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Miloslav Ciz 2023-11-05 01:01:47 +01:00
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@ -17,6 +17,8 @@ Chess (from Persian *shah*, *king*) is a very [old](old.md) two-player board [ga
Many however see [go](go.md) as yet a more [beautiful](beauty.md) game: a more minimal, yet more difficult one, with a completely unique experience.
**Where to play chess online?** There exist many servers such as https://chess.com or https://chess24.com -- however these ones are proprietary, so don't use them. For us a possible one is **Lichess** (libre chess) at https://lichess.org which not only [FOSS](foss.md), but is also gratis (it also allows users to run bots under special accounts which is an amazing way of testing engines against people and other engines), however it requires JavaScript. Another server, a more [suckless](suckless.md) one, is **Free Internet Chess Server** (FICS) at https://www.freechess.org/ -- on this one you can play through telnet (`telnet freechess.org 5000`) or with graphical clients like pychess. Online servers usually rate players with Elo/Glicko just like FIDE, sometimes there are computer opponents available, chess puzzles, variants, analysis tools etc.
Chess as a game is not and cannot be [copyrighted](copyright.md), but **can chess games (moves played in a match) be copyrighted?** Thankfully there is a pretty strong consensus and precedence that say this is not the case, even though [capital worshippers](capitalism.md) try to play the intellectual property card from time to time (e.g. 2016 tournament organizers tried to stop chess websites from broadcasting the match moves under "trade secret protection", unsuccessfully).
**Chess and [IQ](iq.md)/intelligence**: there is a debate about how much of a weight general vs specialized intelligence, IQ, memory and pure practice have in becoming good at chess. It's not clear at all, everyone's opinion differs. A popular formula states that *highest achievable Elo = 1000 + 10 * IQ*, though its accuracy and validity are of course highly questionable. All in all this is probably very similar to language learning: obviously some kind of intelligence/talent is needed to excel, however chess is extremely similar to any other sport in that putting HUGE amounts of time and effort into practice (preferably from young age) is what really makes you good -- without practice even the biggest genius in the world will be easily beaten by a casual chess amateur, and even a relatively dumb man can learn chess very well under the right conditions (just like any dumbass can learn at least one language well); many highest level chess players admit they sucked at math and hated it. As one starts playing chess, he seems to more and more discover that it's really all about studying and practice more than anything else, at least up until the highest master levels where the genius gives a player the tiny nudge needed for the win -- at the grandmaster level intelligence seems to start to matter more. Intelligence is perhaps more of an accelerator of learning, not any hard limit on what can be achieved, however also just having fun and liking chess (which may be just given by upbringing etc.) may have similar accelerating effects on learning. Really the very basics can be learned by literally ANYONE, then it's just about learning TONS of concepts and principles (and automatizing them), be it tactical patterns (forks, pins, double check, discovery checks, sacrifices, smothered mates, ...), good habits, positional principles (pawn structure, king safety, square control, piece activity, ...), opening theory (this alone takes many years and can never end), endgame and mating patterns, time management etcetc.
@ -62,8 +64,6 @@ Computers have already surpassed the best humans in their playing strength (we c
The first chess computer that beat the world champion (at the time Gary Kasparov) was famously [Deep Blue](deep_blue.md) in 1997. [Alan Turing](turing.md) himself has written a chess playing algorithm but at his time there were no computers to run it, so he executed it by hand -- nowadays the algorithm has been implemented on computers (there are bots playing this algorithm e.g. on lichess).
For online chess there exist many servers such as https://chess.com or https://chess24.com, but for us the most important is https://lichess.org which is gratis and uses [FOSS](foss.md) (it also allows users to run bots under special accounts which is an amazing way of testing engines against people and other engines). These servers rate players with Elo/Glicko, allow them to play with each other or against computer, solve puzzles, analyze games, play chess variants, explore opening databases etc.
Playing strength is not the only possible measure of chess engine quality, of course -- for example there are people who try to make the **smallest chess programs** (see [countercomplex](countercomplex.md) and [golfing](golf.md)). As of 2022 the leading programmer of smallest chess programs seems to be Óscar Toledo G. (https://nanochess.org/chess.html). Unfortunately his programs are [proprietary](proprietary.md), even though their source code is public. The programs include Toledo Atomchess (392 [x86](x86.md) instructions), Toledo Nanochess (world's smallest [C](c.md) chess program, 1257 non-blank C characters) and Toledo Javascript chess (world's smallest [Javascript](javascript.md) chess program). He won the [IOCCC](ioccc.md). Another small chess program is micro-Max by H. G. Muller (https://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/max-src2.html, 1433 C characters, Toledo claims it is weaker than his program). Other engines try to be strong while imitating human play (making human moves, even mistakes), most notably Maia which trains several neural networks that play like different rated human players.
{ Nanochess is actually pretty strong, in my testing it easily beat [smallchesslib](smallchesslib.md) Q_Q ~drummyfish }