6 ms·

Chess is kept afloat by chess players, not by billionaires. If all the billionaire backers stopped sponsoring tournaments, people like me would still play, stil

by mna_ 7d ago

Chess is kept afloat by chess players, not by billionaires. If all the billionaire backers stopped sponsoring tournaments, people like me would still play, still pay for chess club memberships, still pay entry fees for tournaments, and still buy chess books, and so on.

magicalist 7d ago
I mean, this is the problem with analogies and trying to use them to prove things, right? People working through problems from an analysis book with their friend (or an LLM) is not the same as research mathematics. People playing in a chess club is not the same as what makes for a good chess tournament. Lumping everything together is just making this branch of the conversation less relevant.
debatem1 7d ago
Also, you learn to be a better chess player by... playing better players. The widespread availability of chess engines has made flawless opponents available to every player. If your goals are understanding the game, self improvement, building thinking skills-- this is the best chess has ever been. It's only if your goal is to beat every opponent you can find that chess is in a bad place.
- ArcHound 7d ago
  It's not that easy. Playing stockfish is like playing tennis against the wall (for untitled players at least). Even if you don't blunder anything, you'll still find yourself in a worse position without any clue as of what went wrong and why. Whereas when playing humans, they can usually explain their approach and when they noticed errors in your play.
  - Quekid5 7d ago
    > Playing stockfish is like playing tennis against the wall (for untitled players at least). It's the same for Magnus Carlsen. Even with Queen odds, Stockfish is literally unbeatable for the best players in the world. It's just too strong at evaluating all kinds of random tangent moves (and ensuing positional advantage) which no human player can possibly pay attention due to the time required. Stockfish vs any human is like Carlsen vs other players by about 3-5 orders of magnitude[0]. It's that stark. [0] A wild pun appears. EDIT: To avoid having to respond to each responder, fair comments about Queen odds. Maybe I was thinking Rook odds? Also, I kinda lumped Stockfish in with all the other engines, but I realize there are other engines with different properties ofc.
    - ArcHound 7d ago
      No worries, I know stockfish is unbeatable by humans. But sometimes, these GMs can flag it, which counts as a win (especially when it's proxied by a cheater). Sometimes they can also explain the idea that cost them the game, so they've learned something maybe. Whereas us scrubs literally cannot do anything at all for reasons completely beyond our understanding.
      - jacobolus 7d ago
        > Whereas us scrubs literally cannot do anything at all for reasons completely beyond our understanding Computer moves are typically much more concrete than human moves: a human will play based on pattern matching ("intuition") and can only make explicit calculation of a small fraction of possibilities, after which decisions are guided by guesswork. The computers are unbeatable in practice because they can calculate concretely in seconds what might take an expert human long intensive study to notice, and they don't make the same kinds of oversights humans can make. But if you stop and explore a particular position for an extended time, and if you have an intermediate level of chess skill, you too can probably often (usually?) figure out why it's doing something. Sometimes understanding the computer's reasons takes searching multiple branches of a tree several unlikely looking moves deep, but the collection of threats the computer was preemptively thwarting, traps it was setting, etc. are comprehensible to humans with enough effort, especially in games between the computer and a human. The frustrating thing about playing against the computer is that it notices and thwarts every plan you might come up with, before you make up the plan yourself, and it doesn't make (human-apparent) mistakes, so the game ends up feeling hopeless. Nothing you try works on it, and if your idea is even slightly inaccurate it will be exploited.
        ArcHound 7d ago
        You put it better than I could. The lesson of "in this exact position you can kick the pieces for 7 moves to get a fork, so instead you should play a4" is not something that I can implement into my games
    - VulgarExigency 7d ago
  - debatem1 7d ago
    I mean, I'm not a great player but I've learned a lot from working through games with stockfish using a git repo and a small script that lets me rewind to different moves and try different approaches. It may not explain its moves but if you're thinking through what's happened you can usually debug your game anyway.
psvv 7d ago
I think the parent comment meant professional, high-level chess. The kind people get played to play, not just do for a hobby. That's absolutely on life support. I'm not sure what the equivalent would look like in the math field, but it probably involves a lot of mathematicians losing their jobs and the quality of human-produced math decreasing overall. The quality of the math in general would be fine, since in this scenario cpus will keep producing it. The quality of cpu-cpu chess games is quite high, beyond human understanding in many cases. Chess is a weird example because it doesn't really have any utility beyond itself. Even pure math sometimes ends up having use in the strangest places. Although if no one understands the frontier math (because no one is getting paid to), I'm not sure it even matters what the quality of the cpu math is? It's a bit like a tree falling in a forest. If an LLM proves a theorem but no one understands it, did it make a sound?
- fidotron 7d ago
  > It's a bit like a tree falling in a forest. If an LLM proves a theorem but no one understands it, did it make a sound? But in future most proofs will be for consumption by other AI models in the pursuit of yet other proofs. It's kind of surprising so many mathematicians act surprised by this given this was clearly where automated proof assistants would lead. I guess they assumed they'd always be the ones guiding them.
  - magicalist 7d ago
    [dead]
  - mb7733 7d ago
    > But in future most proofs will be for consumption by other AI models in the pursuit of yet other proofs. What is the purpose of that? Its like art being produced for AI to consume. What is gained from that?
    - fidotron 7d ago
      Well if it proves useless presumably they'd stop doing it. But if AI is to recursively self improve understanding and evolving its own foundations, which are clearly mathematical, is essential. There is no need for humans to grasp what is going on in that loop.

by mna_ 7d ago

magicalist 7d ago

I mean, this is the problem with analogies and trying to use them to prove things, right? People working through problems from an analysis book with their friend (or an LLM) is not the same as research mathematics. People playing in a chess club is not the same as what makes for a good chess tournament. Lumping everything together is just making this branch of the conversation less relevant.

debatem1 7d ago

Also, you learn to be a better chess player by... playing better players. The widespread availability of chess engines has made flawless opponents available to every player. If your goals are understanding the game, self improvement, building thinking skills-- this is the best chess has ever been. It's only if your goal is to beat every opponent you can find that chess is in a bad place.

ArcHound 7d ago
It's not that easy. Playing stockfish is like playing tennis against the wall (for untitled players at least). Even if you don't blunder anything, you'll still find yourself in a worse position without any clue as of what went wrong and why. Whereas when playing humans, they can usually explain their approach and when they noticed errors in your play.
- Quekid5 7d ago
  > Playing stockfish is like playing tennis against the wall (for untitled players at least). It's the same for Magnus Carlsen. Even with Queen odds, Stockfish is literally unbeatable for the best players in the world. It's just too strong at evaluating all kinds of random tangent moves (and ensuing positional advantage) which no human player can possibly pay attention due to the time required. Stockfish vs any human is like Carlsen vs other players by about 3-5 orders of magnitude[0]. It's that stark. [0] A wild pun appears. EDIT: To avoid having to respond to each responder, fair comments about Queen odds. Maybe I was thinking Rook odds? Also, I kinda lumped Stockfish in with all the other engines, but I realize there are other engines with different properties ofc.
  - ArcHound 7d ago
    No worries, I know stockfish is unbeatable by humans. But sometimes, these GMs can flag it, which counts as a win (especially when it's proxied by a cheater). Sometimes they can also explain the idea that cost them the game, so they've learned something maybe. Whereas us scrubs literally cannot do anything at all for reasons completely beyond our understanding.
    - jacobolus 7d ago
      > Whereas us scrubs literally cannot do anything at all for reasons completely beyond our understanding Computer moves are typically much more concrete than human moves: a human will play based on pattern matching ("intuition") and can only make explicit calculation of a small fraction of possibilities, after which decisions are guided by guesswork. The computers are unbeatable in practice because they can calculate concretely in seconds what might take an expert human long intensive study to notice, and they don't make the same kinds of oversights humans can make. But if you stop and explore a particular position for an extended time, and if you have an intermediate level of chess skill, you too can probably often (usually?) figure out why it's doing something. Sometimes understanding the computer's reasons takes searching multiple branches of a tree several unlikely looking moves deep, but the collection of threats the computer was preemptively thwarting, traps it was setting, etc. are comprehensible to humans with enough effort, especially in games between the computer and a human. The frustrating thing about playing against the computer is that it notices and thwarts every plan you might come up with, before you make up the plan yourself, and it doesn't make (human-apparent) mistakes, so the game ends up feeling hopeless. Nothing you try works on it, and if your idea is even slightly inaccurate it will be exploited.
      - ArcHound 7d ago
        You put it better than I could. The lesson of "in this exact position you can kick the pieces for 7 moves to get a fork, so instead you should play a4" is not something that I can implement into my games
  - VulgarExigency 7d ago
- debatem1 7d ago
  I mean, I'm not a great player but I've learned a lot from working through games with stockfish using a git repo and a small script that lets me rewind to different moves and try different approaches. It may not explain its moves but if you're thinking through what's happened you can usually debug your game anyway.

psvv 7d ago

I think the parent comment meant professional, high-level chess. The kind people get played to play, not just do for a hobby. That's absolutely on life support. I'm not sure what the equivalent would look like in the math field, but it probably involves a lot of mathematicians losing their jobs and the quality of human-produced math decreasing overall. The quality of the math in general would be fine, since in this scenario cpus will keep producing it. The quality of cpu-cpu chess games is quite high, beyond human understanding in many cases. Chess is a weird example because it doesn't really have any utility beyond itself. Even pure math sometimes ends up having use in the strangest places. Although if no one understands the frontier math (because no one is getting paid to), I'm not sure it even matters what the quality of the cpu math is? It's a bit like a tree falling in a forest. If an LLM proves a theorem but no one understands it, did it make a sound?

fidotron 7d ago
> It's a bit like a tree falling in a forest. If an LLM proves a theorem but no one understands it, did it make a sound? But in future most proofs will be for consumption by other AI models in the pursuit of yet other proofs. It's kind of surprising so many mathematicians act surprised by this given this was clearly where automated proof assistants would lead. I guess they assumed they'd always be the ones guiding them.
- magicalist 7d ago
  [dead]
- mb7733 7d ago
  > But in future most proofs will be for consumption by other AI models in the pursuit of yet other proofs. What is the purpose of that? Its like art being produced for AI to consume. What is gained from that?
  - fidotron 7d ago
    Well if it proves useless presumably they'd stop doing it. But if AI is to recursively self improve understanding and evolving its own foundations, which are clearly mathematical, is essential. There is no need for humans to grasp what is going on in that loop.