A Carlsen Interview
I haven't watched this one, but only read the excerpts here. The article is subtitled "I make a move & I really don't know why", which is one of those sentences that sound profound and awe-inspiring but is in fact routine and practically universal. Most of the time, for most human chess players, moves or candidates moves just come to mind and we investigate them. Differences in the number and average quality of the candidate moves will vary with how much we know, but that doesn't mean that we are consciously generating those moves by any conscious algorithmic process.
This is true in practically every area of our life, including speech and writing. Think about the words you speak. Did you engage in some sort of conscious step-by-step process to select those words? If by some semi-miracle you did, then what conscious step-by-step process did you use to the select the words you used in going through the process of selecting the spoken words? An infinite regress looms here. By the time a chess player has reached an ordinary club standard, he is just as unlikely to follow an explicitly algorithmic process of move selection as a grandmaster.
Reader Comments (2)
This is great! The interviewer also deserves praise for not asking stupid questions, as all too often happens. By the way, Magnus is getting quite fluent in English and expresses himself very well, I find. Watch it, Dennis!
Usually, I find Magnus a little awkward when he is being interviewed. He is not too lucid generally. But in this interview he was great and expressed himself very well.
When the interviewer asked him, which game pleases him most, he referred to some game against Anand (in their first championship match). Carlsen said, even though I didn't win, I created something from nothing. Which game was it? And what might have Carlsen been proud of?
[DM: According to the article he referred to a game played in 2010, not from the first match. See the article for their conjecture as to the game he meant.]