Posted by markusw 9 hours ago
It would be a tight fit, but I still think within feasibility. We've gotten so good at shrinking video that it kind of feels like wizardry to me. Granted, I'm not sure there existed a computer in the 90s that was powerful enough to encode or decode it.
https://trixter.oldskool.org/2014/06/19/8088-domination-post...
As it turns out, the video was encoded in such a way that it could be played back using the display bandwidth of the original PC, BUT doing that encoding required a modern computer to perform in a reasonable amount of time.
But anecdotally I'll share that one of my brother's college roomies was a consultant for RealVideo and was behind their initial codecs. He came back to them with algorithmic improvements a bit later and they just cold shouldered him saying the existing codec was good enough.
So who knows if the biz side folks at the time would have even seen value in better codecs, as unbelievable as that seems to us now in the streaming and zoom call world.
I think this is a common trend for algorithms that are in wide use, where you have Moore's law like behavior on the hardware side and then also software optimizations that give their own order of magnitude speedups.
You can technically have some then-contemporary FMV titles run on N64 with a 64MB cart. The hardware lends itself to it because it has the RSP, a secondary MIPS processor with re-programmable microcode. But the best video compression we had at the time was MPEG-2, which just wouldn't cut it.
> the average chess grandmaster during a classical game will analyze roughly the same number of moves as an amateur player, but they analyze only the most critical moves and do a better job with that analysis.
I don't buy this. I've seen GMs playing online while verbalizing their thought process (on twitch / youtube videos where they livestream their play), and they consider way more branches than I do, while also going deeper than I ever would on some branches. My top rating in lichess blitz is about 1900, not bad but way lower than a GM.
The only time when GM will definitely analyze more lines than an amateur is in a highly tactical position but that happens, again, maybe 1-3 times per typical game (tactics themselves will last several moves, but they would be largely calculated through at the beginning of the tactical melee).
The main thing commentators here are missing is that GMs have more confidence and do not repeat their analysis, but amateurs (strong club players included) typically re-analyze the same lines over and over. That alone would account for far stronger play with fewer moves considered, if you count the same move multiple times, which you should!
Also, Jonathan Rowson (Scottish GM - peak about 2600) describes his training matches with Mickey Adams (peak #3 or so in world - 2760), and says pretty much the same thing. Most of the time he asked “what about this line I rejected”, the answer was usually “I hadn’t considered that”.
Those critical moments are a big part of the difference between a GM and a good club player though. If a GM was somehow handicapped to not calculate such tactics, I think lesser players would be able to draw games against GMs much more often.
I agree that GMs can avoid calculation in many positions (e.g. openings as you said), but the value of broader and deeper calculation is still huge in chess.
It's totally true that most people overestimate how much of GM's abilities comes from pure calculation, and underrate intuition. That's what it's getting at.
But in classical games GMs are, in fact, doing tons of calculation, and the statement is literally completely false.
This is a known thing among chess players, and even low-skilled players do it to some extent. A newbie to chess can (and almost every teacher will say 'should') work their pattern recognition by just solving tactical chess puzzles and very quickly improve at spotting things like one or two move checkmate patterns or forks or pins or whatever.
It's more of a memory thing than subconscious calculation.
Sometimes it really looks like "calculations in the back of your head". Have you ever been struck with an 5 moves long tactics in positions you've never seen? Because I have.
There are hardly any other explanations than subconscious calculation.
Would you make the move based on vibes alone in a non-blitz game? The calculation is still required and it is faster for those already familiar.
What does this mean exactly? They analyze the same number but the grandmaster analyzes "only the most critical moves."
So does that mean at every given analysis opportunity (each move I guess), they analyze better candidates?
If so I guess these 2 things are totally redundant? "they analyze only the most critical moves and do a better job with that analysis."
Alternatively I wondered if perhaps they actually perform analysis on less moves (perhaps because they already know the lines or remember their previous analysis). But I think that contradicts the claim that they analyze about the same number of moves.
This is intuitive and I guess I'm not surprised this is what was meant. They analyze the same amount of moves they are simply better at it (picking candidates, calculating, etc.)
I guess maybe im being a bit nitpicky but I feel like this is still a misleading way to say that.
> the average chess grandmaster during a classical game will analyze roughly the same number of moves as an amateur player, but they analyze only the most critical moves and do a better job with that analysis.
You could just omit "only the most critical moves" instead of listing it as an additional thing.
> the average chess grandmaster during a classical game will analyze roughly the same number of moves as an amateur player, but they do a better job with that analysis.
"only the most critical moves" sounds like less, especially when listed in addition to analyzing better.
I digress.
Im not sure where the misunderstanding is.
The article says better players calculate a similar amount of moves and your anecdote shows the better player calculating a lot less.
So yeah it rebuts but the idea that GMs analyze more moves but it doesnt agree with the article, right? I guess just in the sense that its not more.
It's not one and the same, but strategy patterns are definitely a thing too.
There are:
- tactical patterns (e.g. "back rank checkmate", or "pair of pieces that can be forked by a pawn");
- strategy patterns (e.g. "knights are good in closed positions", or "in a same-colour bishop endgame, put your pawns on the colour opposite to the bishops").
There's also calculation ability which also partly relies on patterns one has seen before.
I actually don’t know this for sure, I should say that they don’t verbalise more moves than I think about. It’s plausible and perhaps even likely that they have a lot of moves or positions they do touch on but immediately discard so don’t even verbalise.
So if you measure amateurs via club players (=what people might have considered chess amateurs before), that might give you a different result from the average online player (=what people might consider average amateurs today).
It is much easier to imagine the 1600 FIDE OTB player doing 20-40 positional evaluations than the 1200 random chess.com scrub (eg me) doing the same.
[1] (2011) has a summary in the introduction:
de Groot presented chess players of varying skill, including some of the best players of the time, with an unfamiliar position and asked them to think aloud as they analyzed the position and chose what move they would make. de Groot found that, contrary to popular belief, the strongest players did not think further ahead than weaker players. World-class Grandmasters (GMs) searched at a similar depth and considered a similar number of options as mere chess experts.
Six Grandmasters, five International Masters, six Experts, and five Class A players completed the think-aloud procedure for two chess positions. Findings indicate that Grandmasters and International Masters search more quickly than Experts and Class A players, and that both groups today search substantially faster than players in previous studies. The findings, however, support de Groot’s overall conclusions and are consistent with predictions made by pattern recognition models.
Masters (2350+) | Intermediates (1800-2200)
(Mean values only, i tried inlcuding stddev but it was hard to read)
Positions Evaluated (A): 145.3 | 138.6
Positions Evaluated (B): 216.6 | 190.6
---
Max Depth (A): 11.7 | 9.4
Max Depth (B): 14.1 | 12.0
---
Mean Depth (A): 4.1 | 3.3
Mean Depth (B): 4.9 | 4.2
What i found interesting was that the "intermediate" group had a higher number of "base moves" they evaluated (eg Pos A: 5.6 | 8.6).
The previous studies (de Groot and another rperoduction from 1998) had "Nodes visited" for position A at 51.6 | 34.3 and 48.3 | 40.1 so similarly close together as the new ones, but much lower. (depending on your definition on "similarly close together")
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011...
Maybe this was satirizing people running after every shiny new thing, but the MMX certainly wasn’t. The Pro was the first P6, a totally new, out-of-order microarchitecture that the Pentium 2 would be based on. The MMX was a standard P5 Pentium with a larger L1 and the MMX vector instruction set which, while the first of its kind in an x86, was ultimately not used much in applications, partly because it was integer-only (also because it awkwardly co-opted the existing FPU registers rather than having its own register file). In any case, the Pros were expensive and meant for business use, while the MMXs were consumer processors.
Because this move was a money maker for all involved, all memory producers and also AMD followed immediately the Intel initiative. Memory modules without ECC would have never existed if adequate consumer protection laws had existed.
So a computer from back then _can_ run at Elo +3k, but the programmers at the time wouldn't have been able to implement it even if you went back with a time machine and the blueprint for the technique. They wouldn't have the teacher model to distill from.
I see no reason to doubt the author here.
I spent some time trying to figure out how some of the humans seemed to have trapped the machine out of the opening, because it looked like the human was winning.
I wish disclaimers like that would be at the start and not halfway trough the text.
I thought about something the other day... Modern chess sites run proprietary algorithms to detect cheating by modern engines. But would it be possible for an old engine, let's say from the 70s or 80s, running on modern hardware to deceive these algorithms?
They wouldn't win every tournament but still have a respectable performance.
Maybe a pure neural net (no tree search at all) would stand a better chance. Shockingly, those can play at IM level.
Also notice that for events like Title Tuesday you must play on a dedicated client with at least 2 cameras, so it would be significantly harder to pull it off.
Yes, along side you robosexuals
I just ran Andrej Karpathy's Tiny Stories model on a tiny ESP32. In principle we could probably have done this in the 80's and it would have been so amazing.
I had a Pentium Pro 200 back in the day, to run 3DSMax 1.0 on Windows NT 3.5.
That's discounting architectural innovations & improvements which are bound to happen somehow.