Mozart of Chess: Magnus Carlsen
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Channel: CBS News
Views: 4,222,043
Rating: 4.9139962 out of 5
Keywords: magnus carlsen, chess, 60 minutes, mozart of chess, chess grandmaster, interview, cbs
Id: Qc_v9mTfhC8
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Length: 13min 0sec (780 seconds)
Published: Sun Feb 19 2012
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The bit with Kasparov was very interesting. The guy turns up half an hour late, doesn't even greet his opponent, procrastinates over moves and then walks off after scraping a draw with only a brief backward glance.
I guess that when you have a reputation as the greatest chess player of all time, playing a kid like Magnus Carlsen is the scariest thing in the world.
I don't think that's a good way to put it. Each chessmatch isn't memorized by the location of every single piece, but by the moves that were sequentially done from the startposition. Not that it's not impressive, but that line doesn't represent what's going on in my opinion - even though effectively it may be true.
(not the exact same example, but if i were to memorize 5 sequential chessmoves, i will not state that i've memorized the exact location of 5 x 32 = 160 chesspieces, even though i could retrieve all positions for every single piece after every move. I could even tell you which positions were empty on every move, so i'd be remembering exactly what's on 320 chesslocations)
To play at this level, you need a lot of dedication and a certain level of genius. I quit when I was rated about ~1700 FIDE, but the top guy has a rating of 2837 right now (Carlsen, Magnus). No matter how much time/effort I put into this game, I probably would have never broken 2100. It gets exponentially harder to earn your next 100 points, and I respect those guys who are at the top.
Isn't the strategy behind this sort of tournament to actually play pairs of opponents against each other? I seem to remember Derren Brown doing this.
If you find it hard to believe someone can remember this much information at once, it's worth noting he is not in fact memorizing the position of 320 pieces individually, but 10 board layouts. Essentially, information is being condensed into "chunks" or "objects" so it can be stored in object-limited working memory. Everybody is capable of using this memory strategy, such as when you remember a phone number with seven individual digits as a 3 digit number and a 4 digit number. 7 objects is then represented as 2.
The impressive part of this task is in the detail/resolution of the objects he is storing. This efficient information encoding is made possible by his absolute mastery of common (and uncommon) board configurations and move progressions. The more familiar a set of information is (such as a board configuration or a sequence of 4 digits in a phone number), the easier it is to remember. For an American, "1776" is easier to remember than "4582", but maybe not for someone from China. Likewise, someone who is not an experienced chess player would have no chance of performing this feat, even if they had an exceptionally large working memory capacity.
The New Yorker had a great profile of Carlsen last year. Unfortunately, it seems only the abstract is available online.
This is a common feat for chess players at that level.
This is hardly impressive for his level. Alekhine played two blindfold simuls with 26 and 32 players respectively. The world record for blindfold simuls in the 20th century was with 52 games at the same time. In the 21st century, the record 46 blindfold simuls.
Man, I once tried playing chess with my friend without either of us seeing the board. We had to quit after like 5 moves because we had no idea what the board looked like... Admittedly we both suck at chess.