Author: Bob Durrett
Date: 13:15:11 11/19/02
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On November 19, 2002 at 16:06:01, Uri Blass wrote: >On November 19, 2002 at 14:31:47, Bob Durrett wrote: > >> >>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? > >The question is if humans can find the right lines. > >I suspect that if these lines can be used against computers then they can be >also used against GM's. > > >Uri Well, you don't really think that the present day chess engines play openings [without a book] as well as GMs, do you? Truly, offbeat openings simply do not occur in serious games between GMs. The reason for that must be that GMs have the ability to create new openings, or to refute unsound theoretical novelties, in real time over the board. The risk of having your surprise opening, or theoretical novelty, refuted and losing the game probably explains the fact that the theoretical novelties typically occur after a dozen moves or so have been played. I believe that the top GMs are extremely well prepared in the opening. It will be interesting to see the day when chess engines can play openings at the GM level. Then the books will only serve to add variety. : ) Bob D.
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