19 June 2025

FT article: The sports helping executives stay at the top of their game

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.”

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