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Classic Games (Games)

Magnus Carlsen Auctions Jeans, Admits He Can't Beat Chess Engines (apnews.com) 52

Posted by EditorDavid from the reality-checkmate dept.
Magnus Carlsen "announced this week that he is auctioning off the Italian luxury brand jeans that started a dress code dispute at December's World Rapid and Blitz Chess Championships," reports the Associated Press. ("Condition: Pre-owned," says the listing on eBay, where by Friday night bidding on the charitable auction was up to $14,100.)

But Carlsen drew more attention on The Joe Rogan Experience last week — partly by saying "I have no chance against my phone." (Although he'd also described beating a fan's computer program, according to Firstpost, by playing "some kind of anti-computer chess, where I just closed up the position as much as possible and gave it as few possibilities as possible to out-calculate me.") Carlsen admitted that he rarely plays against chess engines due to their overwhelming strength, but acknowledged their value as training tools. "I rarely play against engines at all because they just make me feel so stupid and useless. So, I think of them more as a tool than anything else."
And this led Carlsen to add "If I started cheating, you would never know," reports Indian Express: It's not just a throwaway line about cheating either. On a two-hour-long podcast, where he touches on mostly everything under the sun, Carlsen fixates on cheating in chess. He also details how a player of his calibre would need very little to cheat in chess. "I would just get a move here and there (from an aide). Or maybe if I am playing in a tournament I just find a system where I get somebody to signal to me when there's a critical moment: a certain moment where a certain move is much better than the others. That's really all I would need to go from being the best to being practically unbeatable. There's so little you need in chess (to cheat). It really is a scary situation," Carlsen said before pointing out how in 2010 the captain of the French chess team was helping a teammate decide his next move at the Olympiad just by standing in specific spots around the table...

"If you're not cheating in a dumb way, there rarely is going to be a smoking gun. And without that smoking gun it is going to be really hard to catch people," Carlsen admits on the podcast... "As long as there are monetary incentives for people to cheat, there will be cheating in chess," says Carlsen on the podcast.
The article adds that Carlsen does not believe Hans Niemann used anal beads to cheat — and that he thinks Niemann has become a much better chess player since the incident. But... "Top level chess has been based on trust a lot. I don't trust Niemann. Other top players still don't trust him and he doesn't trust me," says Carlsen. "There is still something off about him now. We played an over-the-board tournament in Paris last year where there was increased security and he didn't play at nearly the same level there."

Magnus Carlsen Auctions Jeans, Admits He Can't Beat Chess Engines More | Reply

Magnus Carlsen Auctions Jeans, Admits He Can't Beat Chess Engines

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  • Why does chess need a dress code? I'm sure that's a formula for attracting new talent.

    • Re:Stupid (Score:4, Funny)

      by registrations_suck ( 1075251 ) on Saturday March 01, 2025 @12:47PM (#65203545)

      The females should have to play naked, so you can ensure they're not cheating and to make it easier to spot "anal beads".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bjoast ( 1310293 )
      Most sports have a dress code, and there is literally nothing wrong with that.

      • Most sports have a dress code, and there is literally nothing wrong with that.

        This. People who host an event make the rules for participating. Don't like those rules? Then don't participate.

        Go ahead and try to change their minds, but remember whose dojo it is.

      • Try to play in the NBA wearing the other team's jersey.
    • Even the local grocery store has a dress code (no shoes no shirt no service).

      In chess, people do (weird things [chess.com] (fail to bathe, make weird noises, make weird gestures, wear weird clothes), to distract their opponents. So there are rules against this kind of thing.

      In addition, chess organizers want the players to look good, because they want the sport to be respected. Being respected makes it easier to get corporate funding for the tournament, or to gain recognition from the Olympic committee, etc.

  • What was in those pants he was so desperate to not leave them unattended at the venue?

  • Don't get it.

    If you want to donate $14K to charity, why do you need to involve some used pair of jeans? Jus my donate the money to your charity of choice and forget about the used jeans.

    • Don't get it.

      If you want to donate $14K to charity, why do you need to involve some used pair of jeans? Jus my donate the money to your charity of choice and forget about the used jeans.

      First rule of financial narcissism; charities are fucking awesome..when you’re donating not-my money.

  • My layman's understanding was that the history of direct human vs. computer chess veered away from competition and toward training purposes or engines obeying uci_elo limitations quite a while ago; with the last human victories of any real interest being some draws in the early 2000s.

    Has this just survived as a perfunctory interviewer question; or did humans vs. bots actually stay interesting longer than that?
    • Similarly I find it interesting the word "AI" wasn't in the summary. Chess was the paragon of AI for decades. If only we had super-human chess AI, we'd have super-human reasoning. Now chess isn't even called AI. Really the case for today's chess algorithms is a lot stronger than it was for Deep Blue, which was mainly human-specified heuristics and brute force.
      • Modern chess engines are the same: they are brute force tree searchers with a heuristic. Take away the tree searching, and they perform badly.

        • That's how Stockfish works, AlphaZero used a neural net (before it was cool).

          • AlphaZero uses brute force tree searching. The neural network is the heuristic used to analyze each node on the tree. Without tree searching, AlphaZero is trash.

            • Iirc it used tree search to train but played without it or played looking only a few moves deep

              • I have no clue how your memory tricked you like that. You should get your memory checked, because you don't remember correctly at all.

                • Give it a quick Google if you're interested, AlphaZero is irrelevant now anyway. Magnus mentions in the interview a 'hybrid' stockfish that also uses neural net (NNUE) so yeah, it's not all tree search

                  • You did a search that showed you were wrong, and yet you still maintain your wrong-headed opinion.

                    When facts shine in your face, you insist they are not real.

                    • Lol I already did the search so I know what you will see if you ever do it.

                    • Exactly, you did a search. Good job. The surprising thing is, when the search proved you were wrong, you didn't change your opinion.

                      That is the definition of lunacy.

                    • You know, I don't go around correcting people because it makes me feel smart. I thought you might want to learn something new about something you seem to care about, but you don't, and that's fine, so sorry to bother you.

                    • Smart people spend time correcting themselves, not other people. That is why they are smart. You are not.

                    • I don't know if you listened to the podcast, but Magnus brought up some interesting scenarios where his engine would suggest the not strongest move because it seemed to offer more winning chances ( underpromotion in his example). Anyway ypu seem to already know everything but it's worth a listen for anyone else who followed this far.

            • The tree search part is trivial. The heuristics, which it learns through self-play, are practically the whole ballgame. It can only evaluate a tiny, minuscule fraction of possible moves at each turn. It never, ever would have made any notable progress at all towards winning Go with just tree search and not heuristics.

              I do think a pure left-to-right LLM certainly needs more of an executive function to guide and direct repeated evaluations, which MCTS accomplishes, but not in a flexible enough way for re

    • The interviewer was someone who doesn't play chess, and isn't aware of the world.

      The most recent computer vs human paid tournament was maybe this [reddit.com], although there were personal games between humans and computers that were streamed.

  • The top players have been unable to beat ANY engine, including American and European chess engines, since the 90s.

    • I too admit, I cannot beat any chess engine.

      I think that question makes the interviewer look like a stupid.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hawk ( 1151 )

        >I too admit, I cannot beat any chess engine.

        I have yet to meet the engine that can't be beat.

        All it takes is a few sticks of dynamite.

    • The top players have been unable to beat ANY engine,

      That's a really dumb statement, since GnuChess is still an engine. Top players can beat a lot of the existing engines, just not the top engines.

      • Technically it's not a statement, it's a sentence fragment. I'm sure a pedant like yourself will recognize the importance of that distinction and thank me for my contribution.

  • Put the players in a sealed room wrapped in a Faraday cage. Only one door in or out and only cameras watching.

    If you really wanted to be paranoid about cheating, they only get to wear a pre-approved g-string (plus tops for women).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by JMZero ( 449047 )

      Put the players in a room together?

      But what if their opponent is the one feeding them moves?

    • Put the players in a sealed room wrapped in a Faraday cage. Only one door in or out and only cameras watching.

      If you really wanted to be paranoid about cheating, they only get to wear a pre-approved g-string (plus tops for women).

      This is beginning to sound like a pro-wrestling death match. I can hear the testosterone-pumped self-promotion right now.

      So, where can I buy tickets?

    • The top (paranoid) tournaments use scanners to make sure there are no illicit radio communications going on.

  • Chess cheating is hard to detect (Score:3)

    by larryjoe ( 135075 ) on Saturday March 01, 2025 @03:00PM (#65203805)

    There's so little you need in chess (to cheat). It really is a scary situation," Carlsen said before pointing out how in 2010 the captain of the French chess team was helping a teammate decide his next move at the Olympiad just by standing in specific spots around the table...

    "If you're not cheating in a dumb way, there rarely is going to be a smoking gun. And without that smoking gun it is going to be really hard to catch people," Carlsen admits on the podcast... "As long as there are monetary incentives for people to cheat, there will be cheating in chess," says Carlsen on the podcast.

    Communication for smart cheating in chess is sort of like encryption with a combination of steganography and one-time pads. It would take a lot of statistical analysis combined with a huge amount of luck to detect even that communication was going on, let alone decrypting the message. The only way to prevent such cheating is to isolate the two players in a Faraday cage with no sight or hearing of anything outside of the room, like a Fischer-Spassky Game 3 but even more isolated.

    • Chess cheating is hard to detect

      Not according to Carlson,

      I don't trust Niemann. There is still something off about him now.

      He's insinuating he's cheating.

      "If you're not cheating in a dumb way, there rarely is going to be a smoking gun. And without that smoking gun it is going to be really hard to catch people"

      Except for him, he(Carlson) only knows NIemann is cheating. He's such a shitty, deplorable sack of shit that sucks at chess and always blames everyone else but himself for his shitty play.

  • And his Calvin Klein jeans.

  • ...that he's got to sell his pants to get by? Not a great career path advert for the chess world.

    • He's selling his pants for charity. Specifically, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America.

      Actually, the auction is over. His trousers fetched US$36,100.

  • Written by someone that truly doesn't know anything about chess.

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