Magnus Carlsen forced into a draw by more than 143000 people playing against him
19 comments
·May 21, 2025sfblah
somenameforme
This is interesting! I assumed the same thing, so I just skimmed through the game with an engine. The world, on average, was definitely not cheating. As early as move 7 Magnus was outright winning!
But there's an interesting meta in that Magnus played far more passively than he normally would. And so I think he also expected he was probably playing an engine by proxy, and wanted to keep the position completely under control. If he knew the world was legit, they probably would have lost!
I'm still trying to reconcile how it came to be that the world didn't cheat though. Lowest common denominator amongst 140k+ people paired with inevitable chatter of 'Hey best engine move is blah' seems unavoidable.
drewbitt
95 percent accuracy by the world. They traded most everything and played 99 percent accurate in the second half.
selcuka
It's impressive that Magnus might have won if The World hadn't forced a stalemate.
> In the Chess.com virtual chat this week, players appeared split on whether to force the draw — and claim the glory — or to keep playing against Carlsen, even if it ultimately meant a loss.
null
hnposter
Reminds me of Gary Kasparov vs. The World on MSN Gaming Zone.
tedunangst
How many people voted in complete accordance?
nurettin
This means the world (or most of it) was not cheating!
What makes it funny is: when 143000 chess players merge, they basically become Anish Giri.
voxl
It might be natural to jump to immediately think the majority was cheating, but as you rightly point out if they were cheating Magnus would have lost. Human players cannot compete with even a couple hours compute on stockfish let alone 24 hours.
EnPissant
Magnus Carlsen would get crushed by an engine running on an iPhone 1. Meanwhile the world has access to iPhone 16s. The entire concept is flawed. I'm guessing someone made money off it, though.
Marsymars
> Magnus Carlsen would get crushed by an engine running on an iPhone 1.
Did a quick sanity check here - this seems about right - Carlsen might be at least competitive with Pocket Fritz 4 at similar hardware performance to the iPhone 1, but that discounts the software improvements chess engines have seen over the past couple decades.
analog31
I don't know enough about chess, and will take your word for it. What it suggests to me is a deeper question: How do you get 143000 people to all fall in line behind a single machine, or person, making the best decision for them?
EnPissant
If you had a military-like organization and turned 143000 people into calculators led by one (talented) person or a hierarchy, then yes, they would crush Magnus.
ars
No they would not. If you imagine running a computer chess engine on 143,000 humans, it's not even remotely close to the amount of compute you need to win.
Humans don't win by calculation the way computers do. When you have multiple humans working together on chess they don't add up to an ultra-smart human. You are simply as smart as the smartest human in your crew, and that's it.
esseph
The proper question might be: Why is this one iPhone stalemating 140k other iPhones in this particular task?
iPhone/computer/machine/etc
unsupp0rted
Better heuristics. Even 1% better heuristics is enough of an edge in a zero-sum game.
bad_haircut72
Cheating obviously does happen but on the whole chess is kept alive by people who do it for fun. What would be the point of beating Magnus with a computer? Would anyone get satisfaction from that?
olalonde
Oh, sweet summer child.
whythre
I mean, with Carlsen facing this sort of aggregate, large number of ‘opponents,’ yeah, I imagine quite a lot of them are cheaters.
Presumably "the world" used enough engine help to do this.