Freestyle chess Concepts

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

by Tyler Cowen · 11 Sep 2013 · 291pp · 81,703 words

. By the late 1990s, there were collaborative efforts between computer programs and top grandmasters—the human competitor would consult the program midgame. So was born “Freestyle chess.” A top-level collaborative man–machine Freestyle competition meant that a top grandmaster sat down with a computer and the grandmaster thought through the strategy

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supplemented or guided the strategic thinking of the machine but would rely on the machine for accurate short-run tactical calculation. As the programs improved, Freestyle chess circa 2004–2007 favored players who understood very well how the computer programs worked. These individuals did not have to be great chess players and

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engaged in intense competition and challenged to the limits of their abilities, tends to bring out sweat and emotion. This kind of chess is called Freestyle chess, and when you see the people engaged in it, a rather new, passionate physicality in the future of chess is revealed. The late Herbert Simon

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collaborator Fernand Gobet, Simon would start their weekly meetings by asking, “What new data do we have about chess today?” The latest data is from Freestyle chess. And it is the model to consider if you wish to be among the high earners of the very near future. 5 Our Freestyle Future

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In traditional chess tournaments, great care is taken to make sure competitors cannot consult computers or otherwise engage in cheating. Freestyle chess throws these strictures out the window. You can consult books, work with computers, call your grandmaster friend on the phone, bay at the moon, anything

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final decision of which move to play must be made. And a human must make it. What does it take to be a grandmaster of Freestyle chess? It is something quite different from what makes for the best-rated players of traditional chess. A series of Freestyle tournaments was held starting in

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from an analytic, computer-oriented point of view. Anson, when playing, is in perpetual motion, rushing back and forth from one machine to another, as Freestyle chess is, according to team member Nelson, “all about processing as much computer information as rapidly as possible.” Vasik Rajlich, the programmer of Rybka, considers the

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the strongest grandmasters would be unlikely to qualify for the Freestyle finals. Top American grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura was not a huge hit when he tried Freestyle chess, even though he was working with the programs. His problem? Not enough trust in the machines. He once boasted, “I use my brain, because it

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was wrong. • • • Freestyle teams study the opening moves their machine opponents have made in previous games because, as Kasparov has observed, an initial advantage in Freestyle chess usually means an eventual victory. The players also know the weaknesses of particular engines and how one engine can at times offset the weaknesses of

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really does add something, at least for the time being, although he too wonders how long this will remain the case. The top games of Freestyle chess probably are the greatest heights chess has reached, though who actually is to judge? The human–machine pair is better than any human—or any

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best available, because the paired strategies are deeper than what the machine alone can properly evaluate. I’ve spent many hours playing a form of Freestyle chess at home. The Shredder program on my iPad has a performance rating of about 2,200, which makes it Master strength—that is, pretty good

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more and more what workers have learned from the computer, or not, and how well they remember computer-derived information and advice. Freestyle Masters In Freestyle chess, this competition to find the opening novelty is explicit and it leads to a very fine division of labor. Let’s go back to Nelson

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facing in a given round. Secret teams. Board games. Code names. Does this all sound a little too much like child’s play? Could the Freestyle chess model really matter all that much? Am I crazy to think direct man–machine cooperation, focused on making very specific evaluations or completing very specific

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game more rapidly becomes a minefield of complications. Ken may seem like just a normal nerdy computer science professor but he, like some of the Freestyle chess players, is marking a new age to come for intelligent machines. In addition to his concrete results, Ken is doing some work of far-reaching

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human contests and watched Boris Gelfand emerge as the challenger to Anand and eventually lose the championship match. Despite the humans on the teams, even Freestyle chess isn’t very popular, not even by the standards of the chess world. Some chess traditionalists are uncomfortable with the fact that some top Freestyle

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online only, which makes it harder to attract spectators and corporate sponsorship. There is one wealthy patron operating from United Arab Emirates, but so far Freestyle chess does not seem to have a financial future. Nelson Hernandez estimates that during the key Freestyle events from a few years ago about one hundred

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backgrounds and are strong on self-motivation, in addition to being intimidatingly bright. Before his current work on building up an openings book for his Freestyle chess team, Nelson Hernandez (now in his midfifties) worked as an army paratrooper, a stockbroker, for a hedge fund, and as a financial analyst, the job

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a broader public but for members of their own economics profession. In essence, these individuals will sit at their computers, much as Anson Williams the Freestyle chess player does, and digest inputs from diverse sources. They will hone their skills of seeking out, absorbing, and evaluating this information. When it comes to

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Simon,” Chess Programming Wiki CPW, http://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/Herbert+Simon. Chapter 5: Our Freestyle Future For the Kasparov quotation, see “Dark horse ZackS wins Freestyle Chess Tournament,” ChessBase News, June 19, 2005, http://chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp ?new sid=2461, which is also the source for the information on the 2005

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Freestyle tournaments. For some information on Anson Williams, see Daaim Shabazz, “Anson Williams . . . King of Freestyle Chess,” http://www.thechessdrum.net/blog/2007/12/21/anson-williams-king-of-freestyle-chess/, in addition to my interview with him. The Nelson Hernandez quotation comes from the same source. By the way

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, in Freestyle chess, Anson Williams and Nelson Hernandez have been part of a team for years, but they have never met, instead using the internet and Skype. For

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.com/docs/free stylers_version_2.htm. The Arno Nickel quotation is from that same source. The Nakamura quotation is from Arno Nickel, “Freestyle Chess,” http://www.free webs.com/freestyle-chess/gmarnonickel.htm. For a discussion of how opening books work, see this useful piece by Dagh Nielsen, untitled, at http://www.spaghettichess

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://youtu.be/JSOw1Yk_RQU for an Accenture talk by Vishy Anand on finding something new in chess and the importance of memory. In addition to Freestyle chess there is Correspondence chess. In the old days, pre-computer, chess players frequently played by mail, with lags of two to three days between moves

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boil down to which player doesn’t have to hold down a job. It’s another form of man–machine collaboration, but for competitive reasons Freestyle chess so far has been more interesting. For brief overviews of medical diagnoses and AI, see Christopher de la Torre, “The AI Doctor is Ready to

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opening books, 83–85, 86–87, 107, 135, 203 and player ratings, 120 simplicity of rules, 48–49 spectator interest in, 156–57 See also Freestyle chess Chess Tiger (chess program), 78 children and wealth inequality, 249 China chess players from, 108, 189 and demographic trends, 230 and geographic trends, 177 and

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economics, 222 and decision making, 98–99 and machine vs. machine chess, 74–75 and scientific advance, 205–6 computational economics, 222 computer chess. See Freestyle chess conscientiousness, 29–40, 201–2 conservatism, 74, 98, 235, 254–56 consulting, 41, 42–43 consumer empowerment, 122–23 consumer quality quotients, 125 contempt aversion

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, 163–71, 175–77 Foxconn, 7–8 “fracking,” 177 France, 39 Franchise (Asimov), 10–11 Franklin, Benjamin, 148 free trade, 166, 176 freelancing, 59–63 Freestyle chess compared to traditional chess, 77–83 and computer simulations, 227–28 and decision-making models, 129 described, 77–83 impact on human play, 83–86

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), 139–40 Rowling, J. K., 234 Russia, 20 Rybka (chess program) and computer chess matches, 72 and evaluation of chess play, 203, 224–25 and Freestyle chess, 47 and human collaboration, 135, 168 and human intuition, 114–15 and performance evaluation, 104 power of, 68 and training human chess players, 102, 106

Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science

by Michael Nielsen · 2 Oct 2011 · 400pp · 94,847 words

more than either is capable of alone? As an example of the latter, in 2005 the chess website Playchess.com ran what they called a freestyle chess tournament, meaning a tournament where humans and computers could enter together as hybrid teams. To put it another way, the tournament allowed human intelligence to

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. Astroinformatics has emerged more recently. See especially [24] for a manifesto on the need for astroinformatics. p 113: A report on the 2005 Playchess.com freestyle chess tournament may be found at [37], with follow-up commentary on the winners at [39]. Garry Kasparov’s comments on the result are in the

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] Henry William Chesbrough. Opennovation: The new Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology. Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2006. [37] Chess Base. Dark horse ZackS wins Freestyle chess tournament, June 19, 2005. http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=2461. [38] Chess Base. Hydra misses the quarter-finals of Freestyle tournament, June 11

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Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 93–94, 95, 112 CERN particle accelerator, 36 cheminformatics, 108 chemistry wiki, 178 Chesbrough, Henry, 219 chess. See freestyle chess; Karpov, Anatoly; Kasparov versus the World chessboard domino puzzle, 72–73, 75 chess-playing computers, 113–14 chiropractic, 165–67 Christian suppression of early science

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and, 175 room for improvement in, 152–53 societal change and, 159 Ford, Henry, 35 forums, online, 20, 77, 152 Franklin, Rosalind, 79–80, 104 freestyle chess, 113–14 Furstenberg, Hillel, 212 galaxies: active nuclei of, 131, 132 dwarf, 96, 99–100, 112, 131, 140 green pea, 5, 135–40, 142, 155

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

by Kevin Kelly · 6 Jun 2016 · 371pp · 108,317 words

this idea, Kasparov pioneered the concept of man-plus-machine matches, in which AI augments human chess players rather than competes against them. Now called freestyle chess matches, these are like mixed martial arts fights, where players use whatever combat techniques they want. You can play as your unassisted human self, or

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: “Deep Blue,” IBM 100: Icons of Progress, March 7, 2012. rather than competes against them: Owen Williams, “Garry Kasparov—Biography,” KasparovAgent.com, 2010. freestyle chess matches: Arno Nickel, Freestyle Chess, 2010. centaurs won 53 games: Arno Nickel, “The Freestyle Battle 2014,” Infinity Chess, 2015. several different chess programs: Arno Nickel, “‘Intagrand’ Wins the Freestyle

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

by David Epstein · 1 Mar 2019 · 406pp · 109,794 words

experience with specialized training was outsourced, and in a contest where humans focused on strategy, he suddenly had peers. A few years later, the first “freestyle chess” tournament was held. Teams could be made up of multiple humans and computers. The lifetime-of-specialized-practice advantage that had been diluted in advanced

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. As a teenager, he had been outstanding at the video game Command & Conquer, known as a “real time strategy” game because players move simultaneously. In freestyle chess, he had to consider advice from teammates and various chess programs and then very quickly direct the computers to examine particular possibilities in more depth

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for Champions (New York: Random House Puzzles & Games, 2006), x. “Human creativity was even more paramount”; “My advantage in calculating”: Kasparov and Greengard, Deep Thinking. “freestyle chess”: For an excellent discussion of human-computer chess partnerships, see: T. Cowen, Average is Over (New York: Dutton, 2013). His teammate, Nelson Hernandez: Hernandez kindly

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engaged in an extended back-and-forth, explaining to me the nuances of freestyle chess and providing me with documentation about tournaments. He estimated that Williams’s Elo rating in traditional chess would be about 1800. In 2007, National Geographic

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

by Martin Ford · 4 May 2015 · 484pp · 104,873 words

technology continues on its relentless exponential path. The poster child for the machine-human symbiosis idea has come to be the relatively obscure game of freestyle chess. More than a decade after IBM’s Deep Blue computer defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov, it is generally accepted that, in one-on-one

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contests between computers and humans, the machines now dominate absolutely. Freestyle chess, however, is a team sport. Groups of people, who are not necessarily world-class chess players individually, compete against each other and are allowed to

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, rather than full automation, will come to dominate the workplaces of the future. The first is that the continued dominance of human-machine teams in freestyle chess is by no means assured. To me, the process that these teams use—evaluating and comparing the results from different chess algorithms before deciding on

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are largely immune to unemployment today. It is a small population of elite workers. Economist Tyler Cowen’s 2013 book Average Is Over quotes one freestyle chess insider who says that the very best players are “genetic freaks.”54 That hardly makes the machine collaboration idea sound like a systemic solution for

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, 193 Ford Motor Company, 76, 193 401k retirement plans, 222, 274 Foxconn, 10, 11, 14 fractional reserve banking, 218n France, 24, 41 Freeland, Chrystia, 51 freestyle chess, 122, 123 “freeters,” 221 “Free Trade’s Great, but Offshoring Rattles Me” (Blinder), 118 Frey, Carl Benedikt, 59, 223 Friedman, Milton, ix, 210–211 Friedman

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

by Clive Thompson · 11 Sep 2013 · 397pp · 110,130 words

Topalov 4–0. But the centaur play evened the odds. This time, Topalov fought Kasparov to a 3–3 draw. In 2005, there was a “freestyle” chess tournament in which a team could consist of any number of humans or computers, in any combination. Many teams consisted of chess grand masters who

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these smart amateurs could even outplay a supercomputer on the level of Deep Blue. One of the entrants that Cramton and Stephen trounced in the freestyle chess tournament was a version of Hydra, the most powerful chess computer in existence at the time; indeed, it was probably faster and stronger than Deep

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called a centaur . . . fought Kasparov to a 3–3 draw: Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess, Kindle edition. In 2005, there was a “freestyle” chess tournament: My account of the 2005 “freestyle” chess tournament comes from personal interviews with Steven Cramton and Zackary Stephen, as well as these reports: Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess; Kasparov

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines

by Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby · 23 May 2016 · 347pp · 97,721 words

only possible answer. We’re pretty good at assessing which of several sources is most likely to be correct, or at triangulating across multiple answers. Freestyle chess players choose among several different systems for each move, as we’ll discuss below. Analytics experts try a variety of different models, and take the

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, you’ve got to learn a lot, change what you do, and sometimes swallow your pride at the prospect of becoming their helper. Learning from Freestyle Chess Several writers who touch on what we are calling mutual augmentation do so with reference to chess. It’s definitely a realm in which some

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Tyler Cowen (not surprisingly, a chess champion in his youth) and The Second Machine Age authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee use the example of “freestyle chess,” in which human chess players are free to use as much help from computers as they wish.11 The two of us personally don’t

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like to get paid for thinking that hard), but we gather that under these rules, people often manage to beat the best programs. And although freestyle chess is a unique situation, the particulars of why that is true do seem to suggest possibilities for other forms of augmentation: • Different computer programs are

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programs in the first place, and they continue to improve them. On that last point, for example, Anson Williams, one of the world’s best freestyle chess players, and his team member Nelson Hernandez developed a chess position database with more than three billion moves in it. As Hernandez told us about

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee · 20 Jan 2014 · 339pp · 88,732 words

bring a hammer.”2 It might seem, then, that humans no longer have anything to contribute to the game of chess. But the invention of ‘freestyle’ chess tournaments shows how far this is from the truth. In these events, teams can include any combination of human and digital players. As Kasparov himself

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+ better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.3 The key insight from freestyle chess is that people and computers don’t approach the same task the same way. If they did, humans would have had nothing to add after

The Silent Intelligence: The Internet of Things

by Daniel Kellmereit and Daniel Obodovski · 19 Sep 2013 · 138pp · 40,787 words

cope with all this information? When we spoke with Astro Teller of Google, he reminded us of an interesting story. In 2005, there was a freestyle chess tournament hosted by the website PlayChess.com. “Freestyle” meant any humans or computers, or any combination of humans and computers, could participate in the tournament

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the meantime, humans will have to do a lot of strategic thinking and planning, in a not too dissimilar way from the winners of the freestyle chess tournament. In the next chapter we will look into the key areas of the Internet of Things. 15 Bill Gates, Business @ the Speed of Thought

Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins

by Garry Kasparov · 1 May 2017 · 331pp · 104,366 words

+ machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process. I wrote about the freestyle chess result and my conclusion in How Life Imitates Chess and expanded on it a little in a 2010 article for the New York Review of