The Philosophy of Chess
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- Опубліковано 13 гру 2023
- In this episode, I discuss Jean Baudrillard's essay on chess from Screened Out.
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The most interesting philosophical chess battle was between mathematicians and Hans Niemann. Statistics proved that it was statistically impossible for Hans to have won without cheating but it was recognized that the courts couldn't understand them evidence. It was over their heads. It was too risky to rely on mathematical evidence so everyone capitulated to a lawyer. Language defeated science.
"them evidence"
Trying to take revenge on language?
Quibbling about obvious mistypes is the weapon of cowards. @@peterkerj7357
Trying to reinvent pain in the ass? 😅@@peterkerj7357
The m key is next to the spacebar sadly 😔@@peterkerj7357
its interesting to also look at at marcel duchamp, who left the art world to pursue a career in chess and chess journalism in the 1910's and 1920's. There was much less money in chess than art, but he felt like every game was like its own poem being composed in real time. Personally I feel like this attitude and the potential chess games inherently have is soothing to people. I don't really play anymore, but all the times i got back into the game were typically low points of life
I think this is getting more and more deeply embedded into contemporary currents of thought. Started with Queens gambit of course, but the second boom in late 2022 was even bigger than in 2020. More people are playing and learning chess than EVER before in human history. It only makes sense that it would also have a resurgence in cultural analysis or theory, because of course there must be something behind the trend. I always thought Chess lends itself perfectly to a Deleuzian notion of virtuality, which another commenter already mentioned. Every game is exciting not because of the moves played, but because those moves carry with them untold hidden games that lie below the surface. Their potential is their actuality, which makes it a game of virtuality in stasis. Love it. Hope to see more essays on chess in the coming years.
I disagree. Today's chess is dominated by opening theory and engine analysis. There are infinite moves possible, but they will never be played.
This was really cool. I just started reading The System of Objects by Baudrillard. I’m finding it incredibly difficult how coded it is in metaphor but really worth while.
More like The Philosophy of Chess Engines… the irony is that Kasparov is best known for his insane opening prep and insane calculation ability, not his intuition 😂
No bro but you see it's the prep that lets him intuit the solutions, if he were to analyze completely unfamiliar patterns it'd overload his brain but it's the fact that he went over or has solved so many similar problems that he could make such rapid fire and precise decisions. This is what I believe
Deleuze and guattari also wrote a little bit on chess in ATP, though I don't remember which plateau. They describe it as something fundamentally of interiority, as pieces that create their own "striated spaces" that are internally coded. Comparing it to Go which is more exterior, anonymous, and plain. I believe it serves as a critique of political spaces and internally coded States.
It is in the very beginnging, the rhizome chapter!
@@tralx5268 no it's actually in the treatise on nomadology
@@Betterdangaming damn my bad!
Tbh that question you asked about teachers being worried about students submitting chat gpt responses. Again the problem is that one can almost always tell that the response was not produced by a human... But one cannot punish that deviance so comfortably. Because as you mentioned, it is a pool of knowledge constructed by humans that the machine pulls from. It does have a tell-tale vocabulary however, and the tendency to simplify concepts to the point of being erroneous. But as a teacher I do wonder, what's scary is not the possibility of students using chat gpt, but how easily it can be done and how easily one finds oneself depending on technology to make their ends meet. Deadlines no longer remain a challenge because there's always that machine-enabled ability to do the bare minimum. Once a prosthesis has been adopted without a need, doesn't an intellectual handicap necessarily result from it.
There is one question though. If we value success over failure, which could be presumed as the common consensus, would perfection come when humanity's capabilities are reduced and focused on a set goal like a machine ? Assuming that true, then wouldn't the talk you had about the discourse and the narration history of the game of chess would be the only thing holding us back. I for one value human condition to a definite successful triumph of technology; but what if we have the dichotomy of success/failure in mind and we truly prefer the former to the latter, would that only leave us with the inhumane acts for a greater good or is there any other way ?
I would love to know your thoughts on this. Keep up the good work.
Drawing stockfish is doable for 2500ish elo. Levy from Gothamchess has drawn stockfish.
Completely unrelated, but you asked late in the series on Being and Time how your viewers typically consume the extended series.
My answer: I wait until you finish most of them then "catch up" over the week to do the finale "live."
Engines can be set to be really draw averse. My understanding is that even top players can't draw Stockfish with those settings.
I was wondering if youd ever talk about animal ethics ? I just wrote a paper on Derrida’s ‘The Animals That Therefore I Am’ and its super fascinating how he deconstructs anthropocentrism while critiquing deontological approaches such as kant, and even Veganism (although, I think he is flawed/misunderstands Heidegger often, yet the insight is still necessary i think)
Not yet, but I plan to :)
Of course, chess' problem space is quite narrow, there is little space and few different moves. Thus sooner rather than later it might be considered a "solved" game, where every move can and has been precalculated and will thus not just be good but perfect.
I have a bit of a counterexample about your claim that if something was unbeatable the game would die, as there is one more step before the game dies. In 7th grade, we had home room and every day for a year, maybe even two years, I played Egyptian Rat Screw or Egyptian Rat Slap with three of four people in homeroom. I won every game. I maybe won 200 or more games games because we could probably play 2 or 3 games a day, at least. I never lost once, that is until I did. After my loss, we never played Egyptian Rat Screw again. So, perhaps a slight revision might be if some entity proves to be unbeatable at a certain thing, the universe only needs it to lose once and the game will be destroyed.
Also: slight fact check. The Tower of Babel did not fall, it was abandoned. The exact text is "They stopped building the city." It's a bit of a Mandela effect that most people think it fell down. I only know this because I think the Tower of Babel is a great allegory for DeBord's Spectacle and I believe there's an interesting avenue of exploration in how the Spectacle shapes language and destroys language by destroying meaning. When the Tower of Babel is considered through the prism of entertainment, its important to note that it did not fall in spectacular fashion, as though it joins the spectacle it promises. It is in fact abandoned, forgotten, and with no mentions of how it ended.
I think Baudrillard's sense that war was no longer really war is no longer really something to be taken seriously. It was an aberration of brief unipolarity and the end of the Cold War. The ultimate disproof is the war between Russia and Ukraine. If, as Baudrillard says, we addressed that war as a mere matter of statistics, then our prediction would have shown a Russian victory in short order. I can sympathize with Baudrillard believing what he did. When the Ukraine War started, I shared his perspective. Wars were fast, one-sided affairs and surely the Russian army that had brutalized Chechnya, and trounced Georgia would make quick work of smaller, poorer, unblooded Ukraine. Russia thought the same thing. It modeled its initial strategy on the Shock and Awe strategy used by the US in its invasion of Iraq (although both could reasonably be said to be mere updated forms of the Blitz strategy). Evidence clearly shows that that way of thinking was wrong.
This underscores a deeper flaw in Baudrillard's interaction with technology that still remains a bane to current thinking: The vast overestimation of the capacity of our technology when exposed to reality, instead of the sterile conditions of its creation. A modern chess "AI" (I'll do this once and then stop, but calling more complicated machine learning models "AI" is a marketing trick, no a description of any kind of real artificial _intelligence_) can beat any human opponent because while chess may not be solved, it is still conceptually very simple compared to any significant problem-space. Chess is still fundamentally a sterile context. It has an obvious, finite number of inputs. When we expose AIs to real problem-spaces without doing everything in our power to limit potential complications, AI quickly fails.
Technology itself has become a simulacrum. There is an imagined ChatGPT almost fully disjunct from the hallucinating mess that is its reality. The simulacral ChatGPT represents an economic threat to everything. A fulfillment of the tech-optimist promise (or, perhaps, threat) that some day soon we will all be automated out of our jobs. Its reality is an overmarketed mess optimized to con people into thinking it has done something worthwhile; a mere fetishization of the Imitation Game to the point of absurdity. Wild-eyed technologists tell us ghost stories about evil GAIs destroying humanity while the reality of AI development can't write a paper without inventing citations out of thin air. We want so very badly to believe that surely this technology will be the technology that revolutionizes everything because we no longer see ourselves as beings with the agency to revolutionize our own world. Technology is not, in fact, a new Tower of Babel. It is a new God. A promise that something else will make things better, so there is no reason for us to come together and build a better world.
None of that is really about chess, though. I grew up in a household that played chess as the worst chess player by far. I am, as a result, not particularly fond of the game.
Tell that to the people in Gaza
Love your content, love philosophy, but tbqf I'm here cuz you're cute
Baudrillard is the voice of God
Change the title to AI