Chess

World chess championship is on. Magnus is the clear favorite, but Nepomniachtchi is coming strong. It is a lot of fun.

I haven't been posting for sometime. And this seems like a good time to talk about chess.

My journey picking up on chess, again

As a kid I wasn't much interested in chess. My younger brother was into chess, he would buy books to review grandmasters' games. I didn't go further than playing casual games with him.

Maybe it was the quarantine that triggered this, but in the last year I started playing some chess on the smartphone. I had an Android phone for the last 3 years, and I used a random chess app downloaded at Play Store. I thought the app was very neat because it let me play against the computer at different levels and it allowed me to go back and try different things. Like Git, you know. The app also suggested me hints. I thought this was a dope way to improve one's chess skills. Little did I know, I was just scratching the surface.

Three years in Android world was enough for me to appreciate the iPhone again. I switched back to iPhone a couple months ago. I used the Appstore to download the chess.com website's app.

And oh my God! What a different experience this is. The app is really good --after you learn not to get intimidated by its crowded menubar. The app allows you to not only play against the computer, try lessons, solve chess puzzles, but also let's you play with real people around your skill level. That makes up for a whole different experience, because now the stakes are high (even though they are virtual and very intangible). With some skin in the "game", you learn faster and better.

Initially I liked the 10 minute games, where each player got 10 minutes on their clock. You need to win before your timer expires. You lose if your timer expires before your opponent's does. I thought this was a quick game. When I mentioned this to a friend, he said, "What 10 minutes?" And I said, "yeah I know it is kind of a fast game." And he said, "10 minutes games are long, I play 3 minute bullet chess". Wow!

These days I am playing the 5 minute blitz games. It is fast, but you still get time to think.

Humans like competition. Regardless of age. Playing a couple of games helps my mind feel invigorated and sharp again. It feels good to win a game. I know, it is petty vanity, and in vain, but it feels good. Losing is also motivating. Chess is addictive like that.

I think chess is good for improving attention. It seems to help with my ADHD brain. I think it is also good training for making decisions. After evaluating sufficiently, you gotta decide and commit to it.

Random tidbits

How old do you think is chess? I thought it has got to be older. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess#Predecessors

Does chess have anything to do with distributed systems? Of course it does! It has an interesting concurrency model. It is interleaving model in contrast to max-paralllel model. Max-parallel model would correspond to both sides doing their moves at the same time, without seeing each others moves. That would be an interesting way to play chess (provided you have CRDT like rules to merge conflicting moves and deal with illegal moves). It turns out such a variant exists, and it is called Synchronous Chess.

Relating chess to distributed systems further, you can think of each chess game corresponding to an execution of the distributed system. There are so many possible executions because of the concurrency and nondeterminism involved: players may choose to play different pieces in different orders which explodes the state space. You can talk about invariants arising from the rules of the game (possible legal actions in the distributed system), like white bishop always being on white squares, like at most one piece on each square etc. You can even talk about liveness/termination condition.

How much domain knowledge you need to appreciate a game, and does that correlate to the popularity of the game? Chess requires some knowledge (not too much) to appreciate and enjoy it. Watching grandmasters' games in YouTube are very exciting, you can enjoy them a lot with basic understanding of chess. Compared to chess, soccer requires even less knowledge to understand the game, and is more visual/faster-paced, which makes it fun to watch. Of course, even that is subjective. Many people in the US find soccer boring yet think baseball is exciting. It is all a big mystery to me.

I was surprised to learn that when it comes to playing and not just watching, chess is more popular. World Chess Federation (FIDE) approximated that 605 million people play chess. That’s more than twice as many people as playing soccer (250 million). What is the definition of playing in both cases, I don't know.

I think smartphones have been a huge boon to chess. YouTube videos as well! There are so many nice YouTube channels that explain chess techniques, openings, gambits, etc, in a very accessible manner. We live in the golden age of learning. Of course, there is also braindead entertainment you have to avoid to find the time for the good stuff. Does edu-tainment stand a chance? I am cautiously optimistic. We should do a better job to promote the edu-taining content over the stupid stuff. We should also teach youngins (or epsilons as Erdos called them) about time/energy management, and the distinction between instant gratification and contentment/fulfilment.

In addition to chess.com, there is also lichess.org. This post compares their pros/cons.

There is a nice docu-movie about chess, called "Searching for Bobby Fischer".

And of course there is Queen's Gambit miniseries from Netflix. Come to think of it, I think it must have been Queen's Gambit that rekindled my interest for chess.

Shah mat!