Bit of a fluff piece with a weird title. Yes, GMs use "suboptimal moves" in their games, but the main reason is to take their opponents out of prep, and more importantly those lines are also heavily analysed by engines. They are specifically looking for imprecise moves that are only imprecise if the opponent finds the correct line, which could be 10-15 moves deep (so it might not be feasible to do over the board).
And this isn't something new. Magnus has been doing this for a few years now, after getting bored of facing the same over prepped opponents. He has mastered this technique, and showed that he's still the GOAT at mid to late game positions once the opponent is out of prep. But again, he's not doing this "randomly", he's studying when and where he can do it to temporarily get a disadvantage that will sort itself out later in the game. And engines are heavily used still.
A valuable lesson AI taught me is how bad articles on Bloomberg and Forbes are. They probably have always been this bad, but I were unaware of that until they started writing about AI (because, admittedly, I subconsciously thought well-known = good).
There’s something called the Gell-Mann amnesia effect where people often see what you have but then go back to assuming the other stories are all reliable.
I used to love Private Eye and they have done great journalism that’s highly acclaimed, but the only thing they wrote that I really knew about (literally the office I was in) was outrageously wrong and would have been so easy to verify (ask literally anyone in the BBC building we were in to go to that floor, or take a tour or write an email). Can’t read it any more.
Here's Wikipedia's entry on the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, because I've found it a very useful concept to know. Despite my media experiences, I still keep falling for it. And I love that we're still referring to it as Gell-Mann Amnesia here:
In a speech in 2002, Crichton coined the term "Gell-Mann amnesia effect" to describe the phenomenon of experts reading articles within their fields of expertise and finding them to be error-ridden and full of misunderstanding, but seemingly forgetting those experiences when reading articles in the same publications written on topics outside of their fields of expertise, which they believe to be credible. He explained that he had chosen the name ironically, because he had once discussed the effect with physicist Murray Gell-Mann, "and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have".
> As much as chess players can prepare, they can’t memorize everything. When they’re sitting at the board, their computers slumbering at home, they will inevitably be defined by the limits of their knowledge and ability. As a result, the elite grandmasters have realized the most valuable move is often the one that forces their opponents to start thinking with their brains rather than their engines, even if it might not be the “best” possible move.
I agree it's not exactly breaking new ground, but it's an okay article for a generalist audience.
Funnily enough, this is how I managed to start beating my best friend at chess, who reliably beat me every game previously for 2 decades.
One day I just started making somewhat random moves (not terrible obviously, but unusual, and which sometimes gave me a temporary disadvantage). This completely messed with his style of play. He was trying to figure out what my grand strategy was I guess and tied himself in knots. From that moment, I could often beat him.
> AlphaZero, the engine that pioneered the “neural network” approach now incorporated into Stockfish
That's simply not true. While stockfish does use a neural net, it's not using the MCTS approach like LeelaChessZero, and only uses the neural net for evaluating a position, not for suggesting moves. And it was only implemented after stockfish lost to lc0 in a computer chess tournament.
Back in the dark ages of high school, our chess coach specialized in this. We would study openings and strategy. Then he would come up with totally off-the-eall moves. And win, of course, because we had no clue how to respond.
Seirawan Chess, Euroshogi, Fischer Random/chess960 (or chess18) or Crazyhouse are other ways to make chess more interesting or less predictable.
In this video Fischer briefly and enthusiastically talks about this topic.
He talks about Fischer Random and he suggests the Capablanca proposal might be even better, and there can be even more creative variants.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb7-0R2qg98
I like Seirawan Chess and Euroshogi a lot, next to King of the Hill and other games like Minishogi, Tak, Tzaar and RftG.
Define "average" and "very good" - it's quite easy to become good enough to beat all your friends and family (as long as you haven't made friends at the chess club or chess competitions). But if you want to do your best at the local chess competition held in a school hall at the weekend against all kinds of people, from little kids to pensioners, then yeah, you're going to need to spend lots of time studying openings, learning end game theory, and solving chess puzzles.
I used to like chess and probably had a very good memory. But I never studied openings because I felt that those were 'other peoples games' and I figured the whole idea of playing a game is to have fun and see what you can do, not to regurgitate a bunch of paperwork and feel clever by congratulating each other on recognizing obscure opening variation #1922. Obviously the chess club wasn't amused: they cared about winning matches, I cared about having fun. So chess stopped being fun and I quit playing for a long time. Now I'm having a ton of fun playing with my kids and none of us have ever studied an opening book.
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And this isn't something new. Magnus has been doing this for a few years now, after getting bored of facing the same over prepped opponents. He has mastered this technique, and showed that he's still the GOAT at mid to late game positions once the opponent is out of prep. But again, he's not doing this "randomly", he's studying when and where he can do it to temporarily get a disadvantage that will sort itself out later in the game. And engines are heavily used still.
I used to love Private Eye and they have done great journalism that’s highly acclaimed, but the only thing they wrote that I really knew about (literally the office I was in) was outrageously wrong and would have been so easy to verify (ask literally anyone in the BBC building we were in to go to that floor, or take a tour or write an email). Can’t read it any more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...
In a speech in 2002, Crichton coined the term "Gell-Mann amnesia effect" to describe the phenomenon of experts reading articles within their fields of expertise and finding them to be error-ridden and full of misunderstanding, but seemingly forgetting those experiences when reading articles in the same publications written on topics outside of their fields of expertise, which they believe to be credible. He explained that he had chosen the name ironically, because he had once discussed the effect with physicist Murray Gell-Mann, "and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have".
> As much as chess players can prepare, they can’t memorize everything. When they’re sitting at the board, their computers slumbering at home, they will inevitably be defined by the limits of their knowledge and ability. As a result, the elite grandmasters have realized the most valuable move is often the one that forces their opponents to start thinking with their brains rather than their engines, even if it might not be the “best” possible move.
I agree it's not exactly breaking new ground, but it's an okay article for a generalist audience.
One day I just started making somewhat random moves (not terrible obviously, but unusual, and which sometimes gave me a temporary disadvantage). This completely messed with his style of play. He was trying to figure out what my grand strategy was I guess and tied himself in knots. From that moment, I could often beat him.
> AlphaZero, the engine that pioneered the “neural network” approach now incorporated into Stockfish
That's simply not true. While stockfish does use a neural net, it's not using the MCTS approach like LeelaChessZero, and only uses the neural net for evaluating a position, not for suggesting moves. And it was only implemented after stockfish lost to lc0 in a computer chess tournament.
In this video Fischer briefly and enthusiastically talks about this topic. He talks about Fischer Random and he suggests the Capablanca proposal might be even better, and there can be even more creative variants. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb7-0R2qg98
I like Seirawan Chess and Euroshogi a lot, next to King of the Hill and other games like Minishogi, Tak, Tzaar and RftG.
It’s a self reinforcing system. We need a major disruption to move on from it.