The latest Financial Times article involving chess - "The sports helping executives stay at the top of their game" - sadly was evidently written by non-chessplayers. How could I tell? From this quote:
Chess is not a solved game: despite the computing advances, there is no known perfect way to play it. But for some, it is too controlled an environment to offer a window into the real world — too little emotion, too many pre-planned sequences. How much can you learn about life from a sport that machines play far better?
There are several things wrong with the above statement, but the primary tipoff was the "too little emotion" part - no one who has played a serious game would ever say that, including Magnus Carlsen when he loses. The part about not learning from life in anything that machines "play [or do] far better" would mean abandoning all sorts of activities in modern life. I suppose we should all stop writing and drawing now that generative AI exists?
The other chess quote from the article is more on point:
Demis Hassabis, co-founder of Google DeepMind, became a chess master aged 13. He attributes his early interest in AI to playing chess “and trying to improve my own thought processes”.
And I would say an article quote on tennis is also very applicable (see Chess vs. Tennis here for more parallels) and one of the reasons I enjoy chess as a pastime:
“There’s no favouritism, there’s no politics. You either win or lose based on how you perform in the moment.”
