I had most of this material gathering digital dust already, but Mr. Marche today brought it out in force... (#1467016) In the AI column he published for The Guardian over the long weekend, he had this to say about chess:

Chess is a good model for anyone trying to figure out how to use artificial intelligence. AI transformed chess well before it changed any other field. It has completely altered the nature of the game, the nature of training and analysis, the entire conditions under which the game is played. Every grandmaster alive today has trained with AI.

But Gukesh Dommaraju, the current world champion, took an unusual path: his coach, the grandmaster Vishnu Prasanna, encouraged him to avoid AI until he was fully formed as a player. He sharpened his skills, he grew his creativity, he steered his talent away from bad habits, and then, and only then, did he turn to the engines. It worked.

The key is to control the machine, rather than having the machine controlling you.

Chess is an interesting precursor to the infinite-generation/stronger-calculation impact AI might have... because top chess engines have been better than top humans for 25 years already. (Ironically, the LLMs everyone's familiar with are pretty shit at playing chess... they just keep inventing illegal moves, misremembering where the pieces are etc.; you gotta use specialized chess-software to get this god-like understanding of the game.)

Marche is right that machines have completely revamped the chess world: the way the elites play, how they think, how they train, how they analyze, how us schmucks consume the big events (we have an evaluation bar next to the game, capable therefore of instantly understanding the state of the game... though lots of complexity, human vs machine moves etc)— the machine is everywhere.

Now, how do chess players keep their value in this world of infinite strength and infinitely stronger chess players? BY RELEGATING THE MACHINES.

You can practice with machines, analyze games after (or for us audience, during) the games, but the players themselves may not use the machine (other than memorizing opening lines produced and devised beforehand). That is:

To keep the human value intact, we carved out a machine-free zoneTo keep the human value intact, we carved out a machine-free zone

That is, bragging that something is not AI-generated still has some staying power.

Writing _without it_ is the thing that indicates (potential?) worth.

Art, what's this got to do with art?Art, what's this got to do with art?

Art is our human ability to imagine anything, literally anything. Real or not, plausible or not, art in whatever form provides us -- collectively speaking -- with the same view into infinity that LLMs do. Or chess lines.

Here's a weird one: there are more unique possible chess games (or moves, I forget) than the number of atoms in the observable universe. After move 3 in chess, there are hundreds of millions of possible combinations.
(For the math nerds/autists here: 16 pawn moves and 4 knight moves... and then the opponent has the same, so after the first round there are 20*20=400 different positions; 200k after move 2; ...after 15, per Shannon's number: 2,015,099,950,053,364,471,960 — whatever the fuck this number is. #990846)

Here's the relevant art/LLM takeaway from that infinite search space: the vast, vast, vast majority of those move combinations are nonsense. Hanging your queen, moving an unimportant pawn etc. Only a few candidate moves in every position are ever worth our attention. The skill in chess involves selecting(!) which ones, to calculate/evaluate that the following position is beneficial to you, what potential resources your opponent has to counter you.

That's why I struggle with reading (fantasy) novels, a hatred that goes back to magical realism back in literature class. (and why I suspect I keep being a bitch to plebpoet #1463569) Why bother? They're just one line of infinite upon infinite possible ones. There are no rules and no limitations. I'm already suspending disbelief to consume your thing... and now you're bringing infinite-possibilities, whatever-goes back into it...?
Like, stfu and leave me alone.

No sane person likes art, or poetry, or chess, or movies in abstract. Because the quantity available to us since, I dunno, the 14th century, far exceeds anything you could ever consume. And with infinite generation, most "art" or "poetry" or "chess moves" or "movies" are complete crap.

Stream-of-consciousnessStream-of-consciousness

Here's another retarded phenomenon in literary history.... And I confess, this rant originally burst out from my fingers reading Michael Pollan's literature chapter in A World Appears... (#1464029). He interviews a lady who, completely seriously, thought up something as insane as a one-sentence, thousand-page(!) stream-of-consciousness novel. Like why... just don't.

"Ellmann's protagonist is a good person and a good liberal who worries about fun violence and human rights and the cruelties or the American medical system, but not enough to actually do anything about any of it." (p. 172)

Exploring why stream-of-consciousness disappeared, he found a PhD dissertation on the subject:

I guess I'm just too Victorian? (Purity and all that.)

No, I don't think the insane rambling of a mad(wo)man worth our attention.No, I don't think the insane rambling of a mad(wo)man worth our attention.

To paraphrase game of thrones, a madman sees what he sees... the rest of us don't have to look or entertain his delusions. Extend to the vast, vast majority of fictional characters ever created; the vast, vast majority of art ever made; the vast, vast majority of chess moves ever played; the vast, vast number of LLM prompts.

Or, in a context Bitcoiners understand, shitcoins. You don't investigate 9,999 cryptos... you quickly learn that there's 1 worth your attention and interest, and the rest some combination of unworkable, inferior, and scammy. And you politely (or not so politely) proceed to tell anyone off who approaches you with a kRyPTo to, uhm, fuck. right. off.

Liking chess means to play it (against someone else), to try it out for yourself and see who conquers. There’s no illusion that it has value to anybody else, to respect it simply because I played it (well, ok, MAYBE: #969720)

Liking chess might also mean observing, as I do religiously, the elites playing high-stakes and high-level games against each other. That’s the other part of the literature analogy: there are some elites in literature. There are novels and works worth your attention. While I can make some nice brilliant moves now and again, and I’m sure you or your artsy cousin or the new thriller writer from Indiana can write some half-decent stuff, if you’re consuming someone else’s creation (and your time and resources are limited, and the potential reads you _could_ be reading almost infinite) you ought to be consuming theirs (=the high-level, elite, tested-and-proven ones) — not mine, or that Indiana newbie. And definitely not a stream-of-consciousness lady off her meds.

Of course, this overwhelming irrelevancy doesn't reflect back on the game of chess itself or the genre of literature — but it does indicate to us that whenever somebody says they like “art” or “music” or “chess” they’re either retarded, or mean something specifically (and unsaid!): that is, I like the good quality, the good moves in chess, the music that makes me (or you, or him) feel something; the specific, vanishingly rare art that does that too.

Most art is shit. Most chess moves are shit. Most LLM slop is, well, slop.

That’s the unavoidable nature of infinite generation.

To finish this on a lighter note, a Ricky Gervais interview comes to mind, him trying to show how similar — actually — atheism and e.g., Christianity is:

"There are thousands of gods out there… you deny one less god than I do... you don’t believe in 2,999 gods, and I don’t believe in just one more!""There are thousands of gods out there… you deny one less god than I do... you don’t believe in 2,999 gods, and I don’t believe in just one more!"

What’s the big deal, you’d say.

Is it a coincidence that a dig on religion comes to me when thinking about the meaning of infinity?

I. Think. Not.