators, apparently the cheating can be something as simple as "buzzing" when there is a brilliant move to be noticed. It prompts you to look for something unconventional and stuff
On the "My son is so smart, he's just bored. That's why he's failing maths" note. This is a flag for either undiagnosed neurodivergence or shitty parenting. Usually both. Felt personally attacked, sorry.
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.
Magnus is arguably the BEST player ever, it's at the point where even the GMs are like "yeah, he's the best". You can almost count on one hand how many times Magnus has lost playing white, in classical games. Niemann couldn't even analyses his game AFTER having just played it. He said that the winning move was one he saw in another game... that game never happened...
You don't play chess, do you? The debate about the non-existent game was about the opening line, not the winning move. And there turned out to be a game where Carlsen had reached the opening line via transposition, so this is not conclusive. It would be a lucky guess for Niemann, as he said himself, to prepare for that line with a different move order, but possible given the previous game.
@@eljanrimsa5843 Oh, hi. We making personal assumptions about each other for no reason? Cool. "You don't wipe your butt after you poop". Cool. Great way to start this off. It WASN'T about the opening line, it was the mid game where there was a move made that was an improvement... but sure, Niemann somehow looked up that specific game that morning, but also didn't remember when or where that game was played... sure... Hey, was it fun watching someone rated 300 points lower than Niemann out analyse him after the game? Basically everything Niemann said was wrong, like OBJECTIVELY wrong. But, hey, cool.
@@aliince9372 but you don't "see" a winning move in another game. that's not how chess preparation works, that's why I thought (and think) you may not be familiar with the process
@@aliince9372 I believe that their point was that it doesn't seem like you know as much about this topic as you seem to think you know, and that make be affecting your judgement on the matter. I'm not all that experienced with chess, so I'm not sure if that's actually true or not, but generally speaking things _tend_ not to be anywhere near as absolute as people on the internet make it seem. I'd wager that probably applies here.
Lol you bring up organic chemistry, in my final of that class I remember I had this question that I knew I didn't study enough for. I answered it then I whipped out my phone and googled the question. I knew my teacher wasnt paying attention to me/wouldnt care I did such and saw I was wrong. I was so sad about my prep and I left it wrong despite feeling like I deserved to get the question right. Knows right answer when told type feeling made me feel I understand the cheaters conundrum. Those points hurt me even though I knew I would pass no matter what.
OTB cheating can be so nefarious that with a live audience on move x person stands or moves arm or small cough, it could mean which best is piece to move. If we look at baseball moves then the information from small motions can mean a ton. Afaik about chess there is no way to have bots play meaningful games without forcing them into openings. At that point we are comparing bot strengths and not really chess.
There are legitimately kids who are so smart that they're bored with school work. I was one of those kids. In 7th grade, my aptitude tests were showing 2nd year of college on all subjects. Math wasn't hard for me. I was doing trig and calc at home making home brew video games for my friends. But in school, I was having to do pre-algebra busy work in school. My teachers all knew I was too advanced for their classes. The principle however had it out for me and refused to allow me to go into more advanced classes. So since doing well in class wasn't getting my anywhere, why should I even bother? The school system absolutely failed me and it didn't matter how mindnumbingly boring everything was. All it did was induce demand avoidance in me psychologically. While yes there are parents who are all "oh my kid is so special" when the kid really isn't special at all, you'd do better to not be so judgemental about peoples kids whose struggles you aren't privy to.
"There are legitimately kids who are so smart that they're bored with school work. *I was one of those kids.* " im sorry but this is a fucking hilarious thing to say
Chess being fully deterministic with perfect information, I think the idea of romanticism and needing "both logic and passion" preventing computers from playing (what has that ever stopped them from doing anyway?) probably has been dead for about a century and a half.
Only a tiny number of chess players make even a meager living. Important chess saying: "Knowing how to play chess is a sign of intelligence. Knowing how to play well shows you are spending your time poorly."
There is a lot more "celebrity" money in chess recently. Good-but-not-exceptional players can make decent money on youtube if they are good at being interesting and entertaining. There is very little money available purely for being good at chess.
Your point at the end I think is the reality. Niemann and his coach played a lot against the bots and with the bots that they've started to develop "bot-style" play intuitively. That kind of play could definitely throw off the other players that have trend paths worn in by humans. An engine could suggest a move that has no obvious stength for 5 moves, but if you've steeped yourself with that instinct it just "feels right".
Unfortunately, there isn't any bot-style play for a new generation of humans to "grow up with". It's pure logic and mathematics, which lets bots calculate best moves. And they are playing against the best move that you could make next, as well, so that when you don't make that best possible move, you are automatically at a disadvantage. And so, unless you can "keep up" with the bot, it gets better and better as you get worse and worse. No one can defeat this by intuition, instinct or feelings. And even grand masters do rely on these intangibles, as you can hear when they comment their games, saying "something about this move seemed wrong", even though they are calculating as best they can. You can't reach a 3500 elo by just growing up using and playing with bots. Their moves are often not understandable until the game is over simply because human brains can't think that way or that far ahead. It's not a talent that can be developed somehow, it's pure mathematical brainpower. The bots have taught chess players a lot about what works in openings and endgames, true, but those points in the game have the fewest variables and so are at least minimally comprehensible to humans. But it will take a cyborg or another leap in evolution of the human brain before we can compete with these bots or play like them.
I appreciate your very reasonable take. There were thousands of people who were ready and willing to burn Niemann at the stake because he talked funny in an interview. I'm being serious. They thought how he talked, his accent, was proof that he was cheating. People are f*cking stupid. It's nice to hear someone not jump to conclusions for once. I'll defend the fact that we don't know he cheated in this game. Even though he seems like a piece of sh*t otherwise
This is probably a dumb question but why can’t they use some technology that blocks any Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals? I’m pretty sure that tech exists to block Wi-Fi because someone told me that certain professors were using it to stop students from looking at Facebook during lectures. The fact that anyone would go to a lecture and waste their time and distract others by spending time on Facebook is something I find incomprehensible but that’s another topic. But I would think there should be a possible tech solution to this.
That was uber entertaining - thanks. Perfect chess by both sides ends in a Draw [not a stalemate]. Chess ratings are Gaussian - so going from say 2,600 Elo to 2,800 Elo is not a linear calculation. Lastly, in the first 10 moves of chess, there are 169,518,829,100,544,000,000,000,000,000 variations - so you can imagine the number for a 30 move game.
"Perfect chess by both sides ends in a Draw [not a stalemate]." Like she said in the video, I feel like we would've heard about it if they solved chess
@@Ken.- dude - if you watch smart yt vids like this then you must realize that saying a stalemate is a type of draw does not entail every draw is a stalemate.
@@JamesJoyce12 Dude - if you watch smart yt vids like this then you must realize that saying "perfect chess ends in a draw [not stalemate]" is not even close to being proven true
Tennis isn’t a “solved” game but don’t tell me it isn’t an advantage to serve. White has an advantage. A good player will reliably beat a bad player but in tournaments, you’re expected to win with white, and if you draw with black, that is almost as good as a win. If you win with black, you’re on the front foot. To return to the tennis analogy, it’s advantage receiver.
Honestly, kids can solve tic tac toe as well - my friend and i did it just because we used to play it in class by just playing it in the margins of our note. I wanna say early teens, could have been a bit earlier than that.
Gave up competitive chess when a crook obviously cheated me by leaving on a break, running down his clock, while he and his friends gamed the board in their rooms. He was far above my current rating, and it was OBVIOUS to me and then corroborated by people who had watched, who told me about it when I had no way to press the issue. Sorta a lucky time from what I saw of the people who continued on the path to oblivion, otherwise.
Online games are a different thing, and Niemann may indeed have cheated online more often than he has acknowledged. But I personally don't think he cheated in his OTB game with Magnus. It would be much more difficult to pull it off in person, nobody has found any evidence of how it might have been done, and his performance since then makes it look like he is someone who could definitely beat Magnus with Black if Magnus made an imprecise move or two (which does happen). However..., an interesting point was brought up is some of the forums: it turns out there is a whole catalogue of devices you can buy to facilitate cheating (i.e., card counting) at Blackjack, and it would certainly seem possible that such devices -- which are designed to elude rigorous big money casino security -- could be adapted to chess. So I guess that game is still an open question. Security at tournaments has been tightened since then though, and if nobody can catch Niemann in any sort of shenanigans then I think he deserves the benefit of the doubt. Also, how can you talk about computers that beat humans at games and not mention the game of Go?
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.
Not sure Angela answered the question she asked, especially in relation to over-the-board tournaments. Players have definitely gone to the bathroom to consult their phone, and these players have been caught. Otherwise, we presume a hidden observer is monitoring the game with a computer and somehow communicating moves. How? Hikaru Nakamura said all a top player would need is a single beep or flash of light made AFTER the player made his move. The beep would indicate “Yes, you are on the right track.” Knowing you made the best possible move is an incredible confidence boost as you can eliminate self-doubt. Of course, you have to be good enough to have the best move in your list of candidate moves.
so,a rank amateur,such as myself,sees that initial past games are needed,w/consistency ,to predict a differential in current&ongoing play. G,old person
In the late eighties, I loved playing the game but wasn't great by any means. The only problem was it was difficult to find other people that liked to play. I think I spent nearly 100$ on the Kasparov computer chess board. It had 10 levels. Once I figured out which level was challenging, it was a great learning tool. I still have it today because finding normies that like to play is as difficult today as it was then.
Chess has come along ways since I was 5. My father would take me to our church on Sunday night to play. I remember the ire I got when I actually beat a Sandia National Laboratory scientist, who claimed I cheated. He told my dad not to bring me back.
the fact that niemann has a history of cheating, even online, should be enough to ban him from participation honestly. even if he's not cheating, it's only because he's afraid he couldn't get away with it. screw him
So I'm not like a military history person but I'm trying to learn and theres apparently a saying that goes "professional soldiers are predictable but the world is full of amateurs" and I keep thinking about that. Or like how they taught a novice to beat a Go program that thrashed grandmasters by using a strategy that would never work on a human because its too obvious and slow but the program was never trained against something that even novice players would see coming a mile away.
It's a sidenote at the start of the video, but you dropped an article saying "20 years later, humans still lose to computers", as if it were an obvious fact. However, note that where computers once were better than humans at Go, humans have since been able to beat competition-winning AI. Why? Because the AI trained on how to beat people playing against other people, and how to beat other AI. A researcher was able to discover a counterstrategy the AI was vulnerable to, and despite being a novice at Go, win 14 out of 15 games played. Because Chess is not a solved game, it may be possible to find such counterstrategies at some point, although to be fair, as time passes this becomes less and less likely.
On the first move advantage point, it doesn't have to be the case that chess is solved and white will definitely win with best play for it to be the case that white has an advantage by playing the first move. This gives white a tempo which puts black immediately on the defensive. This gives white a practical advantage even if with best play it would end in a draw. This is why, at the highest levels, white typically plays for a win while black plays for a draw.
Your intuition about meaning of "first move advantage" implying the game must be solved is really interesting to me, because that's not what chess players generally mean by it at all. Nearly all people particularly knowledgeable about chess agree that perfect play from both players is almost certainly a draw. Even though chess isn't solved, we know enough to know that it probably is a futile game. However, the "perfect play" is an important qualifier. When players aren't playing perfectly, the first move advantage comes into play. Near perfect play by white vs perfect play by black is probably enough for white to hold on to a draw. Meanwhile, near perfect play from black vs perfect play from white will almost certainly mean white is able to convert the game into a victory. Saying white has a "52%" advantage over black is pretty misleading. In reality, about 40% of all games played at the top level are draws. 35% end in white winning and 25% end in black winning. So even though a draw is still the most likely result of a game, white actually has a MASSIVE advantage over black. This is reflected in the way openings in chess are described. White is trying to press for a win, so white openings are often called "attacks". Meanwhile, black is trying to hold onto a draw, so black openings are often called "defenses". For a player at Magnus's skill level, losing with the white pieces is an incredibly rare occurrence. In fact, the number of people - in the *entire world* - who have beaten Magnus Carlsen with the black pieces is only 13. And Hans Neiman is one of those thirteen. It's genuinely difficult to overstate how much Hans exceeded expectations in this match.
If chess is a win for white, or for black, I would say it is just as "futile". From a mathematical point of view, chess is a finite game, a simple (but long) computation. Either white wins, or black wins, or it is a draw. I can write a 1-line problem that "solves" chess by printing the outcome of the game (but I have to write three versions and I can't tell you which is correct). I can also write a relatively short program that is guaranteed to print the right outcome of the game, but it will take a long time to run. But chess is fun to play, and it is fun to watch GMs play. Now with computers analysing the game live, watching two GMs playing is like watching two blind boxers fight each other.
@ronald3836 A "futile game" is technical term, not a descriptor. In game theory, a game is described as "futile" if perfect play will always result in a draw. Tic Tac Toe is a very basic example of a futile game.
@@Ruminations09 but what is the point of the technical term "futile" as applied to chess? Clearly chess and any similar game with perfect party is either a win for white, a draw, or a win for black. It is not sometimes a win, sometimes a draw (no chance involved). So in the case of chess, "futile" just means the second option: "draw". Why not call it that? My point is, if chess were a win for white, it for black, that would not make the game any more interesting as a finite combinatorial mathematical object.
@@ronald3836 I... genuinely don't understand why you're asking me this question. I'm not the one who decided what it means for a game to be "futile". It's mathematicians who use these technical terms. I'm just using the terms the way they are defined.
tic tac toe ends in a null but you could say that there is still a first mover advantage. Say you have two perfect players playing tic tac toe but at some random intervals instead of being able to make their perfect moves a random move is played instead. My intuition is that under those conditions first player will win more games. Same idea of chess, checkers etc.
The thing about gamers, there is a line, if you cross simply to win, you can never go back. Some cheaters just do it for the hell of it, they don't do it to win, those people are assholes, but they are not cheaters. A cheater is one that does it to win the game, and that is a mindset, you don't come back from that because you lost you moral towards the game. Once a cheater, always a cheater.
A grandmaster only needs to know if the position is "better" for black or white. If they know, they know there's a move somewhere that gives them an advantage and it just becomes a puzzle of finding it in a long classical game.
I know this is old but, honestly the lichess bot plays in weird ways sometimes, like at lower levels it will still make perfect moves and then just mess up every now and then, and you can capitalize on its mistakes but it also finds moves I feel like no lower level player would find sometimes. Honestly I'm not a great player at chess, but I mainly play shogi and the bot on lishogi is way more insane at doing this, like the level of even the level 1 bot plays better than most people I play at shogi online on shogi wars or elsewhere. It sometimes won't find checkmate, but then the level 2 AI will find like mate in 8 or something, it's insane. Weirdly I've had more success vs the lichess AI by playing C4 more, I don't know if it's just me breaking out of theory or what but I find it easier to win.
the advantage of first move lets you dictate the direction of the game, it might not objectively be an advantage but its harder to play on the back foot for a human
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 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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lol same. I figured out a way that worked for me to improve really quickly and then promptly lost motivation. Still find high level chess really fascinating and I like how you don't have to be very good to appreciate calculations even at the Grand Master level (unlike a lot of sports/games which often require a level of proficiency/understanding to grasp how good people in the top level really are).
@@Isaac_L.. I got way more interested in the algorithms computers programs use to play chess than in learning chess strategy myself.
@@Isaac_L..Mind sharing the way to quick improvement you found? No pressure lol I’m mostly just curious :) I barely even understand chess myself
@@민정-q3m I heard Hikaru talking about how he could calculate multiple lines at once then file them away and come back to them like tabs on a computer. So I tried replicating exactly that. I played multiple games at once (on between separate tabs) against bots that were at or slightly above my elo. I'd start with like 3 games at once, then as I got better I quickly went to like 6 or 7, then I upped the bot elo and went back to like 4 games, and so on and so on. So yeah, that's my secret: play a bunch of games at once. Then when you go back to playing one game it feels like you have all this extra memory space and processing power compared to before. I also did zero studying on openings and theory, I'm sure that if I coupled the multiple tabs/games practice with studying some actual theory I could break 2000 elo in well under a year (I started at under half that).
Maybe it was just a strategy that happened to work really well for me and other strategies tend to work better for other people, but it was some of the fastest I can remember ever improving at a skill.
I just don't have interest in playing chess any more. I've gone through phases of interest in other games but this is the only one I've felt like I found a cheat code. (In poker for instance I'm convinced to get to the professional level you need to brute force learn how to do the statistics on a dime coupled with some decision theory study). And I kinda have other hobbies I'm obsessed with which take priority over mastering games that I'm already better than the average person at (but nowhere near the level of a more serious enthusiast).
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
Actually the best way to cheat is to hide a mirror on the ceiling so that you can peak at your opponents pieces
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.
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
"There's no such thing as a bad buzz." -- Hans Niemann, probably
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 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.
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.
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
This is becoming one of my favorite channels, always awesome stuff!
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.
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
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.
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.
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)!))
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.
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
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
that outro was so brave lol
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.
Thanks for this. I was reading in Bletchley Park Brainteasers that Alan Turning had the lowest rating of the chess club. I wonder if he used those games to learn through losing. Like the difference between 10,000 hours to mastery vs 10,000 mistakes to mastery.
There are 255,168 possible games of tic-tac-toe. When rotations and reflections of positions are considered the same, there are only 26,830 possible games. The number of games is higher than the state space. Keep in mind, you can take different paths to get to the same state.
Magnus just played poorly against Hans. It is easy to cheat at chess online but very difficult to do it in person at a FIDE sancioned event. Poor sportsmanship by Magnus to accuse his opponent of cheating with no evidence
Magnus is a memory machine.
Possibly....but Hans has cheated, admitted to cheating, and been shown to have cheated more than he admitted. So maybe Magnus is a poor sport...but Hans is a terrible person. He should not be allowed to compete at the highest level anymore since he has no ability to demonstrate he "isn't" cheating....and we all know, you can't prove negatives.
@@trepidati0n533 has he cheated outside of online games?
@trepidati0n533 The point is, no matter how well respected a player is. They themselves are not the best impartial judge on whether they were cheated against or not. This applies to Garrett Adelstein and Magnus Carlsen
3:03 okay, but to be fair, the Polytopia reference at the end makes it seem like a satirical troll.
I think typically when someone says they play like a computer instead of a human it means more like they played a move that makes the position super complicated. Like people like positions that are simple and the moves being intuitive. Sometimes computers find a line where you have to keep making the best move over and over again which is super hard for humans to spot. I don't really think Hans did that this game, but whatever. Also I heard another story of people cheating and it was so clever, but they got caught. So basically they had one guy watching the game and they had a system where depending on where their friend sat in the venue they would know what move to play. I think they got caught because they figured out that he kept glancing away at the board.
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
Every one of your videos has really low volume, i have to put it up almost to max to hear it.
Hey, lay off Aiden ok, he just has ADHD.
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.
"Cheat a little bit."
I can just picture, cheaters across the planet laughing their lungs out.
From the big chess content creators, apparently the cheating can be something as simple as "buzzing" when there is a brilliant move to be noticed. It prompts you to look for something unconventional and stuff
On the "My son is so smart, he's just bored. That's why he's failing maths" note. This is a flag for either undiagnosed neurodivergence or shitty parenting. Usually both.
Felt personally attacked, sorry.
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.
Gotta love your officemate who's apparently playing 5D checkers against himself 😂
Magnus is arguably the BEST player ever, it's at the point where even the GMs are like "yeah, he's the best". You can almost count on one hand how many times Magnus has lost playing white, in classical games. Niemann couldn't even analyses his game AFTER having just played it. He said that the winning move was one he saw in another game... that game never happened...
You don't play chess, do you? The debate about the non-existent game was about the opening line, not the winning move. And there turned out to be a game where Carlsen had reached the opening line via transposition, so this is not conclusive. It would be a lucky guess for Niemann, as he said himself, to prepare for that line with a different move order, but possible given the previous game.
@@eljanrimsa5843 Oh, hi. We making personal assumptions about each other for no reason? Cool. "You don't wipe your butt after you poop". Cool. Great way to start this off.
It WASN'T about the opening line, it was the mid game where there was a move made that was an improvement... but sure, Niemann somehow looked up that specific game that morning, but also didn't remember when or where that game was played... sure...
Hey, was it fun watching someone rated 300 points lower than Niemann out analyse him after the game? Basically everything Niemann said was wrong, like OBJECTIVELY wrong. But, hey, cool.
@@aliince9372 but you don't "see" a winning move in another game. that's not how chess preparation works, that's why I thought (and think) you may not be familiar with the process
@@eljanrimsa5843 Yeah, that's fine. The game could/would have been analysed after. ...what's your point exactly?
@@aliince9372 I believe that their point was that it doesn't seem like you know as much about this topic as you seem to think you know, and that make be affecting your judgement on the matter. I'm not all that experienced with chess, so I'm not sure if that's actually true or not, but generally speaking things _tend_ not to be anywhere near as absolute as people on the internet make it seem. I'd wager that probably applies here.
Lol you bring up organic chemistry, in my final of that class I remember I had this question that I knew I didn't study enough for. I answered it then I whipped out my phone and googled the question. I knew my teacher wasnt paying attention to me/wouldnt care I did such and saw I was wrong. I was so sad about my prep and I left it wrong despite feeling like I deserved to get the question right. Knows right answer when told type feeling made me feel I understand the cheaters conundrum. Those points hurt me even though I knew I would pass no matter what.
True about solved games, I coded a perfect tiktaktoe ai in my first 3 months of coding.
OTB cheating can be so nefarious that with a live audience on move x person stands or moves arm or small cough, it could mean which best is piece to move. If we look at baseball moves then the information from small motions can mean a ton. Afaik about chess there is no way to have bots play meaningful games without forcing them into openings. At that point we are comparing bot strengths and not really chess.
I like how the "college guy who thinks he's smart" was me when is was 14
there have been chases of grandmasters checking chellphones on toilets in open tournaments, so that does happen which is kinda funny
There are legitimately kids who are so smart that they're bored with school work. I was one of those kids. In 7th grade, my aptitude tests were showing 2nd year of college on all subjects. Math wasn't hard for me. I was doing trig and calc at home making home brew video games for my friends. But in school, I was having to do pre-algebra busy work in school. My teachers all knew I was too advanced for their classes. The principle however had it out for me and refused to allow me to go into more advanced classes. So since doing well in class wasn't getting my anywhere, why should I even bother? The school system absolutely failed me and it didn't matter how mindnumbingly boring everything was. All it did was induce demand avoidance in me psychologically.
While yes there are parents who are all "oh my kid is so special" when the kid really isn't special at all, you'd do better to not be so judgemental about peoples kids whose struggles you aren't privy to.
"There are legitimately kids who are so smart that they're bored with school work. *I was one of those kids.* " im sorry but this is a fucking hilarious thing to say
I was also an intelligent bored child at school. Nevertheless, I did everything I was told to do. There are worse things in life than being bored.
Apparently we need body cavity searches before championship chess matches.
Chess being fully deterministic with perfect information, I think the idea of romanticism and needing "both logic and passion" preventing computers from playing (what has that ever stopped them from doing anyway?) probably has been dead for about a century and a half.
The game at the end was painful to watch.
i wish we had the same type of accountability for politicians who lie.
"And this is actually my favorite part because there's more math"
Don't threaten me with a good time 😂
Only a tiny number of chess players make even a meager living.
Important chess saying: "Knowing how to play chess is a sign of intelligence. Knowing how to play well shows you are spending your time poorly."
There is a lot more "celebrity" money in chess recently. Good-but-not-exceptional players can make decent money on youtube if they are good at being interesting and entertaining. There is very little money available purely for being good at chess.
Your point at the end I think is the reality. Niemann and his coach played a lot against the bots and with the bots that they've started to develop "bot-style" play intuitively. That kind of play could definitely throw off the other players that have trend paths worn in by humans. An engine could suggest a move that has no obvious stength for 5 moves, but if you've steeped yourself with that instinct it just "feels right".
every top player uses engines during training, though. it's nothing unique
Unfortunately, there isn't any bot-style play for a new generation of humans to "grow up with". It's pure logic and mathematics, which lets bots calculate best moves. And they are playing against the best move that you could make next, as well, so that when you don't make that best possible move, you are automatically at a disadvantage. And so, unless you can "keep up" with the bot, it gets better and better as you get worse and worse. No one can defeat this by intuition, instinct or feelings. And even grand masters do rely on these intangibles, as you can hear when they comment their games, saying "something about this move seemed wrong", even though they are calculating as best they can. You can't reach a 3500 elo by just growing up using and playing with bots. Their moves are often not understandable until the game is over simply because human brains can't think that way or that far ahead. It's not a talent that can be developed somehow, it's pure mathematical brainpower. The bots have taught chess players a lot about what works in openings and endgames, true, but those points in the game have the fewest variables and so are at least minimally comprehensible to humans. But it will take a cyborg or another leap in evolution of the human brain before we can compete with these bots or play like them.
DUDETTE, AWESOME!
The song at the end 😂😂
I appreciate your very reasonable take. There were thousands of people who were ready and willing to burn Niemann at the stake because he talked funny in an interview. I'm being serious. They thought how he talked, his accent, was proof that he was cheating. People are f*cking stupid. It's nice to hear someone not jump to conclusions for once. I'll defend the fact that we don't know he cheated in this game. Even though he seems like a piece of sh*t otherwise
This is probably a dumb question but why can’t they use some technology that blocks any Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals? I’m pretty sure that tech exists to block Wi-Fi because someone told me that certain professors were using it to stop students from looking at Facebook during lectures. The fact that anyone would go to a lecture and waste their time and distract others by spending time on Facebook is something I find incomprehensible but that’s another topic. But I would think there should be a possible tech solution to this.
That was uber entertaining - thanks. Perfect chess by both sides ends in a Draw [not a stalemate]. Chess ratings are Gaussian - so going from say 2,600 Elo to 2,800 Elo is not a linear calculation. Lastly, in the first 10 moves of chess, there are 169,518,829,100,544,000,000,000,000,000 variations - so you can imagine the number for a 30 move game.
"Perfect chess by both sides ends in a Draw [not a stalemate]."
Like she said in the video, I feel like we would've heard about it if they solved chess
A stalemate is a draw. In some positions that would be the best move for a player to prevent losing.
@@Ken.- dude - if you watch smart yt vids like this then you must realize that saying a stalemate is a type of draw does not entail every draw is a stalemate.
@@JamesJoyce12 Dude - if you watch smart yt vids like this then you must realize that saying "perfect chess ends in a draw [not stalemate]" is not even close to being proven true
Tennis isn’t a “solved” game but don’t tell me it isn’t an advantage to serve.
White has an advantage. A good player will reliably beat a bad player but in tournaments, you’re expected to win with white, and if you draw with black, that is almost as good as a win. If you win with black, you’re on the front foot. To return to the tennis analogy, it’s advantage receiver.
Oof. I'm pretty sure you didn't cheat.
As someone who watches chess, everything in this video was insulting to me and hilarious. Love your videos
Honestly, kids can solve tic tac toe as well - my friend and i did it just because we used to play it in class by just playing it in the margins of our note. I wanna say early teens, could have been a bit earlier than that.
Gave up competitive chess when a crook obviously cheated me by leaving on a break, running down his clock, while he and his friends gamed the board in their rooms.
He was far above my current rating, and it was OBVIOUS to me and then corroborated by people who had watched, who told me about it when I had no way to press the issue.
Sorta a lucky time from what I saw of the people who continued on the path to oblivion, otherwise.
Online games are a different thing, and Niemann may indeed have cheated online more often than he has acknowledged. But I personally don't think he cheated in his OTB game with Magnus. It would be much more difficult to pull it off in person, nobody has found any evidence of how it might have been done, and his performance since then makes it look like he is someone who could definitely beat Magnus with Black if Magnus made an imprecise move or two (which does happen).
However..., an interesting point was brought up is some of the forums: it turns out there is a whole catalogue of devices you can buy to facilitate cheating (i.e., card counting) at Blackjack, and it would certainly seem possible that such devices -- which are designed to elude rigorous big money casino security -- could be adapted to chess. So I guess that game is still an open question. Security at tournaments has been tightened since then though, and if nobody can catch Niemann in any sort of shenanigans then I think he deserves the benefit of the doubt.
Also, how can you talk about computers that beat humans at games and not mention the game of Go?
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.
The best indicator of future behavior, is past behavior.
Not sure Angela answered the question she asked, especially in relation to over-the-board tournaments. Players have definitely gone to the bathroom to consult their phone, and these players have been caught. Otherwise, we presume a hidden observer is monitoring the game with a computer and somehow communicating moves. How?
Hikaru Nakamura said all a top player would need is a single beep or flash of light made AFTER the player made his move. The beep would indicate “Yes, you are on the right track.” Knowing you made the best possible move is an incredible confidence boost as you can eliminate self-doubt. Of course, you have to be good enough to have the best move in your list of candidate moves.
so,a rank amateur,such as myself,sees that
initial past games are needed,w/consistency
,to predict a differential in current&ongoing
play. G,old person
omg belated welcome to chess doc!!
In the late eighties, I loved playing the game but wasn't great by any means. The only problem was it was difficult to find other people that liked to play. I think I spent nearly 100$ on the Kasparov computer chess board. It had 10 levels. Once I figured out which level was challenging, it was a great learning tool. I still have it today because finding normies that like to play is as difficult today as it was then.
Chess has come along ways since I was 5. My father would take me to our church on Sunday night to play. I remember the ire I got when I actually beat a Sandia National Laboratory scientist, who claimed I cheated. He told my dad not to bring me back.
the fact that niemann has a history of cheating, even online, should be enough to ban him from participation honestly. even if he's not cheating, it's only because he's afraid he couldn't get away with it. screw him
I like this channel because of the excellent taste of memes
"A 'BLOGGER' " 😅😂
stockfish currently evaluates the starting board as +0.3 (i.e. '0.3 pawns' in white's favour), thats probably the reason people say that.
So I'm not like a military history person but I'm trying to learn and theres apparently a saying that goes "professional soldiers are predictable but the world is full of amateurs" and I keep thinking about that. Or like how they taught a novice to beat a Go program that thrashed grandmasters by using a strategy that would never work on a human because its too obvious and slow but the program was never trained against something that even novice players would see coming a mile away.
It's a sidenote at the start of the video, but you dropped an article saying "20 years later, humans still lose to computers", as if it were an obvious fact. However, note that where computers once were better than humans at Go, humans have since been able to beat competition-winning AI. Why? Because the AI trained on how to beat people playing against other people, and how to beat other AI. A researcher was able to discover a counterstrategy the AI was vulnerable to, and despite being a novice at Go, win 14 out of 15 games played. Because Chess is not a solved game, it may be possible to find such counterstrategies at some point, although to be fair, as time passes this becomes less and less likely.
Up to the last minute I was craving so badly to watch Angela screaming at the camera like a possesed Niemann. Dissapointed, but keeping the Faith...
On the first move advantage point, it doesn't have to be the case that chess is solved and white will definitely win with best play for it to be the case that white has an advantage by playing the first move. This gives white a tempo which puts black immediately on the defensive. This gives white a practical advantage even if with best play it would end in a draw. This is why, at the highest levels, white typically plays for a win while black plays for a draw.
Just send the players through airport and medical imaging devices before the game.
There is also betting on individual chess games and tournament play both informally and commercially - and not in trivial amounts.
Your intuition about meaning of "first move advantage" implying the game must be solved is really interesting to me, because that's not what chess players generally mean by it at all.
Nearly all people particularly knowledgeable about chess agree that perfect play from both players is almost certainly a draw. Even though chess isn't solved, we know enough to know that it probably is a futile game.
However, the "perfect play" is an important qualifier. When players aren't playing perfectly, the first move advantage comes into play.
Near perfect play by white vs perfect play by black is probably enough for white to hold on to a draw. Meanwhile, near perfect play from black vs perfect play from white will almost certainly mean white is able to convert the game into a victory.
Saying white has a "52%" advantage over black is pretty misleading. In reality, about 40% of all games played at the top level are draws. 35% end in white winning and 25% end in black winning. So even though a draw is still the most likely result of a game, white actually has a MASSIVE advantage over black.
This is reflected in the way openings in chess are described. White is trying to press for a win, so white openings are often called "attacks". Meanwhile, black is trying to hold onto a draw, so black openings are often called "defenses".
For a player at Magnus's skill level, losing with the white pieces is an incredibly rare occurrence. In fact, the number of people - in the *entire world* - who have beaten Magnus Carlsen with the black pieces is only 13.
And Hans Neiman is one of those thirteen.
It's genuinely difficult to overstate how much Hans exceeded expectations in this match.
If chess is a win for white, or for black, I would say it is just as "futile". From a mathematical point of view, chess is a finite game, a simple (but long) computation. Either white wins, or black wins, or it is a draw. I can write a 1-line problem that "solves" chess by printing the outcome of the game (but I have to write three versions and I can't tell you which is correct).
I can also write a relatively short program that is guaranteed to print the right outcome of the game, but it will take a long time to run.
But chess is fun to play, and it is fun to watch GMs play. Now with computers analysing the game live, watching two GMs playing is like watching two blind boxers fight each other.
@ronald3836 A "futile game" is technical term, not a descriptor. In game theory, a game is described as "futile" if perfect play will always result in a draw. Tic Tac Toe is a very basic example of a futile game.
@@Ruminations09 but what is the point of the technical term "futile" as applied to chess? Clearly chess and any similar game with perfect party is either a win for white, a draw, or a win for black. It is not sometimes a win, sometimes a draw (no chance involved). So in the case of chess, "futile" just means the second option: "draw". Why not call it that?
My point is, if chess were a win for white, it for black, that would not make the game any more interesting as a finite combinatorial mathematical object.
@@ronald3836 I... genuinely don't understand why you're asking me this question.
I'm not the one who decided what it means for a game to be "futile". It's mathematicians who use these technical terms.
I'm just using the terms the way they are defined.
@@Ruminations09 why not just say "is a draw" if "futile" adds nothing.
tic tac toe ends in a null but you could say that there is still a first mover advantage. Say you have two perfect players playing tic tac toe but at some random intervals instead of being able to make their perfect moves a random move is played instead. My intuition is that under those conditions first player will win more games. Same idea of chess, checkers etc.
"Who knew...?" Eh.....everyone?
The thing about gamers, there is a line, if you cross simply to win, you can never go back.
Some cheaters just do it for the hell of it, they don't do it to win, those people are assholes, but they are not cheaters.
A cheater is one that does it to win the game, and that is a mindset, you don't come back from that because you lost you moral towards the game.
Once a cheater, always a cheater.
A grandmaster only needs to know if the position is "better" for black or white. If they know, they know there's a move somewhere that gives them an advantage and it just becomes a puzzle of finding it in a long classical game.
After watching this vid, I still know next-to-nothing about chess, but I am an expert on Rocky movie trivia.
I know this is old but, honestly the lichess bot plays in weird ways sometimes, like at lower levels it will still make perfect moves and then just mess up every now and then, and you can capitalize on its mistakes but it also finds moves I feel like no lower level player would find sometimes. Honestly I'm not a great player at chess, but I mainly play shogi and the bot on lishogi is way more insane at doing this, like the level of even the level 1 bot plays better than most people I play at shogi online on shogi wars or elsewhere. It sometimes won't find checkmate, but then the level 2 AI will find like mate in 8 or something, it's insane.
Weirdly I've had more success vs the lichess AI by playing C4 more, I don't know if it's just me breaking out of theory or what but I find it easier to win.
tictacto is done via minmax algorithm. it's basically the manyworlds theory recorded and the most valuable leaf of the tree of world is chosen.
the advantage of first move lets you dictate the direction of the game, it might not objectively be an advantage but its harder to play on the back foot for a human
Was the Avi Loeb jump scare necessary lol