Author: Bob Durrett
Date: 11:31:47 11/19/02
The typical opening book, it seems to me, is designed to give the chess-playing program the highest probability of success. That may be it's weakness! To improve the statistics, the designer of the opening book will naturally include responses to the moves which are most likely to be played. Similarly, to improve the statistics, the designer of the opening book will provide responses to the moves which are considered to be the most challenging. For example, an opening book for the engine playing the black side will have a lot for 1.e4 but maybe nothing at all for 1.h3. Generally, early queen sorties are regarded, by the "learned" people, as being not worth preparing for. It is assumed that the engine will easily find the refutation without the help of an opening book. But is that really true? Or is it *merely* a universal but false assumption? It occurred to me to use my CB8, with Fritz7 as an analysis engine running under CB8, to see how well early queen sorties fared, historically, in human praxis. I began with a query to identify all games in which White played a queen move on his second move. Amazingly, there were more than 1000 of these games in Chessbase's Megabase 2002 database. I then sorted the games by ELO. Another surprise! There are many different openings of this type. I'm now beginning to believe that it would be possible to produce an anti-computer opening repertoire consisting solely of openings with early queen moves. Here's an example: 1.d4 f5 2.Qd3 If 2...d5 then maybe best is the line 3.c4 e6 4.g3 c6+/=, which might retain a slight advantage for White if Black deviates from this line early enough. If 2...d6 then either 3.e4 fxe4 4.Qxe4 Nf6 5.Qe3+/= or 3.Nf3 Nc6 4.e4 +/= If 2...e6 then 3.e4 fxe4 4.Qxe4 Nf6 5.Qh4 b6 6.Bd3+/= The question is: would your engine find it's way through this analysis? To find the best line, the engine must find the correct move early on. Otherwise it could get into trouble. That was just an example. Maybe the way to defeat the current opening books is to find such lines. I'm not at all convinced that modern chess programs are properly prepared for a human opponent who is determined to bring out his/her queen early. Bob D.
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