Although Norwegian chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen has been in the news recently for losing a match against India’s D Gukesh and slamming the table over it, he remains one of the best in the world at what he does, and it’s partially due to making use of artificial intelligence (AI).
Specifically, the chess heavyweight grew up in what he referred to as a “hybrid generation,” and last year he launched his own chess app called Take Take Take, which provides daily tournament recap videos and analyses player performance during major competitions.
However, this isn’t his first trip into app development, as he earlier launched Play Magnus, which allows users to play an AI bot version of him at different stages of his career, and later sold it to Chess.com. More recently, popular podcaster Joe Rogan asked Carlsen on his JRE podcast if he could beat his phone in chess, to which he said – “No, no chance.”
Using technology to advance gameplay
Commenting on the launch of his latest app, Carlsen told reporters that he wasn’t feeling threatened by the new app getting in the way of his matches, but that it would actually help him, arguing it would be “good for my game as well, to be able to create some content and formulate my thoughts.”
Furthermore, he believes his analyses would benefit amateur players as well, crediting technology for it:
“The evolution of technology has made access to chess more even. People have more access to information to a larger degree and the same information can be analyzed more and more.”
Moreover, Carlsen has expressed his excitement over seeing the progression of opening theory – the first few moves in a chess match – with newer tools, like stronger chess engines and neural networks. When AI became more human in predicting chess moves, he said it was “really fascinating and it opened a lot of eyes.”
Now, he doesn’t think this has made the game easier on a general level. Still:
“I think if you don’t use the technologies, you’re going to lag behind. So there is no doubt that everybody’s using these tools now and that you should.”
As a reminder, an AI approach designed by Jean-Marc Alliot of the Touluse Computer Science Research Institute rated Carlsen in 2017 as the best player of all time as he had the highest probability among all World Chess Champions to play the moves against the bot.
Meanwhile, his reliance on technology and ventures into apps and AI – including the Play Magnus app (downloaded over 1 million times on Google Play alone) – have made the 35-year-old a poster-boy for modern chess.
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