Magnus Carlsen wins longest world chess championship game of all time
Genuinely enjoyable and timely game. Out of prep early, machine evaluations useless throughout, plenty to play for and Magnus&#x27;s quality and stamina showed.<p>I&#x27;m of the opinion that there&#x27;s nothing to gain from fans having engines open during a game, despite working in sports analytics and ostensibly being on the side of the machines. Obviously engines have a lot to say about the modern game, and the match so far had clearly been dominated by excellent prep by both teams. But the excellent commentary on Levitov Chess World by the peerless Peter Svidler, Vladimir Kramnik and Evgenij Miroshnichenko was firmly of the opinion that we had a game on our hands throughout. They were correct.<p>I looked into some stats from the most recent TCEC superfinal just to get a feel for the error bars in engine evaluations. I think it&#x27;s clear that even up to about +1.5, a draw is still on the cards between the superhuman engines, let alone humans. About a quarter of the superfinal games were decisive, despite us treating them as oracles. They&#x27;re far more accurate in their draw predictions - in games that reached a 0.0 evaluation, only 3 ended with a win.<p>But in this game, even when we hit the tablebase results, where the result is a foregone conclusion for the machines, they still don&#x27;t reflect the outcome of a human game, especially when the time controls start to get more stressful.<p>Anyway, what a wonderful, reassuring game. The players will be exhausted and it sets up a fascinating weekend of play. I couldn&#x27;t be happier.