As a break from political news, I was going to write about the world chess championship title match that is just beginning in New York between the reigning champion Magnus Carlsen of Norway and Russian grandmaster Sergei Karyakin. The first game ended in a draw. Carlsen is favored but Karyakin is no pushover, currently ranked ninth in the world after becoming the youngest grandmaster ever at the age of 12.
Both are very young, 25 and 26 respectively, and are of the generation that came after computers proved their dominance in the game. You do not need to even haul out supercomputers like Deep Blue anymore. This was the computer that beat reigning world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. Now even the best human players cannot beat fairly run-of-the-mill computer programs that run on personal computers. While this is a big development for computers, I have never quite seen why this was perceived as a diminution for humans. We routinely accept that machines can do things better than humans, so why not at chess? After all, cars can go much faster than humans can run, and yet we still pay great attention to running events. The legend of John Henry may have resonated at one time but has little relevance anymore.
But politics has reared its head in the coverage of the chess match. The fact that one of the players is Russian and the other from the West seems to bring out all manner of extraneous political factors.
The tournament has prompted comparisons with the iconic 1972 showdown between American Bobby Fischer and the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky, two rivals in the Cold War-era whose showdown was dubbed the “Match of the Century.”
This match comes as Moscow and Washington’s relations have plunged to their lowest point since the Cold War due to disagreements on Syria and Ukraine.
The Russian president of the World Chess Federation (FIDE), Kirsan Ilyumzhinov is unable to attend the championship after being denied a visa, possibly because he has been on a US Treasury blacklist since 2015 over financial ties to the Syrian government.
“This is the first time in the history of the world championships that the (FIDE) president is not at the match,” Ilyumzhinov told journalists in Moscow on Thursday.
I wish countries and the media would not put national burdens on the shoulders of competitors but we seem determined to make every contest into something bigger than it really is.
I played chess fairly seriously as a student, even captaining my high school chess team, but my interest waned after I went to college, and after playing in a couple of national tournaments in Sri Lanka and performing in the middle of the pack, I gave up playing seriously. The game was a little too time consuming and anti-social for my tastes, with both players sitting in silence. It requires hours and hours of practice to become good and I just did not see the point. I still have a chess set, though, and taught my children the game but it never went anywhere and I haven’t played in many years.
I thoroughly despise the addition of nationalism to human accomplishments when all the nation did was (more or less) stay out of the way. Whether someone can play chess well or not has damn little to do with the lines on a map they were born in.
Of course I would say that because I find nationalism to be almost completely pointless except as a technique of political control, which is what I see going on when nationalists start getting all excited about “their” hero. What makes the hero “theirs”? Sponsorship? In which case, “ooh, you can afford to train a hero. yay.”
“But politics has reared its head in the coverage of the chess match.”
How do you mean? Politics has been involved with chess matches since 1948 at least.
As for Ilyumzhinov, if any president of FIDE has been political it must be him. For one thing he’s also the president of the autonomous Republic of Kalmykia. It’s rather misleading to call him Russian.
Now even the best human players cannot beat fairly run-of-the-mill computer programs that run on personal computers. While this is a big development for computers, I have never quite seen why this was perceived as a diminution for humans.
It requires hours and hours of practice to become good…
I must ask the question, then, just how much have these two practiced against a computer in their lives? I would think these computes could actually be very useful for training. I would also suspect back in your younger days, Mano, those “hours and hours of practice” would require people to pair up. Would that be an accurate assumption? If so, with computers, now one can practice alone if they cannot coordinate a practice session with other people. That, I suspect, can be harder to do as one’s skills become more and more advanced as they would prefer to practice with someone closer to their skill level.
Leo,
I think that you are absolutely right. Prior to computers, one had to spend hours analyzing chess problems and chess games played by grandmasters to identify tactics and techniques. Getting actual playing practice was hard for the reason you give and one had to enter lots of tournaments, during which one might have to play with quite a few decidedly inferior players if you were a top-ranked one.
I do not know how much players at the level of Carlsen and Karyakin play with computers but I would be surprised if they did not play a lot. Carlsen freely admits that he would likely lose to a computer so sees no point in playing against one in a competitive setting but he sees computers as ‘useful adjuncts’ to the game, presumably because they enable top players to play lots of practice games at a high level and the vast data banks stored in chess computers enable them to try out all manner of variations. So I think computers have raised the level of chess played by humans.
A huge part of becoming a high-level chess player (master level and up) involves knowledge of openings and both specific and generic situations. This means reading chess books, or being taught by someone else. The reading part is necessarily anti-social, but no more than any other subject that we learn about.