Author: Fernando Villegas
Date: 17:12:49 12/26/05
A very thin line -red or the color you prefer- exist between winning or losing a chess computer. As in real life, tiny differences get bigger and produce huge different outputs. If there is a general teaching on chess, is precisely that. I say all this because I just won a game to Grandmaster by Excalibur that, because it followed many moves along the same path of a game I lost to it a couple of days before, served me very well to appreciate where I did wrong the fist time and how I did now well now and how much far away -or not that far- were he decisions driving the game to so opposite results. The teaching is that the distance can be great in terms of results, but is microscopic in terms of the mental processes that takes you to one or the other move. I have learned that just one extra ply in your analysis or just one extra lateral line in your consideration makes all the difference. In other words, psychologically speaking a win or lose are very near entities in terms of probabilities. It is not that you lose because you was using your brain at LOT less eficacy than when you win. Simply you used it a bit less. You analysed a bit less. You consider just one or two moves less. Against computers this is enough. Against humans your shortcomings and slackenings of attention can be anulated by same processes in the other side. You can recover. Against a computer, that little lapse of attention makes great and unsurmontable difference. Like a guy walking in a rope, you depend of the most souple mistake. A very thin line indeed. fernando
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.