I tend to have little patience with overly strained narratives about chess, such as media portrayals of a chess game symbolizing the Cold War or racial relations or something. That always seems so strained to me. It's a game, not a metaphor.
That said, I found the Gukesh-Ding conflict to contain what I perceived to be something of a narrative of Human vs. Machine, of the rise of the digital era. I don't actually know the players very well, but the impression I got from watching a few recaps is that Gukesh was a monster of preparation. He seemed to blitz out his openings and be ready not five or six moves deep, but who knows -- 15 moves deep in any direction? That was readily apparent from the amount of time it took him on the clock -- almost nothing -- while Ding was taking an hour to evaluate on the board.
I have heard Magnus say that he views Ding as an intuitive player rather than a calculating machine, so that supports the narrative. (Speaking of whom, I do have the feeling as I've watched the last two world championship cycles that we are watching avidly all around the world to see who can finally and definitively lay claim to being the third and second best players in the world. While I totally get why Magnus got tired of the classical chess championship, I think his choice puts the dreaded asterisk on this whole affair. We don't know for certain what would have happened if Magnus had been prepped and played Gukesh, but I have grown to have a lot of confidence in the Norweigian)
So of course returning to the human-machine narrative: in Game 14 Ding fell apart in entirely human ways. Even I know not to put a bishop in the corner if you want to make sure it can find places to escape. I'm probably 1800 or so, but the rook blunder made even me flinch. I knew that as black I would have immediately traded of the rooks and bishops, but if you had asked me to swear that the two pawns beat the one with the kings in that position, I would have said "I'm not sure but it's certainly worth a try."
So when you say that champions are just as human as we are, I'm tempted to say that some are more human than others. Gukesh is obviously an, eating, breathing human, but at the same time his win is representative of a new era. He's the first champion brought up entirely in the era of elite engines. Sometimes it seemed as though he wasn't playing chess, he was playing computer moves from memory. Which isn't very fun, if true.
In all walks of life we now have to contend with The Rise of the Machines. There was recently an AI-created album of what if Led Zeppelin had been a 1950s band. That kind of thing I find quite repulsive. Art that is solely the creation of a machine isn't remotely close to art.
Which begs the question -- was the chess championship closer to a work of art or the moves of a machine? And down the road, are we going to see a lot of ultrapreparation meets ultrapreparation? Anyone with an appreciation for artistic chess blanches at the idea. That win by Ding, his second win, in I forget which game, felt like inspiration and innovation, and was really fun and thought provoking. We need more of that.
On the Warrior front, I was watching as the game unraveled and talk about your human errors, they were all over the place. The Warriors had the game in hand and made enough just mental mistakes that I'm still reeling and will not be able to speak any further of the matter until I've adjusted emotionally, which should probably come before the next world chess championship.
I think there's two interesting things going on when we talk about "human chess" vs. "machine chess." The first, of course, is the nature of opening preparation. Chess engines didn't inspire players for the world championship to prepare deeply: Botvinnik did back in the 1950s. This sort of arms race gave Soviet players a huge advantage throughout the Cold War era, with the notable example of Fischer falling into Soviet prep in the first game of his match with Petrosian in 1971. What's funny about opening preparation with computers is that everyone is prepared for the computer's top choice, so the players often pick secondary moves that are slightly less good to surprise their opponents. This helps to explain Ding's use of the French to good effect and many of Gukesh's opening ideas. This goal of surprising the opponent is probably good for chess in general: there's less incentive to play the same opening system over and over again as in the Kasparov-Karpov matches of the 1980s.
The second strand is the idea of Gukesh as more calculating and Ding as more intuitive once they leave the comfort of their opening preparation. To some extent this means that Gukesh's play is going to resemble that of a computer more frequently, but part of this is just because he is currently the stronger player - you would expect the guy who won the match to play more like a computer because computers are better at chess than people are. It's also interesting to note that Gukesh didn't use computers much until he was already a GM. Ding was prone to all sorts of lapses because of the bad form he's shown over the past year and a half, very different from the highly accurate player he was previously.
I agree with you about the dreaded asterisk and the shift in chess from an art form as it moves towards the uncanny valley. But the role of computer preparation felt less problematic than it has in previous matches, and it's conceivable that Ding would have won the match if his preparation had been a little better and he had avoided some much time pressure.
In the second-to-last paragraph, "the Ding of game 12" should be "the Ding of game 14", right? The impression I got was that game 12 was the closest that Ding came to his historical peak during this match.
Decided to go in and fix the game 12 to game 14, partly because I wanted to add a sentence or two to made the conclusion more clear. A good reminder that I should try to sit on a draft for a day or two before publishing.
What's funny is that even though Game 12 feels like peak Ding, from his comments after the game it was pretty clear that it took a long time for his evaluation process to tell him that he was winning - I have the feeling that the real peak Ding would have known much earlier. But certainly the closest to the Ding of the late 2010s.
From the commentary that I was watching, it seemed that Ding was consistently too pessimistic in his evaluations of his positions during the games (presumably due to a lack of self confidence following his recent results). I guess that this contributed to him trying to steer a lot of his white games to draws, rather than pressing. Given that, I was pleasantly surprised that he managed to make the match as close as it was. But I guess that the match could have turned out a lot differently if Ding had not won game 1.
I tend to have little patience with overly strained narratives about chess, such as media portrayals of a chess game symbolizing the Cold War or racial relations or something. That always seems so strained to me. It's a game, not a metaphor.
That said, I found the Gukesh-Ding conflict to contain what I perceived to be something of a narrative of Human vs. Machine, of the rise of the digital era. I don't actually know the players very well, but the impression I got from watching a few recaps is that Gukesh was a monster of preparation. He seemed to blitz out his openings and be ready not five or six moves deep, but who knows -- 15 moves deep in any direction? That was readily apparent from the amount of time it took him on the clock -- almost nothing -- while Ding was taking an hour to evaluate on the board.
I have heard Magnus say that he views Ding as an intuitive player rather than a calculating machine, so that supports the narrative. (Speaking of whom, I do have the feeling as I've watched the last two world championship cycles that we are watching avidly all around the world to see who can finally and definitively lay claim to being the third and second best players in the world. While I totally get why Magnus got tired of the classical chess championship, I think his choice puts the dreaded asterisk on this whole affair. We don't know for certain what would have happened if Magnus had been prepped and played Gukesh, but I have grown to have a lot of confidence in the Norweigian)
So of course returning to the human-machine narrative: in Game 14 Ding fell apart in entirely human ways. Even I know not to put a bishop in the corner if you want to make sure it can find places to escape. I'm probably 1800 or so, but the rook blunder made even me flinch. I knew that as black I would have immediately traded of the rooks and bishops, but if you had asked me to swear that the two pawns beat the one with the kings in that position, I would have said "I'm not sure but it's certainly worth a try."
So when you say that champions are just as human as we are, I'm tempted to say that some are more human than others. Gukesh is obviously an, eating, breathing human, but at the same time his win is representative of a new era. He's the first champion brought up entirely in the era of elite engines. Sometimes it seemed as though he wasn't playing chess, he was playing computer moves from memory. Which isn't very fun, if true.
In all walks of life we now have to contend with The Rise of the Machines. There was recently an AI-created album of what if Led Zeppelin had been a 1950s band. That kind of thing I find quite repulsive. Art that is solely the creation of a machine isn't remotely close to art.
Which begs the question -- was the chess championship closer to a work of art or the moves of a machine? And down the road, are we going to see a lot of ultrapreparation meets ultrapreparation? Anyone with an appreciation for artistic chess blanches at the idea. That win by Ding, his second win, in I forget which game, felt like inspiration and innovation, and was really fun and thought provoking. We need more of that.
On the Warrior front, I was watching as the game unraveled and talk about your human errors, they were all over the place. The Warriors had the game in hand and made enough just mental mistakes that I'm still reeling and will not be able to speak any further of the matter until I've adjusted emotionally, which should probably come before the next world chess championship.
I think there's two interesting things going on when we talk about "human chess" vs. "machine chess." The first, of course, is the nature of opening preparation. Chess engines didn't inspire players for the world championship to prepare deeply: Botvinnik did back in the 1950s. This sort of arms race gave Soviet players a huge advantage throughout the Cold War era, with the notable example of Fischer falling into Soviet prep in the first game of his match with Petrosian in 1971. What's funny about opening preparation with computers is that everyone is prepared for the computer's top choice, so the players often pick secondary moves that are slightly less good to surprise their opponents. This helps to explain Ding's use of the French to good effect and many of Gukesh's opening ideas. This goal of surprising the opponent is probably good for chess in general: there's less incentive to play the same opening system over and over again as in the Kasparov-Karpov matches of the 1980s.
The second strand is the idea of Gukesh as more calculating and Ding as more intuitive once they leave the comfort of their opening preparation. To some extent this means that Gukesh's play is going to resemble that of a computer more frequently, but part of this is just because he is currently the stronger player - you would expect the guy who won the match to play more like a computer because computers are better at chess than people are. It's also interesting to note that Gukesh didn't use computers much until he was already a GM. Ding was prone to all sorts of lapses because of the bad form he's shown over the past year and a half, very different from the highly accurate player he was previously.
I agree with you about the dreaded asterisk and the shift in chess from an art form as it moves towards the uncanny valley. But the role of computer preparation felt less problematic than it has in previous matches, and it's conceivable that Ding would have won the match if his preparation had been a little better and he had avoided some much time pressure.
In the second-to-last paragraph, "the Ding of game 12" should be "the Ding of game 14", right? The impression I got was that game 12 was the closest that Ding came to his historical peak during this match.
Decided to go in and fix the game 12 to game 14, partly because I wanted to add a sentence or two to made the conclusion more clear. A good reminder that I should try to sit on a draft for a day or two before publishing.
Yeah, that should be Game 14.
What's funny is that even though Game 12 feels like peak Ding, from his comments after the game it was pretty clear that it took a long time for his evaluation process to tell him that he was winning - I have the feeling that the real peak Ding would have known much earlier. But certainly the closest to the Ding of the late 2010s.
From the commentary that I was watching, it seemed that Ding was consistently too pessimistic in his evaluations of his positions during the games (presumably due to a lack of self confidence following his recent results). I guess that this contributed to him trying to steer a lot of his white games to draws, rather than pressing. Given that, I was pleasantly surprised that he managed to make the match as close as it was. But I guess that the match could have turned out a lot differently if Ding had not won game 1.