Author: Kevin Stafford
Date: 14:54:26 07/23/01
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>The point made above was just to stress the importance of the tactics , let me >add the following inspired words by I.Marin : > >"Chess is ONLY moves in a chessboard, chess is only tactics. If you calculate >thoroughly enough you will beat Kasparov and everybody else because "positional >mistakes" simply don't exist: they are simply tactical errors with long term >consequences." > >Best Regards While Ignacio is correct that chess is only tactics in the most abstract sense, this quote is also slightly misleading. This is because both humans and computers have a finite tactical window beyond which they cannot accurately calculate (at least in a reasonable amount of time). It has been shown that increasing the depth of this window is difficult, as the search tree grows exponentially with each ply increase. It is for this reason that positional considerations are in fact relevant. I define a positional move as one that leads to no obvious, immediate tactic, but is speculative in that it might lead to tactics which are beyond the current tactical window. No one is disputing that tactics are not extremely important (and in my opinion, are the very soul of chess), but I do believe that playing for tactics alone will put you at a disadvantage to a person or machine with positional understanding, unless your tactical window is sufficiently deeper than theirs. It is for this very reason that there has been a shift in chess programming away from exclusively fast searchers towards engines with more "chess knowledge" in their evaluation functions. -Kevin
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