Abstract:
In the early hours of yesterday morning, netizen Path posted: "I woke up today and saw that the official chess website was bullying Musk." The accompanying picture is a screenshot of the official Chess.com account attacking Musk.
Trigger
The incident happened on September 3rd. Popular science account Massimo posted a post about the number of variations in chess. He said that there are 20 moves at the beginning, and after one round there are more than 400 positions. By the 40th step, the number of possible games is about 10 to the 40th power. This number is about the same as the number of atoms in the observable universe. The post is accompanied by a picture of the branching of the chess game.
Musk responded and pointed out that "the number of moves that are not really stupid is actually very small, and chess will one day be completely solved."
Open a fight
A few hours later, the official account of Chess.com, the world's largest chess website, quoted Musk's post and replied with only two words: "skill issue." This is a slang term in the gaming circle, and the general meaning is "you need to practice more to learn more".
Chess.com's account profile describes its website as the world's largest chess community, with approximately 250 million users. The X official account has about 720,000 fans. The content style is light and humorous. It often posts game highlights, player updates, statistical data and interactive posts.
This time, it was directly aimed at Musk's face, and the comment area became lively. The onlookers knew that this was not a spat between ordinary accounts and ordinary netizens.
Chicken talks to duck
Musk continued to explain the next day. He said: "Chess is hard for humans, but not for computers. One day, it will be as cracked as checkers. Until then - and even after that - have fun. People enjoy participating in many games and sports where machines are far better than people."
Chess.com did not accept this question and started again: "The number of possible chess games is about 40 orders of magnitude higher than the number of atoms in the observable universe. To crack chess, you must exhaustively enumerate all games. Good luck to you."
Musk immediately said that the other party was wrong, "The number of all legal chess positions is about 40 orders of magnitude lower than the estimated number of atoms in the universe. And ASI (super artificial intelligence) will find ways to crack and compress it that are far beyond our understanding."
He also added a narration: "(I was arguing with an unknown intern from a chess website)"
One thing to add here: Chess.com is talking about the total number of games, that is, the chess tree, all possible branches of moves from the beginning to the end. Musk is talking about the number of legal positions, and only counts how many states can be placed on the chessboard.
What these two guys are talking about is actually not the same concept. It is a "chicken-and-duck talk". By the way, the checkers problem was completely solved by computers in 2007, but chess has not yet been solved.
Helper
In order to gain the upper hand in the quarrel, Musk also called for help.
He forwarded Chess.com’s post about the number of chess games to Grok, asked Grok to analyze the authenticity, and then conducted several rounds of conversation analysis. Finally, Musk forwarded the conversation with Grok and asked Grok to cheer him up.
He also added: "By the way, there are more ways to pee in a pot than there are atoms in the universe. This is a stupid metric."
https://x.com/i/grok/share/a53fe97116544841a83b38b4a4923a3d
Intern
Chess.com directly quoted Musk's "intern" sentence and replied: "I am a full-time employee." This post immediately received 94,000 likes and 5 million views, making it the most popular post in the audience.
Daniel Rensch, chief chess officer at Chess.com, added: Then you are now.
Musk only responded with a sighing emoji.
Chess.com again: Even my friend didn’t reply so quickly.
Add code
Lao Ma may have been busy with other things, but Chess.com didn't stop talking: "What's the best way to pretend to know how to play chess? I know someone who needs guidance." The intern said one sentence after another, with no intention of stepping down to the richest man.
Old accounts
This is actually not the first time. On the same day, user DogeDesigner uncovered a photo of Musk's high school chess "team A" and said, "He won every game during that time, but then he quit chess. He believed that computers would eventually dominate the game, and felt that chess was too simple and of little use in real life."
Musk himself replied: "I also think that in terms of transfer learning in chess - that is, transferring the ability to play chess to understanding the real world - there are diminishing returns."
In 2012, some Tesla employees wanted to hold a company-wide chess tournament, but Musk stopped it. Business Insider asked him why, and he said: We don't have time to play chess.
In October 2022, someone asked Musk again whether he could play chess. He said that he had done it when he was a child and thought it was too simple and of little use in reality. Chess is just an 8x8 grid. There is no fog of war, no technology tree, no random map. There are only two players, and the chess pieces on both sides are exactly the same. He prefers to play the mobile strategy game Polytopia.
Chess.com responded to him one by one at that time: Fog of War chess exists, promotion is the technology tree, Fischer's arbitrary chess (chess960) is a random start, there are four-player chess and tribal chess mode (Horde) with unequal forces.
The old accounts were dug out, and the onlookers discovered that this was not a temporary move. The two sides have been feuding over chess for more than a day or two.
Cannot close the game
The American media USA Today wrote a special report on this matter. The report quoted Chess.com spokesperson Bianca Facey as saying:
"We understand that losing chess is annoying, but losing to a so-called intern on X must be even more annoying."
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