Author: Jeroen Noomen
Date: 02:18:18 08/20/03
Hi all, I have just completed reading Christian Kongsted's book 'How to use computers to improve your chess'. I must say that I like this book. It gives a lot of valuable information, not only for those who want to improve his/her playing strength, his/her chances of beating the silicon beast, but also for programmers. Kongsted gives a lot of interesting positions in which computer programs are not able to come up with the right evaluation. So I think it is a very interesting manual for programmers as well. Of course I was very interested in what the book would say about the program's opening books. Unfortunately this topic gets less than two pages, so I was a bit disappointed by this fact. Also I don't agree with Kongsted's evaluation of the opening books of modern top programs. Let me quote some of them: 1. Opening books are often made as the last thing before a release. This is not true. People like Alex Kure, Sandro Necchi, Dan Wulff and me spent the whole year to improve it and to adjust it. Hundreds of hours are spent to test the book and adjust it. 2. The opening books are made by the programmer himself or a chess player who enters suggested lines from theory books or databases, without checking the lines. Also not true. As everybody knows here, all the book expert do a lot of testing, improving chess theory themselves, adding variations and improvements. Kongsted's statement might be true for a lot of programmers, but certainly not for the top products. 3. The opening book operators are not necessarily strong players and thus might be having trouble identifying which lines are viable and which are not. My current rating is around 2200, but I can give a lot of examples that proves the opposite of the above statement. And I think again that the top products have these topic lines covered very well. I only want to point out the games Anand - Rebel (1st tournament game), Rebel - Scherbakov (offbeat line that brought Rebel a brilliant victory) or Chess Tiger - Fritz from the tournament in Leiden this year, where I improved theory and crushed a line that was thought to be quite good for black. 4. Generally, strong players do not have to fear the openingbook of the computer. Well, I think they should, especially when guys like Alex, Sandro or me are preparing the book for some opponent! From my own examples: The book preparations for Rebel against John van der Wiel were quite successfull, helping to win the match 3,5-2,5. And John stated after the match that it was much more difficult to get anti computer positions against Rebel in this match. Which I took as a compliment for myself :-). Furthermore, the best books contain very sharp offbeat lines, when used against strong opponents can turn into a deadly weapon. F.e. Cock de Gorter - who made books for The King amongst others - is very good at this. In the AEGON tournaments De Gorter often managed to take strong players by surprise by those offbeat lines, with good success as well. All in all the information about the opening books of the current top programs is quite meagre, with only two pages and IMO the conclusions of Christian are too one-sided and not in accordance with the real situation. But overall I like this book and it contains a lot of interesting information for all who wants to improve playing chess or who wants to write a chess program. I can recommend it for everybody in this forum here. Good job, Christian! Best wishes, Jeroen
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