Author: Fernando Villegas
Date: 19:32:29 12/27/05
To play a computer -not to mention a beast running in a PC- should be never confounded with what happens playing a human comrade. This is known since ever, but forgotten always. A human is a fallible criature. His mind wavers, sometimes openly and dramatically, more often in somewhat more obscure ways, but wavers the same. In the kind of chess played by an average player or even an expert level player, that oscilating feature show himself at each move. Tartakower already said -or Fine?- that an average player is not someone that know lot less that a master, but simply a man that commits mistakes at least once in three moves, but the master only once in six or seven. If you take a look at any of your lost game you will see -with sorrow mixed with some consolation- that you DID see and conceived two or three really good, even brilliant moves. Problem is the good and brilliant moves of the computer were decisive. Your brilliance was strategic, his brilliance was tactic. You can test the truth of this using the analysis function of any of the Fritz programs. Just put one of your loses and see what the computer say. Even, as in my case, asking the program to consider a mistake just .11 in disadvantage move, produces long series of moves without any comment because they were correct. But, of course, mistakes were serious enough to compensate with a defeat for the good and even excellent moves that did not produce a win. So what to lose a computer gives as a learning asset is a clear sense of how mistakes, disgraces and defeats happens in life not because systematic errors, but because errors, even if few, weight more as consequences than a long serie of adequate decisions. I have spoiled hundreds of games not badly played due to that last, decisive mistake, critic error. Again tartakower: "who that does the previous than last mistake wins". How this happnes? Due to other very human ilusion: you tend to believe that because you have done well so far, then you have won a kind of break, a moment of peace, a right to be quiet for a moment. Like after driving cautiously 1000 miles you cannot accept the chance to crash in the last mile after such a well done job. How many times you look your game, see your far superior position and then you relax thinking the game is already over, in your pocket, so it will be played automatically to the end? But in fact the tactics neccesary to harvest the superior position demand LOT more concentration. More calculation. At the same time the computer, that has a sense of being down, -low flag say experts- will search more and more to get a sortie. You will become sleepy in the same moment when the monster is fully awaken and coming to kill you with a cheap trick. We should put off the computer in that very moment and begin again the next day, with a fresh start. But instead we keep playing until that last decisive mistake. Chess is tactics, not a pretty picture of a superior position. Loser Regards fernando
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