'Chess Style' and 'Quality Chess'

[Paul Bonham]

Re: 'Chess Style' and 'Quality Chess'

I imagine Paul Bonham would watch that.

Only if the computers absolutely hated and insulted each other. :D

[Kerry Liles]

Re: 'Chess Style' and 'Quality Chess'

And lots of people still watch Jeopardy. But no one would watch 3 computers playing Jeopardy.

I imagine Paul Bonham would watch that.

[Garland Best]

Re: 'Chess Style' and 'Quality Chess'

And lots of people still watch Jeopardy. But no one would watch 3 computers playing Jeopardy.

[Garland Best]

Re: 'Chess Style' and 'Quality Chess'

Your argument is that chess is not inherently human because a machine can do it better than a human. That is a circular argument. Tennis can't be played by a machine? How about table tennis?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIIJME8-au8?

Humor aside, would your watch two robots compete for the world championship?

And I differ with your opinion regarding chess as sport.

Regarding my comment that Karpov was a machine, you misunderstood my point. Karpov was a machine in that he was cold and emotionless. He was an excellent reflection of the USSR at the time and as such was easy to root against. And if you think Karpov reduced the psychological aspect of a game to zero, then you never followed the Karpov - Korchnoi matches.

[Paul Bonham]

Re: 'Chess Style' and 'Quality Chess'

This all misses the point.

The reason I prefer games involving humans are that they are humans. Humans are interesting, they have personalities. Kasparov is bombastic. Fisher was eccentric. Karpov was a machine. Korchnoi was fighting the USSR. Anand is the gentleman. It is their lives, the fact that they connect with you, that they react emotionally puts the face to chess. Stockfish vs Rybka are two soulless machines. How can you relate to either?

Garland, I can definitely see your point IF we were talking about an activity that is inherently human in itself. For example, tennis or boxing or political debates. It's hard to imagine machines engaging in any of that. In the case of tennis, I grew up watching it in the era of Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, and Ivan Lendl. Those 3 guys hated each other, so any time there was a match between any 2 of them, it was a fantastic battle of wills. But it involved human physical activity and so their personalities came through in the way they behaved physically. For example, Lendl never won Wimbledon because his stoic personality made him physically unable to handle the faster reflexes needed to win on grass.

I've also dreamed of seeing the day when there could be a moderated debate where on one side you have Bill Maher, Lawrence O'Donnell, Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz and on the other side you have Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Dennis Miller, Sarah Palin and Donald Trump. There would not be an objective 'winning side' of any such debate, but it would be fun to watch the clash of personalities head-on. Heck, if Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe are on opposite political sides, throw them into that debate too!

But chess is as inherently human an activity as is Jeopardy. Remember the IBM computer program, 'Watson', that beat the best human Jeopardy contestants? Jeopardy is simple data storage and retrieval, where the combination of the most massive storage and the quickest retrieval wins. Purely a machine activity. Humans can excel, but machines do it better.

By your points, I would guess you are one who thinks chess is a sport. But it is simply not so. Chess is pure calculation and logic. There doesn't need to be any physical pieces and board. It can all be represented symbolically. It can all be 1's and 0's and nothing more. That is not inherently human nor is it sport. It is simply a puzzle to be solved, as was done with checkers.

You might respond that there is psychology in chess when humans play over the board. The two players are physically close and 'aware' of the presence of the other. But you also did mention something very interesting: you said Karpov was a machine. From that, one could infer that Karpov was able to reduce any psychological aspect of a game down to zero. If you could enjoy watching Karpov at chess, why not a computer?

Even if there is a psychological element to human over-the-board games, I would call that a distraction from what chess really is. If you want to see two humans engaged in sport which includes psychology, watch tennis or squash or one-on-one basketball or billiards or (gack!) bowling.

However, I will propose one exception to this line of thinking. We can easily picture that computers are leading chess in the direction of being 'solved'. I believe within 20 years (IF programmers continue to work at improving chess engines, which at this point is debateable), the top computer engines will no longer be able to defeat one another. All matches between them will end in draws.

So the exception I would propose is this: humans can and do produce more INTERESTING chess than computers. By that I don't mean the psychological element. What I mean is the 'deviation' element. A computer vs computer game will calculate the most precise moves to 30 plies deep, for example, and at no time during such a game is there a point where each side has 3 or 4 or more pieces en prise. Only humans produce this kind of chess, and even they do it very rarely. Anyone who appreciates this aspect of chess above all is appreciating chess not as a logic puzzle, not as a sport, but as an art form leading us off in hidden mysterious alleyways where the final scene could be anything at all, and the journey rather than the destination is the goal.

The names of players who played or currently play this kind of style are highly revered in chess history, even if they weren't considered among the 'greatest' players. If Karpov was one of the greatest players ever, Tal was probably more loved and followed. Today we have Nakamura as maybe the best current example of this style, although Richard Rapport seems to be arriving in style.

And yes, I've just segeued from chess 'quality' to chess 'style'. The two are inexorably linked together. The more quality you want from chess, the less style you get, and vice-versa.

I think someday people will be saying Carlsen "was a machine". If anyone gets excited over Carlsen's chess, there's a computer engine named 'Houdini' you should know about.

[Garland Best]

Re: 'Chess Style' and 'Quality Chess'

This all misses the point.

The reason I prefer games involving humans are that they are humans. Humans are interesting, they have personalities. Kasparov is bombastic. Fisher was eccentric. Karpov was a machine. Korchnoi was fighting the USSR. Anand is the gentleman. It is their lives, the fact that they connect with you, that they react emotionally puts the face to chess. Stockfish vs Rybka are two soulless machines. How can you relate to either?

[Kevin Pacey]

Re: 'Chess Style' and 'Quality Chess'

Computers do have 'styles', but IMO what's harder to explain about them (than human styles) is describing in even inexact terms the decisions by which their move selections are based on, i.e. describing all the numerical values produced by their evaluation functions together with the other means by which their algorithms accept/reject moves.

I've heard of some programs being stronger than others 'positionally'. However trying to get into the finer points of a player's style is easier in the case of humans. Some human players clearly always (or sometimes, depending on the opponent and tournament situation) prefer piece play over pushing on the pawns at an early stage, for example, assuming the two approaches were even remotely close in strength objectively. A computer might randomly do the former in one game but not another if the same position is reached, and piece play is otherwise just as strong numerically as pawn play.

In any case, many nuances and factors that haven't been mentioned (nor that can be summed up on a relatively short list) go into what can be called a style, and no two players are exactly alike. Sometimes style might be seen as a shortcut to explaining strengths vs. weaknesses (can you believe it?... Karpov once claimed he had no style), but I don't agree with this too much since style can also refer to simple likes and dislikes between moves of roughly equivalent value (at least in the case of humans).

Fwiw, back in the days when computers were still relatively weak, IMO their 'styles' might have been more entertaining (due to searching for an explaination of their occasional comical [not tragic!?] blunders, for one thing) and they seemed easier to distinguish, both from other machines' styles, and at least at more times by their types of moves that would seldom have been made by human players.

[Nigel Hanrahan]

Re: 'Chess Style' and 'Quality Chess'

On the question of 'style', only a few words come to my mind. There is 'positional' versus 'tactical', there is 'conventional' versus 'unorthodox' (especially in openings), and there is what I would call 'broad' versus 'narrow'. Those last terms refer to whether a player is adept and expert in all phases of the game (opening, middlegame, endgame) or only one or two of those phases, and may actually be weak in one or two phases.

Additionally, there could be the concepts of 'continuity' versus 'discontinuity'. This refers to whether a player shows a tendency to embark on a strategic plan and stick to it come what may, or instead shows a tendency to jump from strategic plan to strategic plan based on what the opponent is doing to change the nature of the game.

If anyone else has more definitions of style, by all means add them in this thread so we can all get a more complete picture of exactly what this entails.

Some elements of style are described on the Chess Problem page for Wikipedia. The world of chess problems in general often refers to style and can be helpful.

Economy, beauty of play, originality come to mind as elements of style. The late, great Vladimir Nabokov (who was both a novelist and a chess player) wrote about the "originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity" of creating chess problems. All of these terms could apply to the style of a player, or computer, although I'm not entirely sure what Nabokov meant by "splendid insincerity".

[Paul Bonham]

In the ChessTalk thread titled "Time Increments", I asked Kevin Pacey: where is the interest in the most elite form of chess possible, namely chess played between top computer engines such as Houdini versus Stockfish? In other words, where is the book on such games? (those two engines did play each other I believe in 2013, in a match of many dozens of games, and this match went for the most part unnoticed and as far as I know, there is nowhere to be found an in-depth analysis of the games).

Kevin posted in that thread this response:

"A book on a computer vs. computer match would likely sell far less than a book on a match between elite humans that wasn't a blowout, because we can't calculate nor evaluate positions as well (or in the same way) as computers, and their 'styles' would be harder to explain in depth, or enjoy."

What Kevin appears to be saying is that not only he personally, but most chess players who follow the game's latest developments, would not enjoy a book analyzing Houdini versus Stockfish games because:

(a) they wouldn't understand the analysis (presumably even if the analysis was written by humans, which begs the question... who else would write it?), and

(b) they wouldn't be able to discern any 'style' in either computer engine's play.

I think Kevin's points are important enough to warrant a separate thread on the topic of just what IS a chess player's 'style', and asking whether Kevin's points are valid. Why is this important? I think because everyone who can call themself a serious chess player seems to want to see or to develop or see developed in others 'quality chess'. I keep seeing this mentioned again and again. Yet nobody seems to pay any attention to the greatest quality chess, computer engine versus computer engine. Regardless of style considerations, these engines when matched against each other give us the pinnacle of chess quality. You must believe in that if you believe in the ELO rating system. So what that means is: we should all be able to learn from analysing games between top engines, more so than analyzing ANY human versus human games or even human versus engine games.

On the question of 'style', only a few words come to my mind. There is 'positional' versus 'tactical', there is 'conventional' versus 'unorthodox' (especially in openings), and there is what I would call 'broad' versus 'narrow'. Those last terms refer to whether a player is adept and expert in all phases of the game (opening, middlegame, endgame) or only one or two of those phases, and may actually be weak in one or two phases.

Additionally, there could be the concepts of 'continuity' versus 'discontinuity'. This refers to whether a player shows a tendency to embark on a strategic plan and stick to it come what may, or instead shows a tendency to jump from strategic plan to strategic plan based on what the opponent is doing to change the nature of the game.

If anyone else has more definitions of style, by all means add them in this thread so we can all get a more complete picture of exactly what this entails.

So I suppose the first question many of you could answer is: for you to analyze a set of games set forth in a book, do you need those games to be a collection that contrasts two different styles? For example, Kasparov versus Karpov or Fischer versus Spassky?

Alternatively, would you ever be interested in a book that analyzes games purely for the sake of learning 'quality chess', i.e. a book that showcases games between many different players, in which the games have been selected for their instructive value alone?

If a prominent chess author, let's say a John Nunn or a Jeremy Silman, were to author a book analyzing Houdini versus Stockfish, would you buy it and if so, purely for that author's reputation?

What if the book were authored by some run-of-the-mill GM, and it seemed to have good annotations and diagrams, would you buy the book in order to learn about 'quality chess'?

And finally: would you agree that the lack of discernable 'style' in the play of computer engines on the whole (which we can agree for now is entirely possible) means that there is little to nothing you could learn from analyzing games between such engines, either on your own or with the aid of such a book authored by a GM?

That last question gets to the crux of Kevin's points: is chess 'objective' enough that players can learn something from the highest quality play in terms of ELO rating, even if that play exhibits no discernable 'style' over many games?