Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Playing style of top engines...

Author: Jonas Cohonas

Date: 21:23:34 10/18/05

Go up one level in this thread


>In a high, stratospheric philosofical sense, "style" is always equal to
>imperfection.
>
>Ferdinan Hegel

Pretty interesting, but if one goes by the universal expression one must include
"imperfections" in order to express what is true to you.

In music there is a saying "learn all the rules and theory, so that you can
break the rules and bypass theory" in other words make music yours.
Music however has no right or wrong notes, if a player is good enough he can
play out of key and have it make sense, though it will take a trained ear to
aknowledge it.

In chess there is no "style" only sound moves and unsound moves (the degrees
vary of course), if we talk of a "style" we are referring to a players
preference to what aspect of the game he tends to emphasise, ie Shirov has an
attacking/aggressive style that leads to complicated positions, but that is his
choice to play like that, he choses to play "imperfect", because he likes it and
thinks that he does it better than most.

What we call positional play in chess is just deep tactics that we don't have
the brain power (nor does computers) to calculate perfectly and we have to go by
gut, pattern recognition and rules of thumb to play a positional move.

Style is a matter of preference and choice, chess is chess and is a big equasion
that we do not understand or know how to solve, thus we must make some choices
based on what we are good at and bad at, and that leads to some recognizable
patterns that we end up labeling as a "style".

If we didn't make mistakes and overlook the fact that chess would then be more
boring than beating a chimp at tic tac toe, we wouldn't learn and get better, so
mistakes are good and healthy as in all other aspects of life, except maybe
brain surgery and similar instances :)

Regards
Jonas



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.