Rybka 4 beaten blindfold by neurosurgeon

[Don]

http://www.chessblog.com/2011/04/comput ... eaten.html

This one's for all humanity. Ukrainian Andrew Slyusarchuk, 39 years old, neurosurgeon by profession, has taken on Rybka-4 and beaten him(her/it) blindfold!

Nope, he's not a grandmaster (and doesn't intend to give Vishy Anand any competition). He says, he wanted to display to the world the power of the human mind. What a celebration for all of us!

Andrew was searched thoroughly for any hidden devices before the event. He says, he just learned it all up! He won with white then drew with black to win the match. Incidentally, Andrew plan a simul against 150 Grandmasters. By the way, Andrew specialises in improving memory technologies and knows by heart 20,000 books and 30 million digits of the pi.

Funny. It's humanly impossible. At least the part with 30 million digits of pi is 100% a joke.

30 million digits of pi would take close to a year to memorize at 1 digit per second without any sleep. So if he can recite it, he is using some formula of some kind and is a VERY fast calculator. But I don't know why he would not just admit that he can calculate it, if that is what he is doing because it would be very impressive.

[Don]

http://www.chessblog.com/2011/04/comput ... eaten.html

This one's for all humanity. Ukrainian Andrew Slyusarchuk, 39 years old, neurosurgeon by profession, has taken on Rybka-4 and beaten him(her/it) blindfold!

Nope, he's not a grandmaster (and doesn't intend to give Vishy Anand any competition). He says, he wanted to display to the world the power of the human mind. What a celebration for all of us!

Andrew was searched thoroughly for any hidden devices before the event. He says, he just learned it all up! He won with white then drew with black to win the match. Incidentally, Andrew plan a simul against 150 Grandmasters. By the way, Andrew specialises in improving memory technologies and knows by heart 20,000 books and 30 million digits of the pi.

The problem is that the claims would need to be verified, and claiming they *were* verified is even more unbelievable than the claim they were done. Why?

Consider the claim he memorized 30 million PI numbers. It isn't so much that it is impossible, I wont judge that, but how one tests it. For example, as a mere reference, one digit per second, non-stop, 24h in 24, would take 347+ days. And so on.

proving that he does not remember 30 million digits of PI is easy

choose 1000 random numbers 1-30,000,000 and test him if he can write the digits in the relevant 1000 places.

If he is going to fail then we have an evidence that he does not remember and if he is not going to fail then he probably cheats by using a computer
because I do not believe that humans can remember the first 30,000,000 digits of pi.

Most of the times those who remember decks of cards or whatever do it "as a whole", like a sequence or a pattern. So they can reproduce the whole deck but if you ask "whats the 21st card" they cannot answer you without actually reproducing 1 to 20 first.

Indeed the digits of pi is total BS.

That's not correct. Many people can memorize a deck of cards by position. Some top card players have this skill and it's a skill any of us could learn if we wanted to take the time.

It's all done by memory systems and I used to be able to do it and could quickly relearn it if I wanted to. It just takes some practice. The basic idea is to associate some object with each card and get really familiar with that. For example a 7 of spades might be "hog." You have to get where you know the "thing" instantly, you see a 7 of spades and immediately think "hog" in your mind. Then you do the same thing with the number 1-52 so each of them are associated with some object. Then as someone reads off the cards you make a quick association, the more ridiculous the better. If the 12th card is a seven of spades and the word for 12 is "kite" for example, picture a field full of kids flying kites, but on the other end of the string are a bunch of pigs (hogs) snorting instead of normal kites. Then as soon as someone asks you what the 12th card is, you immediately know 12 is kite and you cannot help but remember the hogs.

The hardest part is first memorizing a word for every card and then a word for every number. There is even a system for doing that really quickly (all spades for example might start with the "s" sound.) The rest comes easy and just takes some practice. Anyone here can do it and since everyone probably thinks you are a genius anyway because you play chess and are good with computers, this will really convince them

You can memorize the deck by linking one card to the next, or by position. For some reason I found for me that it was EASIER to go by position in the deck.

The guy who beats rybka and memorizes pi is probably pretty sharp, but typically they have a huge bag full of tricks which help things along considerably. For example anyone can learn to very quickly tell you which day of the week you were born on given their birthday, and do it in 2 or 3 seconds (with some practice.) Then you tell them that you "memorized" the calendar even though you didn't.

The trick to beating Rybka is not hard to understand. I think someone already hit on it. I used to beat my old fidelty computer at will, I just always played the SAME exact moves every time unless I lost - and over time I learned how to beat it EVEN THOUGH it had a book that varied. I just learned every pathway to victory. Sometime it would vary even when out of book so you have to learn to beat that too. If I wanted to reproduce this rybka trick I would do the same thing with the help of another strong computer. As long as it did not have a seriously wide opening book it can be done (and if it does you have a LOT of work to do If you increase the level a little you will find that is still plays most of the same moves but there will still be some that take you down another path.

To impress people even more, you tell them that you are going to use the "tournament" book set on the "best" move setting! In reality that makes your task much easier. Then you tell them that you want to play at a HIGH level - again that is a big advantage for you because the moves will vary much less due to random noise and timing issues.

I'm pretty sure he did something like this. I'll bet HE is the one who constructed the ground rules on how this was to be set up - but I don't know for sure.

Playing blindfold is not as difficult as people think either - of course if you are memorizing moves you don't really need to be able to visualize the board. But even if you are not, most intelligent people can teach themselves to play blindfold. When I was an active tournament player I was messing around with this with some friends and we were all surprised how far we could go and we still knew where the pieces were. Although I never played a complete game I could see that with practice it could be done. The reason we tried is that at a tournament we saw a mere expert (rated less than 2200 USCF) playing blindfold speed chess and tearing people up. To someone not familiar with chess at all, this seems so fantastic it is hard to believe, but many people know the words to hundreds of popular songs, the name of the group who did the song, etc. Whatever your really interested in you can soak up like a sponge.

[Mithu]

[Whatever your really interested in you can soak up like a sponge.

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