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Ask HN: What are the word games do you play everyday?

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1•bkls•47m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Magnus Carlsen forced into a draw by more than 143000 people playing against him

https://apnews.com/article/chess-magnus-carlsen-match-world-freestyle-grandmaster-963a977765fa02d05a14d701666dfcd7
51•namanyayg•8mo ago

Comments

sfblah•8mo ago
Presumably "the world" used enough engine help to do this.
somenameforme•8mo ago
This is interesting! I assumed the same thing, so I just skimmed through the game with an engine. The world, on average, was definitely not cheating. As early as move 7 Magnus was outright winning!

But there's an interesting meta in that Magnus played far more passively than he normally would. And so I think he also expected he was probably playing an engine by proxy, and wanted to keep the position completely under control. If he knew the world was legit, they probably would have lost!

I'm still trying to reconcile how it came to be that the world didn't cheat though. Lowest common denominator amongst 140k+ people paired with inevitable chatter of 'Hey best engine move is blah' seems unavoidable.

Scarblac•8mo ago
Maybe the non cheaters lost interest when he was winning and the cheaters held the draw?
rthnbgrredf•8mo ago
I think the assumption that more than 50% of people are cheating in online chess is not correct. Another Grandmaster and ex-world champion Anand recently also did a match against 70k people and won.
somenameforme•8mo ago
That's not the assumption at all. The percent of cheaters in online chess is approaching an asymptotic 0 (as a percent of all players) simply because the sites, and chess.com in particular, have gotten very good at culling them.

But things like this are social. I didn't follow this (or even know it was going on somehow) but it seems very safe to assume that somebody and probably multiple somebodies were regularly pointing out and discussing engine moves.

So my only real assumption is that a significant chunk of people would end up deferring to the engine moves rather than their own preference. Of course my implied assumption there is also that a significant chunk of people were involved in the social aspects of this, but I think that's also a fairly reasonable assumption.

squigz•8mo ago
Based on a quick skim of the article, I don't think this was, for example, Twitch Chat picking moves, which might enable the social aspect you're referring to - although I'd like to point out the difficulty inherent to being in a room with many thousands of people, all spamming chess moves, and trying to find the one engine move :P
somenameforme•8mo ago
It was a correspondence event, played a move a day time control on chess.com. Chat would've probably been mostly on X and other such places.
squigz•8mo ago
In that case, I definitely don't believe a majority of people interested in this sort of thing would be intentionally setting out to cheat.
somenameforme•8mo ago
It's not that. It's that once you know the best move you start to see why. And then it becomes hard to get it out of your mind. It's the reason I don't recommend computer assisted game analysis, unless you just want a quick blunder check.

A very non-zero chunk of people also probably would not have even understood that that's cheating if it wasn't really clearly laid out in the interface somewhere. For instance computer assistance in the largest correspondence chess league is legal.

darepublic•8mo ago
> the percentage of cheaters is approaching 0. chess.com is _very_ good at culling them

Any evidence of this whatsoever?

artdigital•8mo ago
There are writeups about this. The sites score each move, it is extremely unlikely to pick superhuman moves multiple times in a row. Once or twice maybe, but not most of the times.
somenameforme•8mo ago
They do a lot more than just that, but a lot of the process is kept confidential. There's a huge cat and mouse game between cheaters and the sites so they try all sorts of things including only using second tier moves, and even 'blundering' but only in winning positions such that the blunder doesn't risk the outcome of the game. Some cheaters also only use the bot in certain parts of the game. In the extreme case you might have very strong players who are cheating (like in a money event) using only the comp eval. So they don't have an easy job at all.

Here, for example, is one of the more well known and easy meta-indicators of cheating: Humans spend more time on difficult moves than on trivial ones. Cheaters will typically spend a comparable amount of time on a trivial forced move, and the start of an exceptionally deep combination. And an even bigger tell is that said exceptionally deep combo may be followed by a couple of forced moves, yet he will again take just about the same amount of time to play those moves.

drewbitt•8mo ago
95 percent accuracy by the world. They traded most everything and played 99 percent accurate in the second half.
globular-toast•8mo ago
I wonder how many people playing legit got bored and signed off leaving it to the people using engines?
EnPissant•8mo ago
Magnus Carlsen would get crushed by an engine running on an iPhone 1. Meanwhile the world has access to iPhone 16s. The entire concept is flawed. I'm guessing someone made money off it, though.
esseph•8mo ago
The proper question might be: Why is this one iPhone stalemating 140k other iPhones in this particular task?

iPhone/computer/machine/etc

unsupp0rted•8mo ago
Better heuristics. Even 1% better heuristics is enough of an edge in a zero-sum game.
analog31•8mo ago
I don't know enough about chess, and will take your word for it. What it suggests to me is a deeper question: How do you get 143000 people to all fall in line behind a single machine, or person, making the best decision for them?
EnPissant•8mo ago
If you had a military-like organization and turned 143000 people into calculators led by one (talented) person or a hierarchy, then yes, they would crush Magnus.
ars•8mo ago
No they would not. If you imagine running a computer chess engine on 143,000 humans, it's not even remotely close to the amount of compute you need to win.

Humans don't win by calculation the way computers do. When you have multiple humans working together on chess they don't add up to an ultra-smart human. You are simply as smart as the smartest human in your crew, and that's it.

EnPissant•8mo ago
You could absolutely form a system to harness the power of that many people. It would not happen spontaneously, but it is possible given enough effort. Calculation and memoirzation plays a huge role in chess.
brador•8mo ago
Now I want to see a YouTuber hire 1000s of humans to make a human CPU. Each human can do a single simple task like a redstone block. What would their equivalent CPU clock speed be?

Could you play doom on humans?

bad_haircut72•8mo ago
Cheating obviously does happen but on the whole chess is kept alive by people who do it for fun. What would be the point of beating Magnus with a computer? Would anyone get satisfaction from that?
whythre•8mo ago
I mean, with Carlsen facing this sort of aggregate, large number of ‘opponents,’ yeah, I imagine quite a lot of them are cheaters.
olalonde•8mo ago
Oh, sweet summer child.
Marsymars•8mo ago
> Magnus Carlsen would get crushed by an engine running on an iPhone 1.

Did a quick sanity check here - this seems about right - Carlsen might be at least competitive with Pocket Fritz 4 at similar hardware performance to the iPhone 1, but that discounts the software improvements chess engines have seen over the past couple decades.

hnposter•8mo ago
Reminds me of Gary Kasparov vs. The World on MSN Gaming Zone.
tedunangst•8mo ago
How many people voted in complete accordance?
nurettin•8mo ago
This means the world (or most of it) was not cheating!

What makes it funny is: when 143000 chess players merge, they basically become Anish Giri.

voxl•8mo ago
It might be natural to jump to immediately think the majority was cheating, but as you rightly point out if they were cheating Magnus would have lost. Human players cannot compete with even a couple hours compute on stockfish let alone 24 hours.
selcuka•8mo ago
It's impressive that Magnus might have won if The World hadn't forced a stalemate.

> In the Chess.com virtual chat this week, players appeared split on whether to force the draw — and claim the glory — or to keep playing against Carlsen, even if it ultimately meant a loss.

cluckindan•8mo ago
It was not a stalemate, it was a threefold repetition.
selcuka•8mo ago
I stand corrected, thanks.
gangelov•8mo ago
There is the full game with some more details here: https://www.chess.com/news/view/the-world-forces-draw-in-his...
gcbill•8mo ago
Perhaps it is worth considering that this was Freestyle chess and not classical chess. Which means the traditional book moves with which chess engines are trained goes out of window. I am not saying Stockfish cant beat Magnus in Freestyle chess but it makes sense to believe that Chess engines are better at classical chess when compared to freestyle.

But then again, with 24 hour time to brute force every possible combination, I guess chess engines may be better at freestyle when compared to classical chess, due to the sheer amount of creativity and calculation involved.

throwawayyy86•8mo ago
It's actually the opposite. Humans fare much worse at freestyle chess because they don't have any opening theory and are unfamiliar with the patterns that arise from nonstandard opening positions. Engines don't care much about opening theory one way or another

Source: am rated 2000 fide (partly because I struggle with openings)

Scarblac•8mo ago
Chess engines haven't needed book moves fed to them for a very long time now. Start up any modern engine and let it analyze, and it will only be considering strong theoretical main lines from the first second.

That said, they have been trained almost exclusively on games that started from the normal starting position. But then, so have humans.

sceptic123•8mo ago
Isn't this the promise of LLM, that with enough data the best answer will surface. The problem is that it needs training against a Magnus Carlsen which is definitely not going to happen.
darepublic•8mo ago
Some irritating aspects to this story. It's a chess.com fluff piece and frankly it would have been disastrous to their bottom line if Magnus would have lost as of course it would mean a significant percent of the world was cheating. I would not be at all surprised if they had measures in place to stop that if it arose.

Freestyle chess has been almost universally known as Fischer random. But of course Fischer being who he was history needs to be sanitized. The ap story is also wrong in its description of how it works since pieces are only randomized along the back rank not "all over the board"

Then you have so called experts racing into this thread to pronounce that cheating had nothing to do with the outcome. On the contrary the accuracy of the world is suspicious and I don't believe chess.com would ever permit Magnus to lose this match so it makes sense that, despite strengthening its position a strong "draw by repetition" faction magically appeared to prevent that possibility.