Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 15:48:12 08/15/98
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On August 15, 1998 at 14:23:14, Fernando Villegas wrote: >Dear friend: >My experience is not related with postal chess, but I observe myself enough to >realize that increments of thinking time even in the course of a normal game has >an enormous effect. Probably that happens because the way we think. We don't do >too much more calculations, but we can perceive in a better way the position. We >can get a better gestalt, an understannding of the situation that is >qualitatively above the precedent one. I insist we "can", not we must. Computers >just get more stuff from his calculations and althought that involves, also, a >better perfomance, I suppose his increments are lesser than they are in our >case, with the exceoption, of course, of specific positions where specific >tactical shots appears just after a ply level has been reached. But then, if we >play much better with more time and computer play "just" somewhat better, then >the conclusion is that for a computer to become a master in postal chess is a >lot more difficult than to be one in normal competition. >But this is very complex. Probable there are as lot of exceptions. Specuially I >am thinking in the fact that better undesrstanding not always involves better >results. At the end a great fraction of chess games are won or lost on tactical >ground, no matter what. If so, perhaps computer keep his edge over us anyway. >But, at the same time, postal chess is less prone to tactical mishaps. We ll, >this issue, as you see, arise more questions than answers. >fernando Computers are really not a threat of any kind at correspondence chess. We had a good such match on r.g.c a few years ago between IM Mike Valvo and Deep Thought. Deep Thought totally blew mike out at blitz, although we never had any 40/2 games to compare them there. But at the "correspondence level" used in the two game match, Mike won both, and he won both easily. Far out-calculating the "beast" which was left on computing 24 hours a day non-stop. He even sacrificed a pawn to reach a position that was simply unplayable by the machine, although it took it several moves before it "caught on." I suspect folks like Hans Berliner would also laugh at the idea, although at the lower levels, computer impact could be felt. But you aren't going to find a 2400 correspondence computer for a long while...
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