M Winther wrote on Wed, Apr 22, 2009 02:01 AM EDT:
I think I do understand how chess engines work. It's obvious that Larry
better understands what I'm talking about. I gave the example of the rook
maneuvre to the king side, in front of the friendly pawn chain. There is no
way that any program, not even Rybka, can calculate any gain from that
maneuvre. He cannot even back up the attack with another piece. So, within
the horizon, it's a useless move. Nevertheless, he just positions it there
and hopes that it can be of good use in the future. But in doing this he
weakens the first rank, etc. But it doesn't matter that it's a bad plan.
If the human doesn't play well then the computer can have good use of the
rook position. A human player must take measures against it and try to find
a refutation. This is the kind of chess that humans like to play, i.e. a
game which isn't perfect, instead it is full of, perhaps, silly and
refutable plans. But this allows room for creativity. Look at the games of
Adolf Anderssen, for instance. Sometimes unscientific creative chess is
called 'café chess'. It builds on the fact that a brutal pawn storm, for
instance, can succeed although the positional criteria are unfavourable.
After all, chessplayers do succeed in many games with bad plans and bad
openings. It is because it's initiative and creativity that counts. Humans
don't like the perfect and the clinically sterile. They like oil paintings
of Henri Matisse and William Turner. They don't appreciate perfectly
realistic sterile computer reproductions of reality. Such creations are
dead. And so is every chessgame played by today's advanced computer
programs.
/Mats
PS. How about the Vicuna and the Llama then?DS.