Author: Stephen Ham
Date: 13:05:12 07/27/00
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Dear Jouni and James, Thanks gentlemen for your kind words and support. I'm almost too embarrassed to post here anymore after my terrible oversight in Ham-Nimzo 7.32. I can accept a few human tactical slips from time to time. But to miss the simple ...g4 line as a saving defense for the computer is nearly unforgivable since I'm supposed to be the strategist! Oh well...there goes another win that I was counting on! If you are interested, please feel welcome to visit The Correspondence Chess Message Board where some discussion of this match is occuring. We would sure value the input of you computer experts, since most of us really know very little about chess software, although many participants there do have/use computers in their correspondece chess. I've learned much from Fritz 6a and Nimzo 7.32. Most of all, I've learned that if I'm to have a successful future in correspondence chess, I'll need to use a strong chess engine to blunder check my work. Just two blunder checks at the appropriate time would surely have enabled me to quickly win in Ham-Fritz 6a and to have won my "won" position in Ham-Nimzo. I knew when I played my Dragon Sicilian against Nimzo 7.32 that I'd be entering a world where pure calculating ability is often more important than positional understanding. And I knew that the wide open Dragon postions would be exactly what the computer wants. Still, given that I'm supposed to play as if my opponents were human means that I need to take these risks in order to really test the opposition. However I can't help but question whether these chess engines have any capacity to win a game on their own. What I mean is, I've tried hard to unbalance all 4 games in order to really keep things exciting and test the computers. But had I chosen to play conservatively, even in the Dragon Sicilian, I think these chess engines would be incapable of outplaying most master humans to the extent that they would win any games. They excel at exploiting human tactical errors when the humans push too hard to win, but they can't otherwise outplay humans. I think chess software needs to have a greater positional understanding so that it can accumulate small "positional" advantages to defeat humans at their own game. Until this happens, we master-rated humans need not worry about actually losing to computer chess engines. Still, it's no fun giving them drws either. Well, thanks for allowing me ramble on, as if I really knew what I am writing about. You have all been very courteous and I thank you for that. Stephen Ham
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