[jackmott42]

Think of the chess players as facing a gigantic search problem. They don't have time to search everything, so they have to use intuition to decide what lines to calculate. Their intuition is very good but not perfect. So sometimes you get in a situation where you have computed the wrong lines and see no solution. The solution might be obvious on another day where you randomly don't cull the right lines, and very hard to find on a day when you are culling the good lines.

Ding when he froze was for whatever reason missing the good move, so felt he was lost, searching and searching for some solution. It seems crazy only because the engine is there telling us it is drawn. But the human is culling the lines that work for some misguided reason.

[lubujackson]

In that vein, when the cheating scandal happened a few months back Hikaru (a top 10 player) said the only information he would need to make a difference in a match is getting a buzz when the position is critical. Not which move to make, but when to spend time analyzing deeply.

It is hard to over-emphasize how much high level chess is about time management.