Is there any chance that a 1300 rated player can beat a 2700 rated player?

Whether 20 or 42, however, your point is a strong one. 2700+ players are not "merely" Grandmasters. They are the best of the best. The current number 41, for example, is a former FIDE World Champion. So is number 37.

Players of this caliber when drunk and tired and blindfolded do not lose to 1300s on their very best days. The "chance" the 1300 has to win may be expressed through statistical estimates, but my bookie gives me better odds of snow skiing in hell.

Completely different processes to find moves. Completely different values being used to judge moves.

And that's just between 1300 and 2000 

techinicly speaking, if you teach a monkey to move the pieces in the correct fashion, there is a Miniscle chance the monkey will guess the right move and beat carlsen.

mdinnerspace wrote:

Ummm, you are mixing up the idea of an infinite number of monkey typing on a keyboard randomly producing a Shakespeare play with this topic.  There is zero chance of a single trained monkey playing a serial progression of games against Carlsen winning a game, ever.  The whole point of the monkeys typing Shakespeare argument is to show how incredibly large infinity actually is, not to say that monkeys can beat humans in any realistic scenario...not even with a "miniscule" chance.

If you agree that for every game Carlsen will play, there exists a sequence of moves that can beat Carlsen.

And if you agree that a monkey, who will move randomly, has a chance to play any move.

Then you can't argue that it is impossible for the monkey to win even if they only play one game.

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I suppose though that the monkey can't move truly randomly. It will favor some types of moves and pieces over others. So I will agree a monkey has no chance.

This argument will similarly defeat monkeys on typewriters. Unless the monkeys are random, then they wont produce everything. E.g. the pattern 2,4,6,8... is infinite and does not itself include many different sets of infinite numbers. So I don't agree that noku's idea is inconsistent if it came from the typewriter idea.

Well note that zero chance and impossible don't mean the same thing. If I throw a dart, it will hit one spot of an infinite amount of possible spots, each of which has a zero chance of occurring (any other assignment of probability would be contradictory, for example saying 1 in a million or 1 in a billion would be a problem because there are more possibilities than a million or billion). Yet I have to hit one; one of those zero probabilities will in fact happen.

So it is what it is. A monkey could beat carlsen ten times in a row, but this possibility isn't a good way of depicting what our reality is like. But it's still a world in which a monkey "could" do this.

Hah, that's a funny observation. I guess infinities screw it all up. Interesting that they sometimes produce a paradox like this, and at other times we can use them to do math that gives solutions in the real world.

btickler... a stipulation was made, tripping, hamstrings etc. is ruled out. Same as a heart attack over the chess board. A useless arguement.

Another stipulation was made: both sides are playing to win, so bribing and other subterfuge doesn't work either.

Not at all; no stipulation breakage here, since you did not follow the criteria.  Comparing a heart attack OTB to those much more likely runner/race outcomes is ridiculous.  A better comparison would be comparing Carlsen breaking up with his girlfriend one day and blundering his queen to a runner tripping over the starting block...both rare, but a lot less rare than a super GM (note how it's not just the chance of any old chessplayer having a heart attack, but of a super GM/top 40-ish in the world player, who just happens to be playing a 1300 in a rated tourney, and who also just happens to have a heart attack OTB) having a heart attack OTB.

Carlson could break up with his girlfriend, his mother pass on, show up drunk as a skunk, in his pajamas after no sleep for 2 days, hang his Queen and never lose to a 1300 as long as he doesn't pass out and lose on time. Joking around of course, but the debate should not include "situations" out side the norm.

Not the point, I have already said that won't happen, in this very thread, and a long time before you ever came along, I might add.  The point was that your running example is flawed and unuseful in this discussion for furthering the side we both agree on...no more, no less.

A runner who can run the hundred in 10 secs can trip, fall, pull a hamstring , and beat a runner who's best is 20 secs.

Heart attacks and strokes while playing in tournaments are surprisingly common among chess players. Emory Tate died while playing in a chess tournament just last month!

I'm comparing that to 1300 vs 2700.

OK btickler... maybe not the best comparison. I think many do not realize how good 2700 is. Thanks

There are a couple of orders of magnitude less chess players in the super GM category, and even more orders of magnitude less of those super GMs playing 1300 players, both requirements for the unlikely heart attack scenario to occur ;).  So take your chance of a heart attack OTB, and then make it another 10000x more unlikely.

okay mr. smart guy, what ever. How about two computers play each other forever, and one is 2700 elo and the other is a computer that generates completely random moves. The latter will beat the former eventually. is that good enough?

A high rating wouldn't reduce your chance for heart attack 

You would have to argue something like players rated over 2700 are more physically fit than the general chess playing population... I wouldn't be surprised if this were true.

Not in any of our lifetimes it won't (nor in the lifespan of humanity as a whole), not unless you have a shitload more computers on the "random" side of this.  That's the whole point I was arguing.  Overcoming infinitesimal chances requires infinite resources.  The random monkey moves example is not some lottery-style, lightning-strike-while-being-attacked-by-a-shark type of gamble...it is unfathomably rarer than that.