"raylopez99" wrote in message
oups.com...


So, understanding how chess works, and how chess playing computers
work, and having seen Crafty evaluate pretty good myself, I have to
side with the original article.

I would not go so far as to say that I side with the original argument,
only that Riis' objections were groundless. In fact, the original authors
have done some groundbreaking work on developing a
methodology to rate chess players. It is, at the very least,
very interesting, and a refreshing change from the pseudo-science
historical ELO/chessmetrics stuff. The problem with the work is
that it applies a new method to a very hard problem (ranking
world champions) when they haven't even shown the method's
worth when applied to easy problems (ranking everybody else).

I have previously expressed belief in the theory that "move rating" will
eventually surpass "result rating" as the gold standard measurement of
chess skill. This is a small first step, but there is much work left to
do.

On Apr 26, 3:18 pm, Ron wrote:

The whole idea of judging a player by his "error rate" presumes that the
way to win at chess is to commit no errors.

But a quick look at players like Lasker, Tal, and Bronstein shows that
there's another way: make an error in order to induce your opponent to
make a bigger error.

Right. This is precisely the, um, strategy I use when
I make all my errors. I am deliberately failing to see
the correct move and instead playing a turkey, with
the intention of inducing a similar blunder by my
opponent. Of course, I could always find the best
move if I really wanted to; I just *want* to play poorly.
;D


Many of Tal's sacrifices would be considered errors by a chess program
(and that's just counting the ones where you could expect a program to
see it through to the end, in all variations, in however much time you
gave it - and if you're only giving even a top program ten minutes a
move, you're not getting there on a lot of sacrifices) but Tal wasn't
trying to play perfect chess. He was trying to win games.

This is why it is rather unfair to try and judge
competitive players by how closely their moves
match up to a chess program; the program is
under no pressure to protect its title, for instance.
Nor is it ever faced with stupid questions from
reporters like- Q: "In game one, why did you allow
42.Q-g7 mate?" A: "As world champion, I never
overlook such things. Clearly then, I must have
been offered, and accepted, a huge bribe, of say,
ten billion dollars. Pardon me, but I *must* get to
the bank before it closes. The interest I'm losing
as we speak is KILLING me!"


And judging by his results (a world championship; the longest undefeated
streak in tournament games) he did so incredibly well.

Because of all the hype surrounding GM Fischer
and all the controversies brought on by Cold War
politics, we seldom remember that even as BF was
taking the title from the "evil axis" in 1972, at the
same time GM Tal was undergoing a period of near
invincibility -- the streak you mentioned above.
Countless fans of BF will recount a 6-0 match
victory or two, while never once realizing the
simultaneous exploits of GM Tal, who by the way,
"took" the year 1972 according to Chessmetrics,
over GM Fischer!


To say, therefore, that he was making errors strikes me as somewhat
absurd.

If we go by what GM Botvinnik said, only Tigran
Petrosian never made any (combinational) errors.
(In the position after 1.e4 Nc6 2.Qh5 Nb8 3.Qxf7+,
one would be wise to decline the sac according to
GM Botvinnik's advice, if GM Petrosian has White.)


If the "error" was never intended to be an irrefutable move, and it
leads directly to victory against a top player, how can you call it an
error?

All this shows is how closely a given player's
world championship games matched up with
move selections by a crippled Crafty. I don't
know about you, but if I were world champion,
I would hope to be a bit stronger than crippled
Crafty, and want my moves to match up well in
simple tactical exchanges, but not otherwise.

I really think the scope of such a statistical
analysis ought to have been limited to finding
out which world champion was the least
afflicted by a tendency to blunder, and which
was most afflicted.

-- help bot

In article .com,
help bot wrote:

Mr. Mitchell has made a serious error here in
equating game commentary after the fact with
what a player may have been thinking at the
time.

All of these games have been annotated --
often after looking at notations by others -- by
such players as GM Tal. This in no way means
that if, say, GM Kortchnoi said move x was
better and then GM Tal wrote in his book that
move x was better (since he agreed), that at
the time the game was played GM Tal *saw*
that move x was better, but deliberately chose
to play a stupid move instead!

Is "Mr. Mitchell" supposed to be me?

In all of the cases I cited, it's clear that Tal is talking about what
he saw during the game, not about his after-the-fact analysis.

Tal does quite a bit of this in his books. He'll give notes from
after-the-fact analysis, but he tends to focus much more than most
players on what he saw, when, and what his motivations were for playing.

So, nice try, but you're actually completely wrong here.

-Ron

On Apr 26, 9:24 pm, "David Kane" wrote:

So, understanding how chess works, and how chess playing computers
work, and having seen Crafty evaluate pretty good myself, I have to
side with the original article.

I would not go so far as to say that I side with the original argument,
only that Riis' objections were groundless. In fact, the original authors
have done some groundbreaking work on developing a
methodology to rate chess players. It is, at the very least,
very interesting, and a refreshing change from the pseudo-science
historical ELO/chessmetrics stuff. The problem with the work is
that it applies a new method to a very hard problem (ranking
world champions) when they haven't even shown the method's
worth when applied to easy problems (ranking everybody else).

It seems to me that the above comments themselves do
a decent job of showing how the "groundbreaking work"
is little different from ChessMetrics' pseudo-science.

------

In one of the defenses to a criticism, it was argued that
even a weak chess program could be utilized effectively
to rank players, due to a strong correlation of some sort.
But in constructing their example to demonstrate how
this works, the authors (as always) made some invalid
assumptions; in this particular case, that apart from the
single strongest move in a given position, the remaining
choices are distributed or chosen evenly. Obviously,
the remaining move choices are anything but equal, and
how a player chooses among them is a big part of how
strongly they play. The stronger the player, the more
likely he would be to go for #2 as opposed to #10
(granting the oddball assumption of exactly ten choices
per position). All these invalid assumptions come off
as a clueless math major having fun "playing around
with" numbers which just happen to relate to chess.

Thus far, the only works I have seen which are not
seriously flawed in terms of logic and reason, were a
few of the brief criticisms of the published works by
the math whiz-kids.

-- help bot

Ron wrote:
The whole idea of judging a player by his "error rate" presumes that
the way to win at chess is to commit no errors.

Well, it worked for Petrosian. ;-)

[...] Tal wasn't trying to play perfect chess. He was trying to win
games.

This is a crucial point, yes.


Dave.

--
David Richerby Broken Atlas (TM): it's like a map of
www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~davidr/ the world but it doesn't work!

raylopez99 wrote:
David Richerby wrote:
Obviously, anything written with a popular audience in mind cannot
possibly be accurate.

No, but popular means not as accurate as a journal paper, which the
original paper was.

Popular does not mean `not as accurate'.


Otherwise it's like saying whoever wins this Usenet thread is right
moreso than two chess researchers debating.

It's not like saying that at all. And what's this about `winning'
threads? I'm posting to share information, help people understand
things and hopefully be entertaining from time to time. What are you
posting for?


[...] 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. [...] You need to apply the same
*good* measure to everyone.

That is the ideal, but my point stands--equally bad is not so bad.

Strongly disagree. Consider an even more ludicrous measu the
better player is the one with most a's in his name. (That said, this
does explain why Lasker beat Steinitz, why Capablanca beat Lasker, why
Alekhine beat Euwe, why Tal and Petrosian beat Botvinnik, why Karpov
kept beating Korchnoi and why Kasparov kept beating Karpov. Perhaps
there's something in this, after all?)


And BTW using your example, a player who wins in the middlegame is
indeed probably stronger than one who wins in the endgame

Disagree strongly.


(it's tougher to win a short game--think of winning a chess
brilliancy against equally matched opposition--than to grind out a
win in the endgame.

The scarcity of short games at high level is because short games are
the result of catastrophic mistakes and high-level players tend not to
make those.


-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.

No. See my point above.

No, really. A player who makes more moves that Crafty doesn't
understand (e.g., positional sacrifices) will have greater deviation
from Crafty's play than a player who makes only moves that Crafty does
understand. Hence, he will score lower. Not because he plays bad
moves but because he plays moves that are better than the ones Crafty
found.


And chess is 99% tactics (famous quote).

If you're going to argue by quotation, I'll throw in ``82% of
statistics are made up on the spot,'' ``History is more or less bunk''
and ``The devil may quote scripture for his own purposes.'' Oh,
and``I never drink water because of the disgusting things fish do in
it.''


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.

Not true. Nearly all games are full of tactical mistakes, except
perhaps at the correspondence chess level. I was reading a book by
John Nunn ("Chess explained move by move") that makes this point in
the preface--Nunn had a hard time finding 20 OTB games that were
'mistake free' for his book, after searching 1000s of games.

I assume you mean ``Understanding Chess Move by Move''? Does he
say that he had a hard time finding games that were mistake free or
free of *tactical* mistakes?


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.

But on balance Tal was a shock player. Deny that and you become a
chess revisionist.

But, on balance, Tal was a very successful player. As Ron said, the
point is to win, not to play perfect chess.


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.

Pace Karpov's lifetime record against Tal, which is way positive. Of
course it was a young Karpov against an older, sick Tal, but the point
stands.

Well, I'm not sure the point does stand. That rider about Tal being
old and sick strikes me as being just a leetle bit significant.


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'. [...]

Positional chess SACRIFICE was my point. A positional chess
sacrifice is rare in chess is my point (goes to chess being 99%
tactics).

If you meant `positional sacrifices' you should have said that. What
you said was `If you believe chess is positional play more than
tactics.' Anyway, I certainly agree with you that tactics are much
more common that positional sacrifices. But there's an awful lot more
to positional play than positional sacrifices. Indeed, one might say
that ``Positional play is 99% positional-sacrifice--free'' but that's
much less snappy than ``Chess is 99% tactics.''


Dave.

--
David Richerby Generic Laptop Tool (TM): it's like
www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~davidr/ a hammer that you can put on your lap
but it's just like all the others!

help bot wrote:
A silly statement. As we saw, the wild, attacking style of GK gave
GM Karpov a very hard time, except for their very first match. How
was GM Tal, in his prime, all that different from GM Kasparov?

Tal sacrificed for the attack; Kasparov sacrificed for the initiative,
according to somebody I read. Tal and Kasparov were dramatically
different in style. Quite apart from anything else, Kasparov's play
is much more sound than Tal's. Of course, Tal's play was sound enough
to win in many cases; who needs to be more sound than that?


Another example was the cool, calm, collected Bobby Fischer, who was
overwhelmed by GM Tal in his prime

You mean the +4-2=5 career record (excluding the two blitzgames at
Herzeg Novi, which were both won by Fischer and which were ten years
after the rest of the games) in Tal's favour? That's not particularly
overwhelming.


and who calmly observed after the fact that GM Tal's
hyper-aggressive play was "unsound".

Tal never claimed to be sound. He just claimed to be sound enough to
be very difficult to beat over the board. Who cares if some sacrifice
takes two hours of computer time to defeat? The opponent doesn't have
two hours of computer time.


The world champions are all competent at tactics, so the differences
between them are more subtle than just "who was the best tactician".

Exactly. Ditto to the rest of your comments from this point, which
I've snipped.


Dave.

--
David Richerby Chocolate Widget (TM): it's like a
www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~davidr/ thingy that's made of chocolate!

David Richerby wrote:
help bot wrote:
Another example was the cool, calm, collected Bobby Fischer, who
was overwhelmed by GM Tal in his prime

You mean the +4-2=5 career record (excluding the two blitzgames at
Herzeg Novi, which were both won by Fischer and which were ten years
after the rest of the games) in Tal's favour?

Er, I took that record from chessgames.com -- I don't know if their
database has all the Tal-Fischer games.


Dave.

--
David Richerby Addictive Dictator (TM): it's like a
www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~davidr/ totalitarian leader but you can never
put it down!

In article ,
David Richerby wrote:

Tal never claimed to be sound.

In fact, he went even further than that.

His quote was something to the effect of:

"There are two kinds of sacrifices: sound ones, and mine."

-Ron

On Apr 27, 4:43 am, David Richerby
wrote:
raylopez99 wrote:

No, but popular means not as accurate as a journal paper, which the
original paper was.

Popular does not mean `not as accurate'.

Generally it does, statistically speaking.


Otherwise it's like saying whoever wins this Usenet thread is right
moreso than two chess researchers debating.

It's not like saying that at all. And what's this about `winning'
threads? I'm posting to share information, help people understand
things and hopefully be entertaining from time to time. What are you
posting for?

To win this thread. I win.


[...] 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. [...] You need to apply the same
*good* measure to everyone.

That is the ideal, but my point stands--equally bad is not so bad.

Strongly disagree. Consider an even more ludicrous measu the
better player is the one with most a's in his name. (That said, this
does explain why Lasker beat Steinitz, why Capablanca beat Lasker, why
Alekhine beat Euwe, why Tal and Petrosian beat Botvinnik, why Karpov
kept beating Korchnoi and why Kasparov kept beating Karpov. Perhaps
there's something in this, after all?)

Irrelevant. We are talking about using a chess program not as strong
as the players it rates, to rate the players based on the least number
of tactical mistakes (and the least number of positional mistakes,
since chess programs do make positional evaluations, often
surprisingly good). We are not talking Mensa word games.



And BTW using your example, a player who wins in the middlegame is
indeed probably stronger than one who wins in the endgame

Disagree strongly.

(it's tougher to win a short game--think of winning a chess
brilliancy against equally matched opposition--than to grind out a
win in the endgame.

The scarcity of short games at high level is because short games are
the result of catastrophic mistakes and high-level players tend not to
make those.

Whatever dude. My point stands: winning in the middlegame is tougher
for equally rated players than winning in the endgame. Probably worth
10 centipawns.


-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.

No. See my point above.

No, really. A player who makes more moves that Crafty doesn't
understand (e.g., positional sacrifices) will have greater deviation
from Crafty's play than a player who makes only moves that Crafty does
understand. Hence, he will score lower. Not because he plays bad
moves but because he plays moves that are better than the ones Crafty
found.

But this is rare. Remember, chess is 99.7% tactics. Has a decade of
computer chess and Deeper Blue not taught you anything? And you, a
programmer no less?


And chess is 99% tactics (famous quote).

If you're going to argue by quotation, I'll throw in ``82% of
statistics are made up on the spot,'' ``History is more or less bunk''
and ``The devil may quote scripture for his own purposes.'' Oh,
and``I never drink water because of the disgusting things fish do in
it.''

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.

Not true. Nearly all games are full of tactical mistakes, except
perhaps at the correspondence chess level. I was reading a book by
John Nunn ("Chess explained move by move") that makes this point in
the preface--Nunn had a hard time finding 20 OTB games that were
'mistake free' for his book, after searching 1000s of games.

I assume you mean ``Understanding Chess Move by Move''? Does he
say that he had a hard time finding games that were mistake free or
free of *tactical* mistakes?

I think he implies both, but since chess is 99.69% tactics, it implies
the latter.


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.

But on balance Tal was a shock player. Deny that and you become a
chess revisionist.

But, on balance, Tal was a very successful player. As Ron said, the
point is to win, not to play perfect chess.

Tal won, and is a winner. But he was not the strongest player--that
is the player that made the least mistakes. This is routine btw in
computer chess --once a GM, I think it was Walter Browne, was rated to
see how 'closely' he played an ending where the best play is already
known (I think it's the B+N+P database called "Nablom*" something,
pretty famous), just to see how 'close' he played to the (already
known) perfect ending database. THe theory was the stronger the
player, the closer he plays to the 'theoretically correct' perfect
play of the database. Why is this so hard to understand? You
understand pointers don't you, yet can't grasp this? Or perhaps you
still program in Visual Basic and Perl?


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.

Pace Karpov's lifetime record against Tal, which is way positive. Of
course it was a young Karpov against an older, sick Tal, but the point
stands.

Well, I'm not sure the point does stand. That rider about Tal being
old and sick strikes me as being just a leetle bit significant.

Actually I was wrong. Per another post in this thread the same day I
posted, apparently in the early 1970s Tal was playing better than
Fischer. He had gotten over his serious kidney ailment. So my point
still stands and indeed is stronger than before, like Tal was.


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'. [...]

Positional chess SACRIFICE was my point. A positional chess
sacrifice is rare in chess is my point (goes to chess being 99%
tactics).

If you meant `positional sacrifices' you should have said that. What
you said was `If you believe chess is positional play more than
tactics.'

Sorry, but now you know what I meant. Move on.


Anyway, I certainly agree with you that tactics are much
more common that positional sacrifices.

Then you conceed my point and indeed the point of Crafty rating chess
players.


But there's an awful lot more
to positional play than positional sacrifices. Indeed, one might say
that ``Positional play is 99% positional-sacrifice--free'' but that's
much less snappy than ``Chess is 99% tactics.''


Whatever. Point being Crafty does both positional and tactical
evaluations, the latter better than the former, but it does both.

Case closed. Like the header says: Greatest chess players ever?
Capa, Kramnik, Karpov, Kasparov, *in that order* (cuz 'puters don't
lie!)

Goodbye, duffer.

RL



Dave.

--
David Richerby Geriatric Laptop Fool (TM): it's likewww.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~davidr/ like an old dumb stripper that you can put on your lap