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

by namanyayg • 1 year ago

51 39 1 year ago

sfblah• 1 year ago

Presumably "the world" used enough engine help to do this.

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.

Scarblac2• 1 year ago

Maybe the non cheaters lost interest when he was winning and the cheaters held the draw?

rthnbgrredf• 1 year 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.

drewbitt• 1 year ago

95 percent accuracy by the world. They traded most everything and played 99 percent accurate in the second half.

globular-toast• 1 year ago

I wonder how many people playing legit got bored and signed off leaving it to the people using engines?

EnPissant3• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

The proper question might be: Why is this one iPhone stalemating 140k other iPhones in this particular task?

iPhone/computer/machine/etc

unsupp0rted• 1 year ago

Better heuristics. Even 1% better heuristics is enough of an edge in a zero-sum game.

analog31• 1 year 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?

EnPissant3• 1 year 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.

bad_haircut72• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

Oh, sweet summer child.

Marsymars• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

Reminds me of Gary Kasparov vs. The World on MSN Gaming Zone.

tedunangst• 1 year ago

How many people voted in complete accordance?

nurettin• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

selcuka2• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

It was not a stalemate, it was a threefold repetition.

selcuka2• 1 year ago

I stand corrected, thanks.

gangelov• 1 year ago

There is the full game with some more details here: https://www.chess.com/news/view/the-world-forces-draw-in-his...

gcbill• 1 year 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• 1 year 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)

Scarblac2• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

darepublic2• 1 year 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.

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

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