Author: Don Dailey
Date: 12:10:17 06/12/98
Go up one level in this thread
>>Again: todays computer programs, no matter if world microcomputer >>professional chess champion or >>microcomputer chess champion. Also the today's machines cannot hide >>their big weaknesses. >>They have NO idea about positional-topics. And tactics is really not the >>problem. >>If all chess games are 100 % tactics (what is often told here) - where >>is the tactics in those games here ? > >So what you are saying is that their is no tactics in this game. So even >if the program could see all the way to checkmate from move one it still >would have lost this game. >Because their is no tactics. Because like you think Positional and >tactical understanding are two different things. And not 2 sides of the >same coin. > > >>And why were the programs unable to handle the topic ? >>No - their problem is not tactics. And tactics is not the most common >>CONTENT when it comes between human vs. >>machine (or cstal vs. machine ) games. >> >>I would like to discuss about those things, instead of discussing about >>FINDER positions and making silly lists >>which program is faster than another finder. because we don't really >>measure strength. We measure how fast their >>searches are. This IS a PART of the strength, but most often not the >>same as the real strength. >> >>Please don't throw tactics and FINDING-key-moves in ONE melting-pot. >>Also don't believe a "king-attack-position" that is found by >>fast-searchers is really a king-attack-position. >>Most often king-attacks are very quiet, and easy. They were NOT seen by >>search. Gandalf and other programs have >>specialized to find them without search. I think this is a good idea, >>since humans (if not badly influenced by >>"advisors" are still capable to attack ). As humans, we talk about tactics and positional play and try to view them as separate things. But I agree with Mark, that in reality there is no difference. Really, the only thing that exists in chess is won positions, drawn positions and lost positions. A given move can take you from one kind to another. Also, this means there is no such thing as a great move, unless you consider it to be any move that preserves the win if the position is a win or preserves the draw if a position is a draw. I suppose we could loosely define a great move as the fastest win if it exists. We humans muddle the distinction. If my program does an incredibly deep search and finds a way to improve the position of the knight as a result, it will be applauded as having great positional ability when in fact all it has is technique. I think we need new terminology to express these things that makes it more clear what is really going on. Saying positional play, and tactical play is misleading because humans tend to think (incorrectly) of tactics as material winning, or game winning. And they think of positional play as something not involving wonderful tactics which is also completely ridiculous in my opinion. This terminology make people categorize programs as fast and dumb, or slow and smart, which is very simplistic in my view. In my opinion, being able to win a queen in 20 moves is great positional play too. It turns out that most of us have programs that can play perfect chess as a result of the search mechanism (given enough time of course.) The positional heuristics do not help much here, and that is why I reluctantly consider the search the heart of each chess program and the biggest source of their strength. Run any modern day program on a 8086 without hash tables (which are mainly a search speed advance) and you will see exactly what I mean. - Don
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