Unfortunately the cost for this stuff is going down. Cheaper to collect information, cheaper to store it, cheaper compute, and better algorithms that mean you need fewer resources.
If the cost to surveil the population is $10k per capita today, it'll be $1k in a few years and $100 a few years after that.
This is a war that can't be won, it's just part of the changing landscape of technology in the information era.
I don't think the cost has been doing down or will continue to trend downward long term. You're assuming that the public hasn't gained and won't gain additional capabilities while our adversaries evolve. But look at our communication reach, bandwidth, latency, and cipher strength.
How easy was it for the government to deliver mass propaganda before the Internet without the public realizing? How quickly and how many bits of information can Alice in Seattle reliably get to Bob in Houston with a strong cipher in the 1960s? Was there ever such a thing as a cipher that's widely used yet unbreakable by the state? Why do you think China banned TLS 1.3? Do you think it will be harder or easier to pretend to be a different person when there are open-source LLMs that can run on a gaming computer?
The Internet is a recent invention. Smartphones and seamless network coverage are even more recent, and so is curve25519. We're closer than ever to what is effectively secure instant telepathy with anyone in the world. We just need to stay vigilant and not be fall for doom and gloom in this last stretch.
I would imagine it's more you're being skeptical of something that is unpopular to be skeptical about. It's like someone saying climate change is impacting our planet, and then asking "source?" in response.
No, that's not correct. I ask "Source?" when someone makes a claim that goes against popular belief, such as: "climate change is not impacting our planet." I do think "Source?" is generally considered a low-effort response, so it's the wording I guess, not the context.
He declined to defend it because he disagreed with the way FIDE was organizing and managing the tournament. I believe this is around the time they threw him out of a tournament for wearing jeans, when he was not the only competitor present in jeans.
I think it's nearly universally accepted that his streak ended on a technicality rather than a legitimate decline/defeat.
I think it's more that he wanted to go out undefeated, rather than lacking motivation. Or rather the former driving the latter.
He made 5 title defenses. Two were against the previous generation of players, and he did extremely well. 2 were against players of his generation and were anything but compelling victories. He only won a total of 1 classical game in the 24 played, and that was in a must-win scenario because he had just lost for a final record in these matches of +1 -1 =22. And finally there was his match against Nepo which was looking to be another extremely close match until Nepo lost a critical game, and then went on monkey tilt, as is his reputation - proceeding to play horribly for the rest of the match and get wiped.
In an interview with Rogan, Carlsen stated he felt he peaked a bit before his match against Nepo, and so he probably did not view his chances of success in a world championship match as especially high. So he was going to have to spend months preparing for a match he could very well lose which would certainly tarnish his reputation as the GOAT of chess. I think this is why he couldn't find the motivation.
For instance there were new world records just around the corner. The most successful world title defenses is 6 and that was back in the early 20th century. With one more he could have surpassed Kasparov and at least tied the record.
Magnus has always been unhappy with the format of the WCC cycle. He first skipped it in 2011, when he was already the top-rated player but not yet champion (https://www.chess.com/news/view/carlsen-quits-world-champion...), and very nearly skipped it again in 2013.
Actually he recently stated that he IS still disappointed about that whole incident because nothing changed and is currently backing up hikaru on drama around similar issues.
The motivation issues can stem from poor management :)
From what I recall, he automatically lost that one game but was not thrown out of the tournament. Eventually he just stopped playing the world championship altogether, which is when he lost his title.
I don't really follow human chess, but I wonder what the new nr 1 player thought of themselves after essentially becoming the "best player in the world who doesn't wear jeans." Must be so frustrating to know there is something left to achieve but your league's shenanigans will prevent you from achieving it in an official and prestigious manner.
The jean controversy was a couple of years after Magnus stopped defending the title. It has nothing to do with it. Magnus just doesn't care about the format of the world title.
I think something broke for him while playing Caruana in 2018. The classical games were a snooze fest of defensive plays after defensive plays and everything was settled in the rapid tie break in a fairly unsatisfying manner.
He is not the first to complain about that by the way. Fischer hated the format too.
The freestyle championship was better in pretty much every way.
There was no snooze fest though in 2018 WCC. The games were extremely exciting, with unbalanced pawn structures. They all ended in draws only because of their strong defensive skills and a touch of luck in a few games.
Unbalanced pawn structure is a feature of the Sveshnikov Sicilian but Caruana had done a lot of prep and it was obvious. Carlsen quicky left the main line for the boring 7. Nd5. Plus, Carlsen missed a lot of good moves because he had to play it safe. To me, it was boring chess of the highest level.
A lot of it felt like watching engines by proxy. One prepared well on a very complex opening. The other found the best meta counterplay and held until he reached the tie break.
Game 12 is a travesty. It was clear he just wanted to move to rapid.
You are clearly confused.
1. It was Magnus who played Sveshnikov, and Fabi who played the 7. Nd5 line.
2. 7. Nd5 line is not boring, it's one of the sharpest things to play against Svehsnikov, with pawns marching on both sides of the board. Mainline Sveshnikov on the other hand can be very drawish, with maneuvering play, where no side has a pawn break in sight.
3. It was the beginning of the Leela era, with many new opening concepts. It was a short-lived golden age, with players excited to try new ideas. After this match Magnus had a second peak, incorporating new knowledge, and won quite a lot of sharp games in Sveshnikov.
4. Well, game 12 was interesting, but EV of extra time to relax and prepare for rapid games with Caruana in 2018 was quite high. Fabi wasn't a very good rapid/blitz player back then.
5. Carlsen-Nepo WCC was a massacre, while the games were quite boring, except a few at the beginning. That match or any of the next matches would be a much better example for a case against classical chess.
I myself quite like chess960, and it's clearly the right direction. Opening prep is absurd now, especially at super GM level.
But that's it. There was no win because the opportunity to even compete was taken away. Imagine you train your whole life and finally win the Olympic Gold medal, but everyone knows it's only because the true nr 1 ignored to compete in this format.
Winning a title is never about facing the greatest possible opponent. Even the people who show up aren’t at their absolute best, but consider everyone who doesn’t devote their lives to the sport. The greatest potential chess player of all time likely does something else with their lives.
Without prep Magnus would be vastly less likely to win, and he’s not doing the prep because he’s not competing. How exactly is that different than someone not devoting themselves to the sport 20 years ago?
I make no claims about what’s going on in people’s heads here just the underlying reality.
I was pissed I didn’t go to nationals in high school largely because I got no sleep the night before due to a crappy hotel stay. Losing a close game to board 1 while trying to stay awake sucked, but I was hardly the only person off my game, so that’s just how things workout.
This is plain wrong for anybody that has been actually following chess.
He said like a year before declining that he would only defend against Alireza because he was the younger generation. Nobody believed him, Alireza didn't win the Candidates and he said "no thanks" and then everybody was surprised pikachu.
The Jean thing was way later and in an unrelated event.
My understanding is that this is purely a strategic choice by the bigger labs. When OpenAI released Whisper, it was by far best-in-class, and they haven't released any major upgrades since then. It's been 3.5 years... Whisper is older than ChatGPT.
Gemini 3 Pro Preview has superlative audio listening comprehension. If I send it a recording of myself in a car, with me talking, and another passenger talking to the driver, and the radio playing, me in English, the radio in Portuguese, and the driver+passenger in Spanish, Gemini can parse all 4 audio streams as well as other background noises and give a translation for each one, including figuring out which voice belongs to which person, and what everyone's names are (if it's possible to figure that out from the conversation).
I'm sure it would have superlative audio generation capabilities too, if such a feature were enabled.
Yes modern AIs have an entire opening database and generally have cached the first 20+ moves of the game (for most common openings) from a database of very deep searches identifying the best move. This is absolutely a form of opening prep for AIs.
That said, even without that database a modern AI will completely topple the best human at every common chess variant. Humans cannot defeat modern AIs in chess like games.
Like my answer below, that's wrong. Even I have achieved a few draws or even wins against Stockfish in training games, and I am FM strength. From time to time you are happy to reach a simple rook endgame which happens to be won and the engine doesn't anticipate that (horizon effect). You still draw or lose 90% of those but you win 10%.
Either the engine was misconfigured, the hardware you were playing on was glitching or you are omitting something. There is no chance in the world that you can beat stockfish in standard time control.
Just because you can not do it it does not mean that others can not do it. If you search for Lichess games where strong players play against (edit: strongest!) Stockfish (which, admittedly is not the full throttle Stockfish) you will find that Stockfish by far does not win all the time. Such is a claim which only inexperienced chess beginners and Stockfish fanboys make. Stronger players know that Stockfish is relatively better, and by a far margin, but – obviously – does not win all the time due to the huge drawing range in chess. Admittedly, winning a game gets more and more difficult with every year. And, to make you happy, I have never beaten Lc0.
> If you search for Lichess games where strong players play against Stockfish ([..]) you will find that Stockfish by far does not win all the time.
I'm sure some of those games are actually stockfish v stockfish or something similar. Its pretty easy to run stockfish or lichess locally and copy the moves from each engine back and forth.
@josephg (for reasons I do not know there is no reply link below your post)
Sure, some people are cheaters. Some are not. There is no personal win in cheating against Stockfish. Usually strong players do it for training purposes, or to entertain their watchers when they stream. I actually remember having seen one who did that, and he drew. That was a party.
Yes. I hear this claim from above: "Some humans can beat stockfish."
Evidence given: "There exist some small number of games on lichess.org played against stockfish where the user won."
My counter argument is that games on lichess against stockfish don't imply a human beat stockfish. It could just be that stockfish (or other bots) can sometimes beat stockfish. And some humans surely use bots to play on their behalf in order to cheat in online games.
I don't know if any humans can beat stockfish. But I don't consider that to be strong evidence.
> My counter argument is that games on lichess against stockfish don't imply a human beat stockfish. It could just be that stockfish (or other bots) can sometimes beat stockfish. And some humans surely use bots to play on their behalf in order to cheat in online games.
Also, Lichess' Stockfish runs in the browser (with all the slowdown that entails), plus is limited to one second of thinking time even on the highest level. It also has no tablebases and AFAIK no opening book. Even if you _can_ consistently beat Lichess Stockfish level 8, there's still a very long way from there to saying you can beat Stockfish at its maximum strength, which is generally what people would assume the best humans would be up against in such a duel.
People generally don't play unencumbered engines anymore because the result isn't interesting.
Well, there is nothing I can do to prove to you that I did, as I can not travel into the past taking you with me. I know, I did win two or three games and drew approximately 25 out of approximately 500 training games. But I can not prove it. You have to believe or not.
I believe you. I just suspect stockfish was misconfigured, it wasn’t playing at its highest skill level or something similar was going on. That seems more likely. (I’d love to know for sure though).
Yeah his claim is quite absurd really. If it was a weaker stockfish (bad hardware, older version etc.) then maybe. Modern stockfish pretty much crushes any and everyone. A draw alone would be extremely impressive, and maybe doable with enough luck from a top player. But even that is very far fetched nowadays. Let alone actually winning.
Elsewhere in the thread he revealed that he achieved these results around the year 2015, which means we was playing against Stockfish 6 or earlier, estimated to have about 400 less ELO than today's Stockfish 18. Stockfish 6 didn't even have NNUE, so the real issue seems to be that he thinks his results from 2015 hold any relevance to the chess engines of today.
No not at all! You can find plenty of videos on YouTube of humans taking down 2015-era stockfish. Usually it involves exploiting specific weaknesses in the engine, for example bringing the game to a stalled position where the game nearly reaches the 50 move rule, and then the engine makes a disadvantaged move to avoid a draw.
Especially pre-NNUE, chess engines were often not fully well-rounded, and therefore a human with specific knowledge of the chess engine's weaknesses could take it down with enough attempts.
Would you be willing to bet money that you can beat a properly setup stockfish, no piece odds and even time controls? I'll give you literally any odds you name and let you try an unlimited number of times until you give up. 100% serious.
P.S: You should not take this bet. You will lose. You are mistaken if you think you beat stockfish.
If you're betting against modern stockfish, respectively, that's a terrible bet.
There are some games of knight odds Leela playing superGM's.
For example, Hikaru Nakamura went 1 win, 2 draws, and 13 losses against LeelaKnightOdds at 3 minutes + 2 sec increment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYO9w3tQU4Q
So that's a score of 2 out of 16. Which is apparently actually very good. I know Fabi played a lot of games too, and also lost almost all of them.
And that is with knight odds lol. And stockfish is ever better than Leela, but generally less aggressive and more methodical.
You clarified in another post that you had won back in 2015. I have no clue the strength of engines back then (I imagine still very strong of course), but a decade of growth is a lot. They're completely insane nowadays.
I doubt that. Stockfish 11 years ago as you claim (which around then was rated approximately 2800), maybe. Stockfish today? Stockfish on Lichess is 3000 and that's not even running at full capacity. A fully supported Stockfish running on top hardware is currently 3650ish. It can avoid known draw lines and stalemate lines, and could absolutely crush the likes of Magnus.
Further, if the engine does not use an opening database and the thinking time per game is the same, then the engine will usually make the same moves, so you can learn from your errors. There are just a few chess engines which "learn" per default and therefore change their moves, like BrainLearn.
I have achieved these results around 2015, sitting at home, relaxed. I was not in a match situation observed by millions. Such a situation can knowingly lead to blunders like Kramniks overlook of mate in 2.
I also sometimes "cheated" by aborting the game when I was tired and continuing it the next day (if at all). That's what the player in a match can not do.
I also sometimes restarted a game at a specific position. Can also not be done in a match. Finally, they used better hardware in these matches. I had eight threads on my old Laptop and I used four of them. The Laptop itself was bought around 2005. Between 2000 and approximately 2020 I trained every day and I was on my peak. I am still around 2400 on Lichess today, without training.
So, I hope it does not sound that extraordinary any more. It isn't. Maybe it is now, but not then.
2015 stockfish is quite a different beast from 2026 stockfish. Stockfish didn't even add NNUE until 2020.
Based on what data I can find, it's estimated that the difference between the 2025 stockfish (stockfish 6) and today's stockfish (stockfish 18) is nearly 400 points.
That's the difference between Magnus Carlson at his peak and someone who doesn't even have enough rating to qualify for the grandmaster title.
So yes, the fact that you beat stockfish in 2015 doesn't sound extraordinary, because AI today is vastly stronger than it was when you achieved those results. What sounds extraordinary to people is your belief that you could repeat those results against today's top chess engines.
Out of sheer curiosity, I did a bunch of research to understand just how dramatic a 350 point rating gap is in real word chess. Magnus Carlson, for example, has a 98% win rate against players >350 rating points lower than his own, with zero recorded losses.
In fact, there is only one game I could find in all of Chess history (Anand vs Touzane, 2001) where a super GM (rating >2700) dropped a classical game to someone more than 350 points below theirs (gap: 402 points). (it's estimated that there are between 2000 and 3000 classical games in history played between Super GMs and players >350 points below them) And it could easily be that Anand was ill, or suffering some other human condition which made his play significantly worse than his typical play for that game - which you would not see from a computer engine.
In other words, the Stockfish that you beat in 2015 would itself be expected to get 3-5 points (that is, 6-10 draws and 0 wins) in 500 matches against the best chess engine of today. The delta in strength is immense, and it is reasonable for everyone else in this comment thread to assert that you would have zero chance at all of picking up a draw against Stockfish 18 in a fair game of any time control, regardless of how many matches you played.
I do not know the time controls anymore, but I always use the latest Stockfish with all available threads. No opening book, but I do not repeat lines to take advantage of that, because I play to train calculation. I guess hash was the (for my setup) normal 4096 MB.
Latest Stockfish with all available threads and no opening book is still well beyond any human. Elo ratings get a bit silly with computers, but we're talking an Elo of well north of 3000.
For reference: The last serious match between the top human player and an engine was Brains in Bahrain, Kramnik–Fritz 7, in 2002 (already that should tell you something). Well, actually a broken and buggy version of Fritz 7, but that's another story. It was a 4–4 tie. On the latest CCRL list, Stockfish 18 outranks Fritz 8 (the oldest Fritz version on the list) by 947 Elo points _on the same hardware_. (For comparison, Magnus Carlsen's peak rating is 65 points higher than Kramnik's peak rating.)
Add to that 24 years of hardware development, and you can imagine why no human player is particularly interested in playing full-strength engines in a non-odds match anymore. Even more so in FRC/Chess960 where you have absolutely zero chance of leading the game into some sort of super-drawish opening to try to hold on to half a point now and then.
I'm late to this thread but I've manufactured about a dozen SKUs and I think you could have saved an enormous amount of grief with one simple step:
If you are American, and you are manufacturing 500 units, do it in America. Yes, it's more expensive per-unit, but at 500 units you don't need a tiny per-unit cost.
American manufacturing is more flexible, higher agency, and people tend to adapt to underspecified instructions better. The communication loops are stronger.
That said, America has enormous tradeoffs. If you need 10,000 of a part in 4 hours because something weird happened, China can make it happen. America... might take months. But if your batch size is 500, it's better for an American living in America to cut their teeth on American manufacturing and go to China when you need 10,000+ units per run.
Wow, this article is a tour de force in menu and icon design, I learned a lot. For anyone who wants to understand the design world better, or wants a glimpse into the brain of a design-minded person, this is a great article. Incredibly accessible, incredibly insightful, and just overall a gem.
If the cost to surveil the population is $10k per capita today, it'll be $1k in a few years and $100 a few years after that.
This is a war that can't be won, it's just part of the changing landscape of technology in the information era.
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