Alex7's blog

Chess Grandmasters?
By Alex7, 9 years ago, In English

I was just curious is there a codeforces Grandmaster who is also a chess Grandmaster ??

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9 years ago, # |
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I don't think so. To become a chess Grandmaster you have to perform enormous amount of work. Vast majority of chess Grandmasters plays chess professionaly and they devote their lives to it.

Competitive programming is very different. In some way it can be corelated with your job — you can work at company or do scientific research and still progress in contests (or at least don't become much weaker). It's because competitive programming it's a mixture of math and CS tasks inspired by real life problems.

Chess is very specific area where you have to posess amounts of expert knowledge which is almost useless anywhere else. And let me be clear — I didn't say that playing chess is useless at all. I thank God I play chess my entire life and for me It's the most beautiful sport I've ever seen.

Also chess is much older and much more "developed" discipline. 100 years ago there where almost no professionals, today there are a lot of and the competition is very strong. There are about 180000 people with ELO rating and probably millions of people playing chess without international rating.

I know the world of chess quite good. In fact I'm the only person in my family who don't play chess very seriously (I'm a bad son). And the only both chess players and competitive programmers I know are: me, my roommate terjanq, one guy who was laureate of Polish Junior Olympiad in Informatics and then disappear from the world of contests and this guy: http://www.spoj.com/users/jaaro/.

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9 years ago, # |
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VeniVidiVici is an International Master in chess, and a Master on codeforces!!

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9 years ago, # |
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it would be interestring to see corellations between chess and CF ratings. I play chess exclusively at VK (1chess.org) so I don't have a FIDE rating.

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    9 years ago, # ^ |
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    I have FIDE rating higher than Codeforces rating, but actually it's not a thing to be proud of. They both are too low :(

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9 years ago, # |
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I'm not a chess grandmaster and neither is jablko, Xellos, Bobik, nor Mimino (at least as far as I know and according to ratings.fide.com). 691 more CF grandmasters to check.

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9 years ago, # |
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stevenkplus is also a chess player (source).

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9 years ago, # |
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Poncholo is a FIDE Master from the Dominican Republic and also a competitive programmer. You can see his Chess profile page following this link. He is much more active in Chess than in CP, and is currently trying to break the Marc Lang's record for most simultaneous blindfold chess matches, which is set at 46 boards. You can follow his (Spanish language) fan page here.

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9 years ago, # |
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not a codeforces and not a chess, but still

https://www.hackerrank.com/AWice — Alex Wice, legendary poker player

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9 years ago, # |
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I'm not great at it but I enjoy playing chess very much and would love to have a game with a competitive programmer.

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    9 years ago, # ^ |
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    Although I'm terrible at it, we can play at chess24.com sometime :P

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      9 years ago, # ^ |
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      Or maybe hold a codeforces chess tournament, that would be funny..

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    9 years ago, # ^ |
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    because we are programmers, why don't we play with our self-written chess engines? :D

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      9 years ago, # ^ |
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      Because they are way too good and win every time :(

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      9 years ago, # ^ |
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      Because either you fail to beat your own bot (and thus you learn that you are a poor chess player) or your bot fails to beat you (and thus you learn that you are a poor coder). Or both, in case of draw.

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9 years ago, # |
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I don't know about Chess, but I know that snuke is very good (7dan) at Go.

btw, anyone know Chess 2: The Sequel? :P

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    9 years ago, # ^ |
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    My friend told me the rules and we played some games. I always chose Classic since I have big experience in usual chess, and after these games I feel that Reaper army is imbalanced.

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9 years ago, # |
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