“If you lose, I get a Tesla!” – Chess fraternity reacts over Elon Musk’s controversial tweet against the sport

“If you lose, I get a Tesla!” – Chess fraternity reacts over Elon Musk’s controversial tweet against the sport

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk

The CEO of Tesla and one of the top visionaries, Elon Musk has irked some of the members of the global chess community with his interesting take on the age-old strategy game.

Replying to a Twitter user Massimo (@Rainmaker1973), who tweeted that there are 69,352,859,712,417 possible games that can be played after both the players have made five moves each, the world’s richest man said that playing chess back in the day was understandable but now we have computers.

Massimo wrote on the micro-blogging site: “The Shannon number, named after Claude Shannon, is a conservative lower bound (not an estimate) of the game-tree complexity of chess of 10¹²⁰. After each player has moved 5 times there are 69,352,859,712,417 possible games that could have been played.”

FS Video

“Chess is a simple game. Understandable when all we had to play with were squirrels and rocks, but now we have computers,” Musk replied on Sunday.

“Polytopia is *way* better imo, if you like strategy games,” he added in the following tweet.

Twitter reactions to Elon Musk’s tweet about Chess

Hikaru Nakamura
Hikaru Nakamura reacted to Musk’s tweet

Musk is a popular entity on social media owing to his opinion about various subjects, ranging from cryptocurrencies to clean energy. However, his thoughts about the age-old game didn’t well with the netizens and here are some of the top tweets:

“I literally don’t care,” tweeted the World number 1 blitz player Hikaru Nakamura. 

Croatian Chess YouTuber Antonio Radić (@agadmator) commented: “Even in Star Trek they don’t joke about solving chess. There is one episode though in the Q continuum where two Qs just stare at the board because they already played out all the possibilities. But yeah, simple.”

American chess player and International master, Daniel Rensch wrote: “Chess is as unsolved as it is timeless, @elonmusk — not simple by any stretch of the imagination.”

Also Read | “I neither play chess nor checkers” Jonathan Kuminga reveals the ‘Rookie Duty’ Klay Thompson makes him do