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Re:Magnus Carlsen wins longest world chess championship game... by initialized on Friday December 03, 2021 @03:40PM (#29435082)
lots of games at this level result in draws, this was a win.
Re:Magnus Carlsen wins longest world chess championship game... by jfengel on Friday December 03, 2021 @04:13PM (#29435567)
That was the one thing I found distractingly wrong in Queen's Gambit. It completely glossed over the sheer number of draws. I'm a dilettante at chess, and even I know that.

(I gather that the number of draws may have been lower at the time, but they showed few or none.)

Re:Magnus Carlsen wins longest world chess championship game... by jll29 on Friday December 03, 2021 @05:11PM (#29436270)
It's perhaps a shortcoming of the medium – lack of time – and to keep the script short & engaging for the viewers. In a similar vein, computer nerds are shown to write code or hack systems in no time, when in reality a lot of high-concentration hours are burned, but from the outside watching someone stare at a screen doing not much other than think just isn't that exciting, and in the same way chess games ending in draws again and again aren't that exciting to watch for lay viewers. Also, films like that tend to ignore the "team" element (whether it's in sports or computing) and tend to over-emphasize the single protagonist "genius", also unrealistic.
Re:Magnus Carlsen wins longest world chess championship game... by NikolaeVarius on Friday December 03, 2021 @03:43PM (#29435145)
I wonder if this is a limitation on how humans conceptualize Chess. Do games played with computers either vs human or another computer frequently end in draws?

If not, maybe there is some insight to be gained to raise high level play even more.

Re:Magnus Carlsen wins longest world chess championship game... by throwaway81523 on Friday December 03, 2021 @03:59PM (#29435381)
Engine games (you can watch them at tcec-chess.com and some are terrific) with the standard starting position are almost always drawn. Engine tournaments are usually played instead with human selected, unbalanced openings designed to produce an exciting game with lower likelihood of a draw. The unbalanced opening intentionally gives one side (black or white) an advantage, so each opening is used twice, with each engine playing one game as black and one as white, to balance things out. The games are usually drawn anyway, with some occasional exciting wins. The top human players now study engine games closely, and play more like engines themselves. Very few mistakes => more draws.

It's unknown what would happen if a top human with serious preparation played against a modern engine. They'd have basically no chance of winning and a fairly low chance of a draw, with the unknown being "how low is fairly low". My wild-ass guess is maybe 1 game in 10 when the human has the white pieces and much lower with the black pieces. There is not much chess theory about what happens when a human plays a game from the beginning aiming for a draw, even though they do that all the time in real chess. It is something of a gap in the "literature".

Re:Magnus Carlsen wins longest world chess championship game... by YawningAngel on Friday December 03, 2021 @03:47PM (#29435201)
High level computers draw each other almost 100% of the time and beat humans 100% of the time.
Re:Magnus Carlsen wins longest world chess championship game... by umanwizard on Friday December 03, 2021 @04:06PM (#29435473)
In general as skill increases (assuming the competitors are evenly matched), so does draw rate. Human grandmasters draw much more often than human beginners, and engines draw even more than human GMs.

This is one of the intuitive reasons for hypothesizing that chess is drawn with perfect play, even though we can’t prove it.

Re:Magnus Carlsen wins longest world chess championship game... by LudwigNagasena on Friday December 03, 2021 @10:31PM (#29438452)
Yes, there is a limitation. People have to learn high-level ideas and develop their intuition. Computers can have millions of training games (to teach the NN and to do regression tests), terabytes of tablebase positions and an ability to calculate thousands of lines in real-time.