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Subject: Re: Anti-computer chess playing

Author: martin fierz

Date: 14:00:10 09/30/02

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On September 30, 2002 at 14:19:13, Brian Thomas wrote:

>The idea of playing anti-computer chess has come up over the weekend a number of
>times (specifically with the CM9000 v Christianson match).
>
>I do understand the core meaning: but what specifically would this entail?  Is
>it a matter of finding a distinct positional weakness in the specific engine
>(in, for example, The King) and exploiting it?  Or more of a general strategy?
>I imagine no 2 engines could be played the same way in this manner.
>
>I would think that trying just a "general" tactic would be too vague and lead to
>a positional weakness.  The only thing I saw that one may consider anti-computer
>playing was, in the last Chessmaster game Sunday evening, the computer fought
>very hard to hold onto its isolated pawn early on.  This may be a weakness, but
>how do you exploit it?  Could Chessmaster have beaten Larry if it just let the
>pawn go and worked better positionally?
>
>Looking more for general thoughts/opinions, I have mine :)
>
>Brian

humans are good at positional chess, machines at tactics.

there are two forms of anti-computer chess: one is to more or less bet on the
fact that machines are bad in certain positions and play "incorrect" chess as a
result (see games of eduard nemeth, and to a lesser extent, some great
anti-computer games by GMs like one vanWely - rebel game where he plays a move
and says of his Bg3-move: "i would never play this against a human, but i knew
the computer would play a bad move after this"). if you were to play this form
of chess against a really good player, it would backfire. unlike the second
method, which treats the computers with more respect:

you try to avoid the tactics but play normal chess. you would do this by playing
decent but boring openings (IM hug - shredder from the recent
switzerland-shredder match is a great example, shredder was outplayed by the IM,
but a tactical trick saved it). kasparov tried something like this against deep
blue but failed with it. he's just the wrong type of player to play this kind of
chess. i think this is the best chance for humans to win matches against the
machines, but: this form of chess has to be the type of chess the human plays
all the time. kramnik will probably use this approach against deep fritz.

game 2 of christiansen - CM is a good example of what to avoid: white played
e4-d5 on about move 6, and you can be sure that christiansen didn't miss the
Nxe4 thing, but rather thought it was ok for white. it's a very complicated
position, and that is what you don't want to do against the computer - *even if
it is correct in principle*.

aloha
  martin




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