raylopez99 wrote:
I find the rebuttal by Dr. S=F8ren Riis, Oxford, UK unconvincing for
a number of reasons.

- it was clearly written with a popular audience in mind (witness the
exclamation point!

Obviously, anything written with a popular audience in mind cannot
possibly be accurate.


- it fails to understand the simple argument of 'normalization'. The
Matej Guid and Ivan Bratko original article pointed out that Crafty
was used since it was open source and could be modified; the stronger
programs are not, but in any event Crafty is hardly a weak tactics
program and the authors are looking for a standardized (normalized)
way of spotting blunders.

Just because they used the same system for everyone doesn't mean the
system was good or useful. For example, they could declare that every
king move is a blunder. That's consistent across all the players but
would declare players who tend to win in the endgame (where the king
gets moved more) to be weaker than players who tend to win in the
middlegame. You need to apply the same *good* measure to everyone.


-The fact that Riis found positional sacrifices not evaluated by
Crafty is not convincing since: (1) such positional sacrifices are
rare--as computers have shown, chess is largely tactics; (2) everybody
will be judged equally by Crafty, so others pos sacs are also scored
'badly', so nobody will lose relative standing to one another

No. A player who plays more positional sacrifices will be penalized
for playing moves that crafty doesn't understand.


and (3), as long as assumption (1) is valid, Crafty will find the
most "mistake free" chess player, or one that plays closest to being
"tactics mistake free", which is a very good way to determine a good
chess player IMO.

But World Champions make very few tactical mistakes.


Now of course the surrebutter (rebuttal to the rebuttal) will be
that players like Tal will score poorly--and indeed they (he)
did--but let's face it, Tal was more of a shock player that relied
on playing the man rather than the board.

I'm not convinced by that assertion. Tal played games that were sound
enough that they were very hard to defeat over the board. I don't
think that counts as playing the man rather than the board.


In a match of coolheaded Karpov or Kramnik versus Tal, all in their
prime, the less emotional player is likely to win

Hmm... The two Botvinnik-Tal matches between them were only won by
Botvinnik +12-11=19. Hardly a convincing victory for the cool head.


Think of all the bogus moves made by beginners, sacrificing knight
for pawn, "to break up their pawn chain", with no positional
advantage. If you believe chess is positional play more than
tactics then such bogus moves should work more often than they do.
They do not.

This argument is bogus. Sacrificing a knight against one's opponent's
pawn structure is hardly a prime example of `positional chess'. You
might as well say that all the bogus tactical shots attempted by
beginners to `win material' or `checkmate the king' show that tactics
play a small role in chess.


Dave.

--
David Richerby Frozen Erotic Gerbil (TM): it's like
www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~davidr/ a children's pet but it's genuinely
erotic and frozen in a block of ice!