Agreed, which is what my hyperbole was meant to point out. There is basically no way to “get lucky” and win at chess against a vastly superior player unless the opponent either lets you win or has a massive brain injury mid-game. Those are the only two conditions I can imagine in which Kasparov loses to Jordan. Even in Kasparov has a massive fuck-up or two Jordan won’t be good enough to beat him (hence the discussions about spotting pieces).
However, I can (however remotely) imagine a scenario in which Kasparov gets some decent athletic and ball-handling training and jacks up a bunch of wild shots that happen to go in while Jordan rims out a bunch of layups. Unlikely? Sure. But more likely than Jordan beating Kasparov at chess.
brickbacon, Malacandra has already demolished most of your previous post. Allow me to finish…
I have no idea why you are comparing a title awarded for tournament results against being elected to a Hall of Fame.
Certainly there are far more people playing chess competitively than basketball! Chess players can be aged 4 - 100, can be blind or only play over the Internet. You can play chess almost anywhere (I’ve done it in the Dead Sea and in a broken lift.)
It’s hard to get actual figures, but I’ve seen estimates of 650 million chess players world-wide - and over 2 billion games have been played on the Internet.
Cite?
(Are you talking about a handful of specially built chess computers that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take years to develop? (if not, I have an 80% score against ‘Chess Titans’ on its top level…)
And in any case, how does this help Jordan? How are you going to teach him to analyse a billion chess positions?
Out of interest, what is your rating in chess?
Where did you get the idea that computers and humans use the same techniques to play chess?
I think that ultimately this thread mostly illustrates people’s biases toward their preferred game or characteristics. When you jack up a shot, by definition you’re taking a shot that is probably not going to go in. When you say Kasparov could jack up some shots- uh, every shot he takes is going to be jacked up. He’s going against a much taller and faster guy. He’s not going to blow past him. So saying he can jack up some shots doesn’t mean he has a chance, it just means he’ll be taking a bunch of unlikely and off-balance shots. When you’re shooting like that, you probably don’t make 6 in a row even if you’re playing by yourself.
Respectfully, the idea that even a well-trained guy with average physical characteristics can jack up and make 6 to 11 shots in a row over the consensus best basketball player ever - a guy who is much taller and stronger and faster - is pretty loopy. An excellent professional basketball player wouldn’t score 6 to 11 baskets in a row over Jordan in his prime. We have not really discussed this in this thread from what I can see, but Jordan was an outstanding defender. It’s not as famous as his scoring and dunking ability, but he was on the All-NBA Defensive First Team every year in his prime. He is one of the NBA’s all-time leaders in steals, and not just total steals but steals per game. In his prime he was good for about 2.5 steals a game, and that’s in five-on-five games against professional players. It’s much easier to get a steal or a block when you know the guy you are guarding cannot pass the ball to anyone else. Kasparov can read moves on a chessboard in a way most of us can’t, and Jordan can do the same with people trying to get off a shot.
And it’s already been agreed Jordan would miss some shots, at least over a series of games. The vast majority of the time he’s going to get his own rebound and be in better position to score. He’s eight inches taller and faster and nothing need be said about his jumping ability compared to the average person. (Notice that that CEO game had no rebounding? There’s a reason.) You don’t win anything just by getting the other guy to miss.
There’s been a lot more facts posted about what chess players can do!
(And sadly a lot more ill-informed opinions about top class chess.)
Kasparov can beat 4 2600 grandmasters simultaneously.
He can give a 2100 rated player two pawns start and still beat him.
Korchnoi is 80 and still holds a rating of 2560. How good will Jordan be at 80?
‘Most of us’?
I reached the top 3000 in the World at my peak and I wouldn’t even get a draw off Kasparov.
I repeat what I said earlier - people just don’t understand how difficult world-class chess is.
But he doesn’t have a 10% make chance. He probably doesn’t have a 1% make chance. And taking rebounding into account, Jordan probably has a better than 99% make chance (at least if he’s taking the contest seriously).
Jordan was way way better than a league full of guys, all of whom were way way better than the players they played against in top-level college competition, all of whom in turn were way way better than the players they played against in high school. Figure that Kasparov’s high end, if he gets to go back in time to age 18 or so and train rigorously as a basketball player, is roughly equivalent to a decent high school player. The difference in class is so high that chance really doesn’t enter in to it.
(I do buy others’ argument that there are more ways in which a basketball player could be incapacitated than a chess player, so Kasparov would ultimately win the endurance contest. But it wouldn’t be by sinking a bunch of lucky shots.)
That’s true. Then again, most people know more about Jordan. You can know nothing about basketball and still know that he’s considered perhaps the best basketball player ever and that he’s much bigger and stronger and faster than the average guy. Then again, obviously the non-chess players here don’t know the rankings system or just how superior Kasparov is even to other great players.
At basketball? Better than you, me, and Garry Kasparov unless we’re all healthy and he suffers a bunch of major health problems. Did this turn into a comparison of how they’ll play their respective sports when they’re 80? I think the idea here is that we are comparing these guys at the peak of their skills in their respective games. A great professional athletes is usually done or nearly done by the time he’s 40, nevermind 80. That’s just the difference between physical quickness and mental acuity. Jordan still knows how to play basketball, but you’re just not as quick at 40 and eventually the loss of speed and endurance offsets the accumulated knowledge. It doesn’t work quit that way in chess, and nobody is denying that.
Evidently not. But I think my comparison was entirely valid. I was talking about the ability to analyze potential moves, not beating someone in a game.
To add maybe a few relevant facts about Jordan: as I say, I think the idea here is that we’re talking about him at his best. His best seasons include 1986-87, when he scored 37 points a game - not a record, but a level that nobody had approached in 25 years and that nobody has come very close to in the 25 years since. According to an unofficial measurement called Player Efficiency Rating (which takes into account a player’s contributions including points and rebounds, counts misses against them, and adjusts for pace of play) he was even better the next year. His scoring was down to 35 points a game, still the best in the league, won the most valuable player award and he lead the league in steals AND was voted the best defensive player in the league. He lead the league in scoring 10 times, lead the NBA in steals three times, won six season MVP awards, made the all-defensive team 10 times (meaning he was considered one of the five best defensive players in the league, including one of the two best guards, is the all-time leader in scoring average per game, and is credited with four of the 10 best seasons ever by PER. But here we’re considering whether or not Garry Kasparov could make six consecutive lucky shots against him despite the eight inches and the leaping ability he’s giving up and somehow stop Jordan on defense even though he’d be extremely small and slow compared to the NBA defenders who generally could not stop Jordan either even when he was double-teamed, and certainly weren’t beating him in one-on-one in his prime. It’s no more likely than Jordan winning a game of chess against Kasparov.
Sorry, five season MVP awards and six in the finals. One year they gave the season MVP to Charles Barkley because they were bored of giving it to Jordan. Barkley had a great year, but Jordan was better. And you know what happened when their teams met in the finals? Jordan scored 41 points a game for six games, which is a record and is simply absurd, and I assure you revenge was a partial motive. I don’t mean to suggest that Kasparov is less competitive than Jordan, only that Jordan is pathological in his hatred of losing or being slighted in any way.
Computers don’t win that way, but humans can use computers to study their opponents in that way. Computers can recognize patterns and tease out data in ways that can be more helpful to a less talented player. In short, there seems to be a mechanical advantage there. It’s kind a like Sabremetrics in baseball. If a GM relies on complex statistical analysis, he can generally make better decisions. That means that theoretically, the role of gut feelings which can often be wrong in the case of a less talented GM can be minimized. Winning in chess can often be result of minimizing mistakes and bad assumptions.
And yet, there are common openings, responses, endings, etc. Just because there are many permutations doesn’t mean there are that many good ones, or that many that one player tends to use. There are plenty of permutation for a Rubik’s cube, yet that doesn’t stop people form solving them in seconds. Why? Because only a small set of those permutations are relevant or useful.
Both serve as a rough, but useful proxy for greatness, no?
There are no where near 650mm competitive chess players worldwide. That’s just complete nonsense, and I think you know that. If you really intend that 1/10 people on Earth play chess competitively, you are smoking crack.
You misunderstood. I don’t think computers play chess like humans do. My points are as follows:
The use of computers as a means of studying chess history, player tendencies, and likely outcomes can provide a mechanical advantage to an already skilled player.
A player can more effectively utilize their study time, notice subtle correlations, perform statistical analyses.
Computers can organize information, compile data, sift through results, and perform direct searches in seconds. It would take a chess player of the past years to do.
The advantage computers provide is like digging in sand with a shovel instead of with your hands. And even if the difference isn’t a stark as that at the moment, it certainly will be at some point. It’s now tro the point where an amateur can focus more on strategy instead of tactics, as those have largely been evaluated with precision by computers.
As much as you both want to critique my analysis, and understanding of the game (which is likely far inferior to both of yours), it is instructive to look at what the actual experts say:
[QUOTE=GM Nigel Short quoted in Time Magazine]
Powerful chess programs, which now routinely beat the best human competitors, have allowed grand masters to study positions at a deeper level than was possible before. Short says top players can now spend almost an entire game trading moves that have been scripted by the same program and that such play by rote has removed some of the mystique of chess. He likens chess computers to “chainsaws chopping down the Amazon.”
[/QUOTE]
This both validates my claim that computers routinely beat humans, and supports the belief that computers act as a powerful mechanical advantage. Furthermore, it means a guy like Jordan might need to memorize scripts to play in certain board setups.
[QUOTE= Gary Kasparov]
Today [2010], for $50 you can buy a home PC program that will crush most grandmasters.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE= Gary Kasparov]
The heavy use of computer analysis has pushed the game itself in new directions. The machine doesn’t care about style or patterns or hundreds of years of established theory. It counts up the values of the chess pieces, analyzes a few billion moves, and counts them up again. (A computer translates each piece and each positional factor into a value in order to reduce the game to numbers it can crunch.) It is entirely free of prejudice and doctrine and this has contributed to the development of players who are almost as free of dogma as the machines with which they train. Increasingly, a move isn’t good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn’t been done that way before. It’s simply good if it works and bad if it doesn’t. Although we still require a strong measure of intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more like computers.
[/QUOTE]
So people are playing more like computers, meaning that innate intuition is a smaller part of chess. I think this bodes well for the beginner. As chess tactics become more results based, it means that human variation matters less and less.
[QUOTE=Gary Kasparov]
The availability of millions of games at one’s fingertips in a database is also making the game’s best players younger and younger. Absorbing the thousands of essential patterns and opening moves used to take many years, a process indicative of Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours to become an expert” theory as expounded in his recent book Outliers. (Gladwell’s earlier book, Blink, rehashed, if more creatively, much of the cognitive psychology material that is re-rehashed in Chess Metaphors.) Today’s teens, and increasingly pre-teens, can accelerate this process by plugging into a digitized archive of chess information and making full use of the superiority of the young mind to retain it all. In the pre-computer era, teenage grandmasters were rarities and almost always destined to play for the world championship. Bobby Fischer’s 1958 record of attaining the grandmaster title at fifteen was broken only in 1991. It has been broken twenty times since then, with the current record holder, Ukrainian Sergey Karjakin, having claimed the highest title at the nearly absurd age of twelve in 2002.
[/QUOTE]
So the learning curve has flattened somewhat because people able to utilize computers. Again, this favors Jordan. Plus, keep in mind that Jordan doesn’t need to be better that Kasparov. He just needs to beat him once. I think that is easier today than it ever was.
That may be true for chess computers, but it’s not true for humans. There was a case a couple of years back where a grandmaster lost to a computer because he somehow managed to overlook the mate-in-one position he moved into. Extraordinarily rare, yes, but not one-in-a-billion rare.
Nor is it true to say that there’s no luck in chess. Consider the following: Suppose that we have a game between Kasparov and Jordan, but Jordan has a bluetooth earbud hidden in his ear, and hiding behind the curtain is a collaboration between Deep Blue, Magnus Carlsen, Levon Aronian, and Vladimir Kramnik. Every move, they consult amongst themselves, and tell Jordan what move to make via the earbud. Jordan would have a pretty good chance of winning that game, wouldn’t he?
OK, now suppose the same situation, except the earbud malfunctions. Jordan is left not knowing what move the experts would recommend, and so just picks a valid move completely at random (we’ll assume he’s at least had enough chess training that he knows what the valid moves are). There is a chance that, even with no skill whatsoever, he’ll still end up making the same move that the top experts in the world would have. In other words, he really could win by getting lucky. I’ll grant that luck has a very small influence, but it does have some.
Oh, and memorizing scripts won’t help Jordan (or any player) one iota, past perhaps the first three moves of the game. You couldn’t store enough scripts to make a difference if you used every atom in the Universe to do it. It’s easy enough to say “If the board position is this, then make this move”, but that particular board position will never actually come up.
But “reading moves on a chessboard” is not as useful as it once was. Just as having a guy feeling about a player as a sports GM was, or a stock as a broker. Will a trained professional likely do much better than a novice? Yes, but the process has become far more forgiving to beginners, and allows one to gain skills far quicker.
Well, considering it’s a one-on-one game, he would never need to take a shot. He would just back Kasparov down to the paint, the spin and put up a lay up with about 97% accuracy.
Geez. Clearly Jordan canot step off a basketball court, and then memorize a list of moves to play. The point was that, int he estimation of a GM, trained professionals now play chess like computers, using rote memorization of moves. That is an easy think to mimic. Now of course that alone will not win a game, but it means the number of moves subject to judgement is likely fewer, thus the odds of an upset are higher.
Even granting that point, I don’t think it moves the prospect of Jordan winning or drawing a game of chess into the realm of plausibility. OK, say it is easier to learn to play chess. I don’t think that makes beating Garry Kasparov any more likely than “he just needs to jack up six shots in a row” makes it more likely a pickup player of average physical skills can beat Jordan. Kasparov’s ability to understand chess is just that superior.
Layups are still shots, but agree he wouldn’t have to take a jumpshot from any significant distance unless he decided to. And I think his accuracy on layups and finger rolsl and dunks is going to be north of 99 percent in this situation.
That’s the point though. You don’t really need to “understand” chess on the level a guy like Kasparov does any more to be good at it. You don’t need to know WHY it works, just that it DOES work. So Jordan playing in this bastardized fashion will get better results than had he needed to intuit things the way a guy like Kasparov did.
Kasparov was/is great because he could do that, and because it led him to make the correct moves. Now, one can make the correct move just trusting a computer that knows it’s the correct move. Of course, you can argue that that does not make him a better chess player, but it does mean he will get better outcomes. If the question was will Jordan become a “better player” I would cede that that would likely never happen. If the question is just can someone get a result they desire utilizing a significant mechanical advantage, I think it’s a much easier proposition.
That’s why there’s a better (although very, very slim) likelihood of Jordan winning because the best is results based. A chess result can me gamed, and theoretically obtained without creativity, intimate chess understanding, or “vision”. That’s why computers are good at it. Now it’s not easy for a human without the requisite knowledge base to take advantage of those things, but given that the pros have succumb to such results-based, computer-like thinking, I have to believe it would work in Jordan’s favor given sufficient outside chess study.
Well, it’s not an either/or thing. More importantly, he would need to at least become a competent chess player to even make use of that mechanical advantage. Just as giving a child science equipment won’t make them a scientist. However, it does allow a college student to complete experiments in a day that took professionals weeks in the past.
OK, a typical chess position has about 30 possible moves. Typically top players consider about 4 of them (unless it’s a forcing situation, where there may be just one sensible move.)
Assuming you play into an ending, a game will last about 60 moves.
Would you like to calculate the chances that Jordan selects the correct move 60 times in a row?
(Once he blunders, he’s lost.)
And of course playing the best moves every time might only lead to a draw…
Being “good” that way - or just being “good” at it - doesn’t make you any more likely to beat Garry Kasparov. Being a good pickup basketball player doesn’t mean you have a chance of beating Michael Jordan in his prime at one-on-one either. Let’s say it’s easier to get from a beginner level of zero to an experienced, quality player level of something like 10 or 20. That doesn’t mean you have any kind of chance against guys who are 100s - people who might be about as good at the game as any person can realistically be.
Computers can’t recognise patterns in chess.
Humans can rapidly say ‘this position is better for White’ or ‘this is a position in which Philidor’s mate applies.’
Cite?
No. One is achieved through actual play.
If you want to compare Hall of Fame in baseball, use the Chess Oscar - awarded about 38 times, if you think that means anything.
Sure. All GM’s use computers (especially Kasparov.) Beginners however (like Jordan) simply can’t use computer opening databases, nor computer analysis effectively.
You don’t become an expert in an opening by memorising openings, but by understanding them.
[Quote=Originally Posted by GM Nigel Short quoted in Time Magazine]
Powerful chess programs, which now routinely beat the best human competitors, have allowed grand masters to study positions at a deeper level than was possible before. Short says top players can now spend almost an entire game trading moves that have been scripted by the same program and that such play by rote has removed some of the mystique of chess. He likens chess computers to “chainsaws chopping down the Amazon.”
[/quote]
Please stop saying ‘computers routinely beat humans.’ Only expensively designed programs which have taken years to create do so.
What Nigel meant was that in certain sharp fashionable openings (the Moscow variation comes to mind), you can get two well-prepared Grandmasters rattling off home analysis to a draw.
However it’s easy to avoid this (White can start with 1. d4 and 2. Nf3 if he wants to avoid computer analysis, for example.) Also the key phrase is ‘top players’. None of what Nigel said applies to beginners or club players. When two grandmasters are due to play, they can play through the last 100 games of their opponent, looking for opening innovations and bringing in a program to check them. This is **not **something a beginner can do - they would just be overwhelmed by the relelntless stream of positions passing in front of them.
Please, please give an example of a ‘script to play in a certain board setup’ that Jordan could memorise.
I’m sorry, but this is completely meaningless. :smack:
No human plays chess like a computer. Computers analyse every possibility, generating billions of positions and then crudely assessing them (mainly for material.)
Innate intuition is just as important as it always was (add in pattern recognition too, of course.)
What computers can do for top players is extend their intuition by giving them accurate information about some positions which they can then use to assess similar positions.
Have you ever coached a beginner? How would you teach them to analyse ‘like a computer’?
Oh please. Kasparov has used computers for decades, building up his innate talent.
How long do you think it takes to become a Grandmaster?
How long for a 50 year old beginner?
When you jack up a shot, by definition you’re taking a shot that is probably not going to go in. When you say Kasparov could jack up some shots- uh, every shot he takes is going to be jacked up. He’s going against a much taller and faster guy. He’s not going to blow past him. So saying he can jack up some shots doesn’t mean he has a chance, it just means he’ll be taking a bunch of unlikely and off-balance shots. When you’re shooting like that, you probably don’t make 6 in a row even if you’re playing by yourself.