Microphone stopped working. Need new one. No voice recording until further notice. Please stop crying.
Rising tides and boats
Paul Morphy is likely the greatest chess mind to ever play the game. In my opinion, anyway. And my opinion is quite good.
He was so far ahead of most of his competitors that they usually bored him. Morphy, a perfectly smug comedian at heart, resorted to inventing more and more difficult ways to compete — playing with his food, just to entertain himself.
And yet today, any old Grandmaster would make Morphy look like an intern. There are probably even International Masters (the tier below Grandmasters) who would beat Morphy if they could play him.
Magnus Carlsen, Hikaru Nakamura, Fabiano Caruana, Ding Liren… these guys have access to two things that Morphy never had: “the engine,” and limitless practice.
(“The engine” in this case refers to any chess engine, of which there are many.)
Today’s Grandmasters can play 10,000 ranked games a year if they want to. I doubt Morphy played that many games in his entire short career. Speed chess, Blitz chess, Bullet chess, as well as the slow and painstaking Classical chess (which today’s pros are spending less and less time on) — they can spend as many hours a day, a week, a month as they want practicing against the best competition in the world, with very little friction.
Morphy, on the other hand, had trouble even finding decent players to sit down with at all. Sometimes he spent months waiting for someone else to agree to a single high-level match. And if they cancelled, he just didn’t get to play.
If you were to seriously test a modern Grandmaster of chess, I would bet that they could recognize something like 30,000 positions at any given moment, and even tell you who played those positions and when the game occurred.
Morphy had access to books, sure. And he read them. But he did not have access to a chess engine that would help him iterate the most complex positions ever seen and give him the objectively best moves to play in any one of them.
Not only have these new players discovered and memorized and theorized a universe more positions than Morphy ever could, but now they can practice with those positions at a speed Morphy couldn’t dream of.
Chess is a funny game — all of the best openings have been theorized to a point of absurdity. If you play the King’s Indian defense or the Sicilian, there is very little your opponent could do to surprise you. Because you know by heart all of the best lines, for maybe a dozen or more moves into the game (which is a lot, because that alone means hundreds of reasonably playable positions).
And yet, in pro competition, often after move 7 or 8 you’ll run into a position that has never been seen before, ever, in recorded play. Move 7 or 8, brand new game. It’s just such a complicated game — trying new things still happens. Because it must. Otherwise you can’t surprise your opponent and you have very little edge. If all you do is what your opponent knows, you’re not terribly likely to win.
Gravity
What happens as technology advances is that the rising tide lifts all boats. That is, the whole of humanity gets lifted into progress and ease.
But there’s a nuance there: each person, each group, gets lifted in proportion to how close they sit to the crux of progress. You can apply Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity to almost anything — physics or not. There are gravitational centers which affect everything nearby.
For example, new irrigation techniques in the 16th century would probably benefit the farmer and his whole community. Those who lived near the farmer would probably enjoy lower prices, more plentiful harvests, and maybe even healthier crops. But those living 800 miles away would see almost no benefit, until the technology and its gravitational force took the time to spread.
The good thing about the marriage of chess and the internet is that there really isn’t anyone being left behind. Nobody lives far away from the crux, because the internet makes the crux’s geographical position irrelevant. Anyone with WiFi can spend as much time as they like mastering the game using all of the latest ideas.
Furthermore, you can find out much more easily now about local and regional tournaments, rather than waiting to hear about them by pure luck through word of mouth or bulletin boards. And then you can go practice in real time against real people. For which there is no substitute, of course.
And yet there doesn’t seem to be any limit on how much information the human mind can store and curate. Knowledge isn’t a zero-sum game. It’s overwhelmingly a positive-sum game. You don’t have to forget anything to learn something else; in fact, the more you know the easier it is to learn more. That applies at the level of the individual and at the level of the collective.
And in that way, the internet’s ubiquitous influence over “everybody” is both an advantage and yet again a disadvantage: people Like Nakamura and Carlsen who are one-in-a-million minds get magnified that much more. Because they sponge up knowledge like gluttons, and they never fucking stop playing chess.
So even though we’re all standing on the shoulders of giants, the superstar effect is still very much real. Because there will always be people who either have sharper minds, more creativity, or simply work harder. There will always be people who use the available tools better, for one reason or another.
The edge of technology
Something I’ve been thinking about recently is the progress of communication technology:
The printing press made it so that anyone could be a reader.
The internet made it so that anyone can be a reader of anything.
Social media made it so that anyone could be a creator.
AI is going to make it so that anyone can be a creator of anything.
AI, if it delivers on the promises we’ve shoved into its mouth, is going to again lift all boats. Which will be incredible. But once we’re all 20 more feet above sea level there are still going to be boats that outperform and those that simply rise to a new baseline.
Because there are going to be those who receive the technology, and those who get the technology.
In the first two decades of the internet, Search Engine Optimization was the problem of the user, not the problem of the website owner. The first masters of the internet were people who knew how to browse it creatively and precisely — knew how to call forth the furthest reaches of the internet directly to their screens.
For instance, instead of going to a search engine and typing “why is my car making a noise,” you’d type “knocking/tapping/ticking sound front end Toyota Camry.” And you’d be rewarded for your diligence with posts on obscure message boards that answered your exact problem or one like it. Instead of being sent to a general section of the library, you’d be directed to the book, page, and line that answered your question.
Now that’s baked right into websites, and into Google. And Google most likely knows what you’re looking for before you finish typing.
The master of today’s internet is someone who knows how to communicate — not with a search engine, but with people. You could also say that the master of today’s internet is really communicating with the algorithm. Which is true. But at the end of the day, the algorithm is a device for delivering to people what they want. The TikTok algorithm delivers stupid, meaningless content to half the population because half the population wants to see stupid, meaningless content. It’s still about what people want.
The master of tomorrow’s internet is someone who knows how to communicate with AI. Part of that is having a vocabulary that can express more per word, part of it is figuring out how to build a trusting, understanding relationship with a computer, and part of it is knowing exactly, precisely what you’re trying to accomplish. Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash predicted this decades ago with Hiro’s digital librarian.
The edge is in getting the human part right. Always has been.
The most interesting conversations about ChatGPT have not been about its outputs, but about how to give it better inputs. How to do the human element of the technology correctly. How to make your technology serve you, instead of the other way around. And it’s precisely the same with trying to get better images out of Midjourney.
It’s also the same way with dog training: the art of prompting is by far the most important part, and you can tell right away when someone seriously gets it. No matter how much AI or how many pit bulls you give to the average person, they still have to learn how to use them.
The reason today’s Grandmasters could probably beat Paul Morphy isn’t because they’re smarter or better (because they probably aren’t) — it’s because they have the unearned advantage of having been born later. They accumulated knowledge that Morphy couldn’t have possibly accumulated. The cool part is, they’ve taken that advantage and parlayed it.
Rising tides lift all boats, but that doesn’t mean you can’t also build a better boat.
Drink some water. Some unbelievably pure, reverse-osmosed, deionized water.
JDR
“Every pessimist who ever lived has been buried in an unmarked grave. Tomorrow has always been better than today, and it always will be.” - Paul Harvey
🎤 Sad to hear your Mic bit the dust.
Still read and enjoyed your words loud and clear. Great consistent posting on a range of topics. I learned about chess today, Ty.