4 ms·

(most) Chess engines without end-game database will play horrible endgame to the extend that a lowly IM can beat the strongest chess engine on the best consumer

by pavs 16y ago

(most) Chess engines without end-game database will play horrible endgame to the extend that a lowly IM can beat the strongest chess engine on the best consumer hardware. At least this was still true last time I was keeping tabs on Computer Chess scene. But with 4-5-6 pieces endgame its not only perfect but it also effects game quality in the middle-games, where most of the games are decided between human-comp games. Nowadays, Computer Chess scene is not as exciting as it was 10 years ago (not because of Deep-blue). Now it has come to a stage that it is less about knowledge algorithm tweaking and more about, fine-tuning and narrowing down opening books to few sets where a particular engine is strong at and use extensive positional and book learning from previous games on those or similar lines of moves and win games. Now when you (or GMs) play against a computer engine, you are not as much playing against an engine, but playing against a huge database that has been fine-tuned over 100,000s of games. This is why no chess engine author will agree to an official tournament games against a top GM, without opening-book, EGTB, pos-learning, book-learning.

jacquesm 16y ago
I played chess a lot when I was younger and enjoyed it a lot. Then I joined a chess club. Biggest mistake I ever made. Everybody was cramming openings instead of playing the game themselves. It really was terribly boring. My strategy for dealing with this was to open with a really bad but non-standard move. This led to an immediate abandoning of all studied openings by the opponent and usually that led to a relatively quick win because they spent so much time on openings that they forgot how to play. Funny that. Of course, against a really good player that will just get you slaughtered but the people that rely on knowing tons of openings to gain a favourable position in the mid game will fail miserably. I quit because of that, the fact that in order to be competitive I'd have to cram openings too instead of being able to simply play and hone your skill against the wits of the opponent in front of you, instead of the dead corpses of all the GMs before whose games they studied. I really don't want to play Caro-Kann all over again, I'd like to play my own games.
- janzer 16y ago
  For you or anyone else that dislikes the memorization parts of Chess, you may find Arimaa (http://arimaa.com/ http://arimaa.com/) interesting. Personally I also like it better than chess because of the somewhat more simple/elegant rules while still leaving a game that seems to have a large strategic depth. Of course it also has a great hacker aspect of being very difficult for computers, but I think that's really only a rather marginal side issue. The game really is a fun game to actually play.
- dgordon 16y ago
  Sorry to hear you ran into that. It sounds like a terrible environment to try to learn chess in. But you can get quite good without spending much time at all studying openings. I hate studying openings, and I'm definitely better than most of the people who cram openings. Learn how to play chess well -- what you wanted to do anyway -- and learn just enough of the opening to get to a playable middlegame position (playing less-aggressive openings makes this much easier, and allows you to figure it out based on general principles), and skill, not memorization, will make the difference. (Just in case you, or anyone else reading, were thinking of taking it up again.) P.S. I wouldn't want to play the Caro-Kann either. ;-)
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    I pretty much gave up on it, the only thing I still enjoy is teaching kids to play and one guy from Amsterdam I occasionally play, we're fairly evenly matched so it's almost always interesting. I learned to play when I was about 6 years old, my neighbour was a very good player (I believe master class, but not sure, it is very long ago), he gave me Max Euwe's books and I dutifully worked through them, we would play for days on end, and I loved it, the guy must have had amazing patience (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1370499 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1370499 ). In school I was pretty much unbeatable until I met Arno Bezemer, a kid living about 4 houses down the road, he taught me a definite lesson in humility, I didn't win a single game for the first year and half and even when I did win it was usually only because he was distracted or had a really bad day, he taught me a tremendous amount about chess. He enticed me to join the club and I lost almost all interest very shortly after that, I think I only played in that club for about 6 months, and it killed any interest I might have had in competitive chess. Eventually Arno became the strongest player in Amsterdam, he's in the top 100 players for the Netherlands, ranks 3637 for the world. But he's dedicated his life to it, I don't think I could do that. http://ratings.fide.com/card.phtml?event=1001396 http://ratings.fide.com/card.phtml?event=1001396 edit: corrected the author of the books I learned to play with.

by pavs 16y ago

jacquesm 16y ago

I played chess a lot when I was younger and enjoyed it a lot. Then I joined a chess club. Biggest mistake I ever made. Everybody was cramming openings instead of playing the game themselves. It really was terribly boring. My strategy for dealing with this was to open with a really bad but non-standard move. This led to an immediate abandoning of all studied openings by the opponent and usually that led to a relatively quick win because they spent so much time on openings that they forgot how to play. Funny that. Of course, against a really good player that will just get you slaughtered but the people that rely on knowing tons of openings to gain a favourable position in the mid game will fail miserably. I quit because of that, the fact that in order to be competitive I'd have to cram openings too instead of being able to simply play and hone your skill against the wits of the opponent in front of you, instead of the dead corpses of all the GMs before whose games they studied. I really don't want to play Caro-Kann all over again, I'd like to play my own games.

janzer 16y ago
For you or anyone else that dislikes the memorization parts of Chess, you may find Arimaa (http://arimaa.com/ http://arimaa.com/) interesting. Personally I also like it better than chess because of the somewhat more simple/elegant rules while still leaving a game that seems to have a large strategic depth. Of course it also has a great hacker aspect of being very difficult for computers, but I think that's really only a rather marginal side issue. The game really is a fun game to actually play.
dgordon 16y ago
Sorry to hear you ran into that. It sounds like a terrible environment to try to learn chess in. But you can get quite good without spending much time at all studying openings. I hate studying openings, and I'm definitely better than most of the people who cram openings. Learn how to play chess well -- what you wanted to do anyway -- and learn just enough of the opening to get to a playable middlegame position (playing less-aggressive openings makes this much easier, and allows you to figure it out based on general principles), and skill, not memorization, will make the difference. (Just in case you, or anyone else reading, were thinking of taking it up again.) P.S. I wouldn't want to play the Caro-Kann either. ;-)
- jacquesm 16y ago
  I pretty much gave up on it, the only thing I still enjoy is teaching kids to play and one guy from Amsterdam I occasionally play, we're fairly evenly matched so it's almost always interesting. I learned to play when I was about 6 years old, my neighbour was a very good player (I believe master class, but not sure, it is very long ago), he gave me Max Euwe's books and I dutifully worked through them, we would play for days on end, and I loved it, the guy must have had amazing patience (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1370499 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1370499 ). In school I was pretty much unbeatable until I met Arno Bezemer, a kid living about 4 houses down the road, he taught me a definite lesson in humility, I didn't win a single game for the first year and half and even when I did win it was usually only because he was distracted or had a really bad day, he taught me a tremendous amount about chess. He enticed me to join the club and I lost almost all interest very shortly after that, I think I only played in that club for about 6 months, and it killed any interest I might have had in competitive chess. Eventually Arno became the strongest player in Amsterdam, he's in the top 100 players for the Netherlands, ranks 3637 for the world. But he's dedicated his life to it, I don't think I could do that. http://ratings.fide.com/card.phtml?event=1001396 http://ratings.fide.com/card.phtml?event=1001396 edit: corrected the author of the books I learned to play with.