My nephew beat HOUDINI?!?!

come one nice try 

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs. 

Get your 11-year old nephew to play in your state's K-12 championship. He will win that and then he can play in the Denker tournament of Champions. The winner of that tournament usually receives a full college scholarship. That would make it well worth your nephew's time. 

Until then, I laud the fact that the OP has been relatively silent. He now knows that his nephew can get a free ride to college if he's telling the truth. And if he isn't telling the truth, he's better off being silent.

IMO, it shows more how unreliable is the engine analysis at shallow depth and short time. Wafflemaster is correct in his post #100.

Example: at 14 plies, Houdini wants white to play 48.Re6 (+3.29) instead of the played Ra8 (+1.92).  You cannot claim here that Ra8 was a bad move, however, because at 16 plies Houdini considers it best (+2.66) and Re6 slips to +2.42.

If you re-run your Stockfish analysis at 10s/move, you're likely to find that the "blunders" found at 5s/move become much less pronounced and perhaps are no blunders at all.

I quite agree - the brain is capable of producing great profiencies after being damage. Ironically a neurotypical brain limits the capacity for special talents by dampening each area of the brain, like a brake on a car it limits each intelligence to a certain level, this is important for true sentience and global thinking. However people with hi functioning austism for instance can tap into this unlimited potential without sometimes truly understanding how.

Yeah, I saw the same documentary.  IMO the rainman (Kim Peek) is a terrible example if someone is suggesting a gifted chess player.  Kim Peek had super-human memory but was an idiot in using that information.  What was his IQ 70?  He couldn't interpret metaphors when asked "What does it mean to get a hold of yourself?" he literally grabbed his arms.  IMO chess involves a lot of creativity.

Memorization helps in chess, no doubt, but the ideas are more important than the moves.  Feel free to use a database of 100,000 games to aid you vs houdini and you'll be dead as soon as the reference material leaves you to think on your own.

An idiot savant autistic type in chess?  Sure.  GM strength at 11 after reading 1 book?  No.

Maybe he's planning on retiring his user name soon...

Now the lines have all been read
And you knew them all by heart
Now you move toward the door
Here it comes the hardest part
Try the handle of the road
Feeling different feeling strange
This can never be arranged
As the light fades from the screen
From the famous final scene.

Right, but do you know how rare it is, and the price they pay for thier "gift". I'm sure you do because I've researched the topic myself as well. I would love if this story were true. However, the odds are very low...

Waffle:

Correct. That and there is the English guy who can draw a perfect picture of Rome after a 1/2h helicopter tour. He just can't apply the gift to anything else. Memory of who played third base in the 1909 world series is nice, but Rainman (who passed away last year??) couldn't apply that memory towards a useful goal.

IMO also: our brains are naturally tuned in a way to math and music.  Chess is artificial.  Yes there are patterns and logic to chess too, so it's not impossible, but I'd like to point out there already exist those who progressed at near inhuman rates and whose ability is almost incomprehensible... they're the top players in the world.

Many talented hard working people never make it to a GM title.  Many talented hard working people who made GM before 20 never make it to the top 100.  If you want to believe in inhuman playing ability you don't need to indulge in fantasy using disorders you don't understand.  These people already exist.

But when talking about savants we are not assuming they would play like a person. Engines don't have their own 'ideas' they calculate the position and determine the best moves. You often hear strong players on here (Pfren comes to mind) talking about some of the limitations engines have in certain situations because they don't have independent ideas. Houdini ranks around 3300 without the ability to have thoughts, opinions, feeling....it simply calculates.

Perhaps a better example (than Kim Peeks) would be Daniel Tammet. He is a maths savant. A highly functioning autistic who can do things like memorise Pi to something like 22, 000 decimal points and quickly gives answers to complex calculations. You should look him up. Quite an interesting guy.

I agree in this instance. There's no way the kid mentioned here is what has been claimed, but people like that do exist.

And here's the rub: Why would an autistic child play like an engine, which we know to be seriously flawed, especially in the endgame?

Wouldn't an autistic child play more like Magnus Carlsen or Vasily Ivanchuk or any of a number of known masters players who have autistic tendencies?

Not that I'm saying Carlsen is autistic, but that his understanding of the board is more how an autistic human would play than Houdini.

Yeah, I've seen some stuff on Daniel Tammet, he is a much better example.  But again I think the human brain is more turned to math.  With chess it is possible I would think, but it would take some work first to understand the mechanics... the story of the OP as told is not believable.

Engines are not rated against people.  3300 houdini and 2800 human is not the same pool.  Last time briefly checked (so I may be wrong) engine ratings tend to be inflated as compared to FIDE ratings.

Houdini doesn't have ideas, it does comparatively short term calculations using human guided evaluations.  It wins because its middlegame play is on average more precise so although it will choose a poor plan the human cannot be precise enough to punish it without assistance (e.g. ICCF you don't get far if all you do is let houdini choose 100% of the moves with zero input from you).

I believe a chess-like Daniel Tammet would have deep and brilliant ideas, not the computer-like short term accuracy.  Daniel could for example calculate take large numbers to large powers, but he was not perfect.  The imaginary chess playing Daniel could not play chess through pure calculation.  Afterall the millions of positions per second of a computer still far exceed any high functioning autistic person.  As smyslovfan said above me it would be more akin to Ivanchuk.

Yes.  This says is better than I did.

Well so you are saying they are aliens?

The point I'd like to make is the people who are indulging in that fantasy don't understand chess, engines, or autism.

Obviously it's incorrect for me to have said they're inhuman.

+1

I don't know, perhaps they would. It's interesting to hear other people's opinions on the matter though. Topics like this, that draw intelligent opinions, seem to be few and far between on the forums.

My points are really intended as questions I suppose. I am by no means an authority. Simply trying to generate discussion.

Well, since I can only assume that you have extensive knowledge in all three, I suppose we are in the right place to learn something.

Maybe if you play against Houdini 20 times you will understand why it's impossible.

Well, that's why I said it's the point I'd like to make... apparently I don't think I've done such a great job so far :)

I know enough about chess and engines, but about autism just the general info that's available from places like wiki and documentaries on youtube.

I never mind having a discussion about it, I wasn't trying to say those who disagreed with me are stupid or anything like that.  The points I've heard made up to now though are not good enough to change my mind.  Usually they amount to "it could happen because I saw a movie where a guy was super smart once."