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Humans can't analyze chess exhaustively. We do so largely by pattern recognition. As a result, we mostly cannot accurately analyze the chess of players who are
by wavemode 2y ago
Humans can't analyze chess exhaustively. We do so largely by pattern recognition. As a result, we mostly cannot accurately analyze the chess of players who are significantly stronger than we are.
In other words, when a human says "this is a good position for white" or "that was a good move" (roughly equivalent to saying "that move leads to a good position"), we do so not by checking every possible sequence of moves (which would require analyzing billions of possible continuations) and ensuring that all of them are good. We instead do so by intuition - we assess what the position looks like in comparison to positions we've analyzed before that we know lead to a win for one player or the other. As a concrete example: if we see connected passed pawns for white, we're probably going to say white is winning, unless mentally we can find a continuation where black is able to capture them or blockade them.
So all it takes for a chess position to be good without a human being able to tell, is for there to exist some sequence of moves that leads to a different result from what we expected, and we are unable to find that sequence. In the example above, a human would wrongly conclude that white is winning if there actually does exist some deep and complicated series of moves black can play to permanently blockade the connected passers.
You see this most commonly with chess engines (i.e. chess AI). The engine will make a move, or suggest a move, and the human (who may even be one the top players in the world) raises their eyebrow. Why, because the move visually seems to make no sense and/or serve no purpose. The engine is making that move based on some billion-position analysis it performed, that the human just isn't capable of. Only after the engine ultimately wins the game, does the human go back and start to get a sense of what the purpose of that strange-looking move was.
- joe_the_user 2y agoYour argument relies too much on "I know exactly how people think". I'd like evidence.
- wavemode 2y agoIt's not an argument at all, it's just an explanation based on my experience playing and studying chess. My purpose was not really to argue or debate. If you're -curious- about why weaker players can't accurately analyze the chess of strong players, I've laid out for you why that's the case. On the other hand, if you're -skeptical- that weaker players cannot do this, I'd encourage you to do your own research on the topic and highlight where you believe I've stated something false.