Author: Torstein Hall
Date: 08:31:29 02/05/01
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Its interesting to note that the position was used by Botvinnik when he developed the "chess program Pioner." The quotes are there, because I think we never saw Pioner play. And I'm not sure how much programming Botvinnik actually did himself! Anyway here are some translations from his book "15 partij i ich istorija" or rather from the Sweedish translation called "Botvinnik om sjakk". So if it sounds rather funny, remember that my native language aer neither Sweedish, English or Russian for that matter.... [D]8/p3q1kp/1p2Pnp1/3pQ3/2pP4/1nP3N1/1B4PP/6K1 w - - "This position has gone into chess history. The audience was applauding for this combination, in fact the only time during the 38 AVRO tournament an foreign player was applauded! Under the chess olympic in Amsterdam 1954 a chess playing confectioner had a cake on display, decorated with the diagrammed position. But destiny had another supprise waiting. I'm now working on an artficial chessmaster, a program called Pioner. When I later was thinking about my game with Capablanca did I ask myself, not without a bit of anxiety, if Pioner could solve this position? In the spring of 79 I got my young colleague B. Sjtilman to enter the position into Pioner. To my disapointment, Pioner wanted to play 30.Sf5+. A continuation I had not looked into during the game. " Botvinnik goes on to explain his teori on chess as a general process of exchange, where the target for the exchange is to win positional or material values on the board. ( I hope I understood this right!? ) Botvinnik continues: "In this posision the piece with the lowest positional value for white is the bishop on b2, and the piece with the highest value for black is the Queen on e7. We notice that to exchange the positional values of these two pieces, we do not need to get them of the board, but to change their position. Thats why the value of the white pieces increase when the black Queen leaves e7. (I would rather say that the black Queen decreased its value, but who am I?) I was wondering if it would be possible to formalize this and get it into Pioner. To our luck, Pioner was alreaddy prepared for this! So to control the idea Sjtilman formalised this in a simple way and entered it into Pioner. After a short "think", Pioner on the 5 of July 1979 Kl. 14.00 played the first move in the analysis 30.Ba3 At the moment we are still working on improving the program to the algorithm" That was back in 79. If they had succedded maybe we would have had another bread of chess programs today. But I'm still sitting here waiting for an intelligent program, not the bean counters of today! :-) Torstein Torstein
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