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".
> 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.
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.
Today I learned, Stockfish moved to neural network on 2023. I knew that it was just a minmax with alpha beta pruning and a really good eval function. Now its not.
What are you on about? Is this about how when people use an English term in a particular way, then their listeners/readers begin to use it too? If so, yes, it's a self reinforcing mechanism called lexical dissemination, and I'm very curious to hear about how you'd disrupt it.
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.
strongly disagree that studying openings is necessary to "do your best" at competitions. In my experience almost all games between players under 2000 (class players) are decided tactically. I'm expertish (2200+ bullet, 2200+ blitz, 1900+ USCF, win most local tournaments in my area etc) and I don't bother studying openings. Chess is 99.9% tactics at the class level. You won't reach GM without opening theory memorization but you wont reach GM anyway.
Also a reminder for anyone reading these comments that chess should be fun! Don't let psychological hangups like thinking u need a good memory, thinking you need to study openings, have a certain level of skill, or need to play a certain format (like avoiding blitz because it is "bad" for your game or thinking OTB is more important) stop you from playing chess! The only rules for how to play chess are the rules of the game; all the other stuff e.g advice about how to get good are just things people make up. Learn and play however you want and in whatever way brings you the most joy! Chess is a game and it is meant to be fun and not be taken seriously
Like the other comment said, usually being careful not to hang pieces and capturing hanged pieces takes one a long way. The most applicable advice is to count attackers and defenders in a particular square (or piece) and if you have more attackers than defenders then it is safe to move there, generally.
I was being (slightly) flippant. As in any other discipline you do need to actually learn some things: tactics practice, basic endgames, basic opening principles.
But that's different from opening theory and what people usually mean by memorization. It is almost all pattern recognition and rules of thumb, and all the opening theory memorization in the world won't help you if you dont understand the ideas behind them. All the top players are extremely sharp tacticians long before they do any memorization.
You have to run the computation. Garry Kasporov is great at this. Its like what is the answer to 1 + 1, you can look it up in a table (memory) or you can understand the concept of addition and run the computation yourself to get the answer (best move).
I don't see the sarcasm because it IS especially handy in openings. If you understand the core principles like developing pieces and taking space, you won't need to memorize any openings to become good.
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".
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.
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.
It’s a self reinforcing system. We need a major disruption to move on from it.
I personally prefer to avoid the term altogether in favor of more specific terms, like:
- LLM
- chess engine
- image generation model
etc
Eg when they tested good chess players on random board positions they were just as good as people that did not play chess.
Also a reminder for anyone reading these comments that chess should be fun! Don't let psychological hangups like thinking u need a good memory, thinking you need to study openings, have a certain level of skill, or need to play a certain format (like avoiding blitz because it is "bad" for your game or thinking OTB is more important) stop you from playing chess! The only rules for how to play chess are the rules of the game; all the other stuff e.g advice about how to get good are just things people make up. Learn and play however you want and in whatever way brings you the most joy! Chess is a game and it is meant to be fun and not be taken seriously
Things like not leaving a piece hanging undefended, not falling into one move tactical traps (forks/pins etc.), and learning how to check mate.
You can achieve all of that by playing slower games, and doing some puzzles.
I was being (slightly) flippant. As in any other discipline you do need to actually learn some things: tactics practice, basic endgames, basic opening principles.
But that's different from opening theory and what people usually mean by memorization. It is almost all pattern recognition and rules of thumb, and all the opening theory memorization in the world won't help you if you dont understand the ideas behind them. All the top players are extremely sharp tacticians long before they do any memorization.
/s