TOTP!!

Language

so what's the deal with this chess challenge. why isn't Carlsen playing? isn't he #1? so who cares who wins this?

HEY EVERYONE, SHOENICE AGAIN

its hardly 6, how am i this drunk already

bad parenting

i understand why you all want to hate the lakers. if i were a fan of whatever ****ty sports team you rooted for, id be mad. mad my teams cant deliver. mad we never win. and i get it. you place all this sadness and disappointment on something else. and if that needs to be the greatest nba franchise, then thats just a cross we have to bear.

Someone who's terrible at chess and doesn't mind playing against a dolt, play me a game.

I'm terrible @ chess but I don't want to play a dolt.

Well, the current match is a friendly. Kramnik and Aronian just said "Hey, you wanna come over and play?" and their parents were OK with it, so they're doing it. It's attracting attention because it's the first match between top five ranked players since 2010, and it'll probably be the last until the 2013 world championship at the earliest.

This year's world championship is Anand (defending champ, world #4, gets an automatic berth in the championship match) vs. Boris Gelfand, who is kind of a nobody. World #20. FIDE came up with a ridiculously screwy system for determining the challenger, but it basically devolved into a bracket-style tournament of rapid/blitz chess. The system was ******ed, and Magnus (world #1, who was all of 19 when this was going down) said that he wouldn't play unless they changed it. They didn't, and Gelfand emerged from the high variance tournament to be the challenger.

Gelfand and Anand are both in their forties and both are on the downward slope of their careers. The consensus is that Anand should dominate the match and retain the title, which he's had since 2006. But no one is excited, since both have been subpar lately, and both are very boring, happy to draw every game.

Fun game for everyone: Go look at the ratings and see how many of the best players in the world are younger than you.

I'm a fan of the defending world champions imo.

If played correctly by each player shouldn't every chess match end in a draw?

We don't know.

But yes, a lot of people think that.

And you don't want to know.

I can't handle the truth.

there is one person on that list who is not older than me

finally going to put elrey on ignore

Ok maybe not

Hey AIOTT: We know definitively what the outcome is (with perfect play) for everything up to six pieces. That information is freely available in a one terabyte database. It was created with MASSIVE amounts of computer time and effort. (Wiki) I don't know if there has been/is/will be any work done on generalized seven piece databases. But every piece you add adds quite a few magnitudes of difficulty. If we devoted all human effort to it for a century, I doubt we'd be able to get a ten piece database completed.

And at some point, you just physically have to stop. With the full 32 pieces, you get to a point at which the number of possible positions is on par with the number of atoms in the solar system. So, for all practical purposes, it will never be possible to state definitively whether chess is a forced win for white (or possibly black) or a forced draw. Obviously it's one of the three, and most people think it's a forced draw. But we'll never know, and no one will ever be able to play perfectly.

still, it would be a worthwhile endeavour.

wtf mayo how did you get into my facebook profile

So can you say briefly why some exhaustative methods are needed to show this, rather than being able to show it with some sort of mathematical proof.