Author: Fernando Villegas
Date: 16:45:30 04/13/98
Hi Mats: I don’t dare to share your view that there are many people here with not enough chess level and that would the reason they don’t understand the importance of positional chess considerations and why, then, Fritz 5 must be under critic. Maybe, maybe not. Besides, levels are established from the point of view of whom is the guy that takes the measure. Funny, but top world players even talks of “weak” GMI and in other contexts people like you or me talk of an “strong” club player just fort a player with 2200 Elo or so. Sure, positional chess is something else that counting nodes. In fact, strategy and positional considerations are the necessary answer to the fact that we -and even machines- cannot count enough nodes to take really clever decisions. They are a kind of short-cut or replacement to what would be, or is, in theory, the very very best thing to do, that is, just counting all to fulfill the calculation. You don’t need to do “strategic” considerations to divine how much the addition of 10 numbers is; you do it. You put them together. But you should use some kind of strategic device if the number of number was, let us say, 100 billion. Sure you will try to detect a pattern, what kind of numbers they tends to be. That is a way to circumvent the problem, to get an answer, even if not precise. But then, a new problem arises: what’s the better strategy depends not only of the problem, but of the kind of thinking device that must solve it. Our strategies are ground in what our brain can do. They are based, also, in our quality of members of a totality. Our incarnations as individuals is deceiving. Even to talk is to share a product of the entire history of human kind. And when we play chess, many men inside our brain are playing with us. We use a vast repository of experience and accumulated wisdom. Human wisdom. At the same time, we are prone to failures, we get tired, we confuse the steps in the reasoning chain many times, etc, and so we use badly that legacy. Besides we tend to be lazy and to believe that what is sanctioned by time “is” theoretically sound for ever. Nothing of all this is truth for machines, so maybe very few of our strategy has too much sense for them. And maybe that’s the reason what appears as an ugly move to us is just a move that does not fit with our sense of what is strategically correct. I have posted many times about this issue without no answer at all. Funny thing, because I believe that before talking of knowledge, strategy, positional kind of chess etc, we should check if these things mean and can mean the same to all kind of thinking devices in the galaxy. I am not so sure. fernando
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