Magnus' Childhood Improvement

I've been reading Wonderboy Magnus Carlsen: How Magnus Carlsen Became the Youngest Grandmaster in the World, and one interesting thing I read is that his rating increased from 904 to 1907 in about a year from mid-2000 to mid-2001. A 1000-point increase in 1 year!!

I wonder what the people who don't believe in talent make of that.

I think you'd have to define what talent is. However while gaining 1,000 points in a year is certainly an achievement its a lot easier to do when your going from beginner (900) to A class-expert (1900). I'm not sure how many games he played that year or what he did for studying, but good for him! To get a wider picture, according to FIDE he was 2064 in April 2001 and after 71 games played and a year later in April 2002, he was 2163. A year after that and 87 games later, in April 2003, he was 2356, a much larger jump than the previous year. Then a year after that in april 2004, after having played another 141 games, he was 2552. It is interesting to see that as he played more games he tended to raise his rating more early in his career, which might point also to the idea that if you want to really improve you have to play those long time control games often (among other things). I think what is more remarkable though is that by January 2012 FIDE posted ratings, less than 11 years after reaching 2064 in 2001, he'll have improved to over 2860, about 800 points increased against master leveled players and greater to achieve the highest rating in chess history to date. Certainly if talent exists Magnus has it.

The problem is that you're just making an assumption. You see something amazing, don't know how it happened, so you assume it is some unproven thing because it seems like it couldn't have been anything else.

It's like seeing a light turn on by itself, not being able to figure out why, and thus concluding it is some supernatural, poorly defined thing causing it. Just because you can't explain it rationally doesn't mean there isn't a rational explanation somewhere -- maybe you just don't know enough about electricity or machinery to know why something like that would ever happen. We couldn't always explain lightning and thus attributed it arbirarily, either to some lightning god or perhaps God himself. Only later did we find out what really causes it. So you have to keep in mind that human understanding evolves; it's not so crazy that there will be things sometimes that we can't currently explain, currently being the key word.

Maybe it's hard to conceive of a rating jump like that happening, but maybe a process we simply can't understand is occurring rather than a different one that you are assuming. We couldn't film Carlsen in his home 24/7, so we don't know how he lived in his early years to achieve that.

Anyway, from a more personal perspective, I had a pretty rapid increase of rating too -- not as much as Magnus's -- but I can understand how it can be possible to fly through your second thousand. Now, if Carlsen gets up to 3800 this year I will indeed be totally stumped.

Sacrilege! You will offend the Rating God with your foolish loose talk!