Isaac Berkower - Week 21 - The Magnus Carlson Invitational

 

Currently going on is the Magnus Carlsen invitational chess tournament, part of a 10 tournament qualifying contest leading up to a final called the Meltwater Tour. Magnus Carlson is the current world number 1 but that title could be in trouble. He already dropped three previous tournaments in the Meltwater Tour and needs to win today, Friday March 19 to move on in the current tournament with his name in it. He is currently down against his opponent, a Russian nicknamed Nepo, and needs to make up ground. 

Although he is down, I think that it's pretty crazy how much a chess grandmaster needs to learn in order to get to their level, because even though there usually hasn't been a game that played out the exact same way as the current game being played, a grandmaster can always pull a previous tactic used in a similar situation in another game, and to do this, they need to store information from tens, hundreds, or probably even thousands of games and know exactly how to use it in their game. Obviously there is a reason that these people are at the top of the world, because of this insane storage of information that they have in their brain.

One concept that is emphasized by this is that for most situations, the player doesn’t need to “invent” a move and could instead use a move that was already invented. This concept is one that I have heard a lot in all of the chess videos that I have watched that “you don’t need to reinvent the wheel”. 

I think that this is a concept that could be applied for all facets of work. For example if you are coding a website that has already been created, as long as you understand it, you could just pull the code from github and edit all of the things that need to be edited to meet your needs. Another example is when pi was calculated to high precision by Isaac Newton, instead of other mathematicians trying to start from nothing in order to calculate pi to higher precision, they just used the same method developed by Isaac Newton.

This idea from chess and other areas in life is one that is very important, and should be applied much more than it currently is to everyday life.

What do you think about this idea of not “reinventing the wheel”? Have you been following the Magnus Carlson Invitational?