If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.
Policy / Politique
The fee for tournament organizers advertising on ChessTalk is $20/event or $100/yearly unlimited for the year.
Les frais d'inscription des organisateurs de tournoi sur ChessTalk sont de 20 $/événement ou de 100 $/année illimitée.
You can etransfer to Henry Lam at chesstalkforum at gmail dot com
Transfér à Henry Lam à chesstalkforum@gmail.com
Dark Knight / Le Chevalier Noir
General Guidelines
---- Nous avons besoin d'un traduction français!
Some Basics
1. Under Board "Frequently Asked Questions" (FAQs) there are 3 sections dealing with General Forum Usage, User Profile Features, and Reading and Posting Messages. These deal with everything from Avatars to Your Notifications. Most general technical questions are covered there. Here is a link to the FAQs. https://forum.chesstalk.com/help
2. Consider using the SEARCH button if you are looking for information. You may find your question has already been answered in a previous thread.
3. If you've looked for an answer to a question, and not found one, then you should consider asking your question in a new thread. For example, there have already been questions and discussion regarding: how to do chess diagrams (FENs); crosstables that line up properly; and the numerous little “glitches” that every new site will have.
4. Read pinned or sticky threads, like this one, if they look important. This applies especially to newcomers.
5. Read the thread you're posting in before you post. There are a variety of ways to look at a thread. These are covered under “Display Modes”.
6. Thread titles: please provide some details in your thread title. This is useful for a number of reasons. It helps ChessTalk members to quickly skim the threads. It prevents duplication of threads. And so on.
7. Unnecessary thread proliferation (e.g., deliberately creating a new thread that duplicates existing discussion) is discouraged. Look to see if a thread on your topic may have already been started and, if so, consider adding your contribution to the pre-existing thread. However, starting new threads to explore side-issues that are not relevant to the original subject is strongly encouraged. A single thread on the Canadian Open, with hundreds of posts on multiple sub-topics, is no better than a dozen threads on the Open covering only a few topics. Use your good judgment when starting a new thread.
8. If and/or when sub-forums are created, please make sure to create threads in the proper place.
Debate
9. Give an opinion and back it up with a reason. Throwaway comments such as "Game X pwnz because my friend and I think so!" could be considered pointless at best, and inflammatory at worst.
10. Try to give your own opinions, not simply those copied and pasted from reviews or opinions of your friends.
Unacceptable behavior and warnings
11. In registering here at ChessTalk please note that the same or similar rules apply here as applied at the previous Boardhost message board. In particular, the following content is not permitted to appear in any messages:
* Racism
* Hatred
* Harassment
* Adult content
* Obscene material
* Nudity or pornography
* Material that infringes intellectual property or other proprietary rights of any party
* Material the posting of which is tortious or violates a contractual or fiduciary obligation you or we owe to another party
* Piracy, hacking, viruses, worms, or warez
* Spam
* Any illegal content
* unapproved Commercial banner advertisements or revenue-generating links
* Any link to or any images from a site containing any material outlined in these restrictions
* Any material deemed offensive or inappropriate by the Board staff
12. Users are welcome to challenge other points of view and opinions, but should do so respectfully. Personal attacks on others will not be tolerated. Posts and threads with unacceptable content can be closed or deleted altogether. Furthermore, a range of sanctions are possible - from a simple warning to a temporary or even a permanent banning from ChessTalk.
Helping to Moderate
13. 'Report' links (an exclamation mark inside a triangle) can be found in many places throughout the board. These links allow users to alert the board staff to anything which is offensive, objectionable or illegal. Please consider using this feature if the need arises.
Advice for free
14. You should exercise the same caution with Private Messages as you would with any public posting.
With some shots/interviews with Pascal Charbonneau, Jeff Sarwer (Ray Philips), Fischer, the Polgars, etc.
(Susan Polgar was NOT the first woman to get a "men's" GM title).
Especially interesting were Saidy's suggestion that chess attracts people with certain mental illnesses, and Pandolfini's statement to the effect that he refuses to coach children whose parents put too much pressure on them to excel. I also liked Fischer telling us that he is not a genius, just a good chess player. Far too often the word "genius" is used with reference to good chess players. Magnus is not a genius, he is simply a great chess player. Let us not flatter ourselves and over-inflate the relevance of a finite board game, no matter how much we love it or are obsessed by it.
With some shots/interviews with Pascal Charbonneau, Jeff Sarwer (Ray Philips), Fischer, the Polgars, etc.
(Susan Polgar was NOT the first woman to get a "men's" GM title).
Especially interesting were Saidy's suggestion that chess attracts people with certain mental illnesses, and Pandolfini's statement to the effect that he refuses to coach children whose parents put too much pressure on them to excel. I also liked Fischer telling us that he is not a genius, just a good chess player. Far too often the word "genius" is used with reference to good chess players. Magnus is not a genius, he is simply a great chess player. Let us not flatter ourselves and over-inflate the relevance of a finite board game, no matter how much we love it or are obsessed by it.
What you say about genius versus being elite at chess is spot on. To me, the elite in chess are like robots. They have been trained all their life to play one particular game extremely well. But if you change just one rule (which I am experimenting with right now, see my thread on chess with one rule change) and all their specialized knowledge gets thrown out the window. They might still be strong players of the new game, but no longer elite, at least until they can master all the new opening theory and endgame theory and tactics of the new game.
This is the characteristic of present day robots. They are programmed to do one or at most a few things very well, better than humans. Change one rule and they have to be reprogrammed. In the case of a perfect information game like chess, even the robot will adapt more quickly than than the human, generally speaking.
I have long felt that if we teach chess in schools, we should also teach poker. Not using money of course, the only prizes would be chips so that it's not considered gambling. The thing about poker is that it teaches skills that chess doesn't teach. The primary one is how to deal emotionally when you do everything right, play perfectly, and still lose. That is part of the real world which chess does not encapsulate, although in chess you can do everything right and still settle for a draw.
Another skill poker teaches is patience and variety. The player who is going all-in on most hands is soon eliminated once his or her pattern is detected. Chess can teach patience too, but not so much the variety.
And one big thing in poker that isn't nearly as prevalent in chess is psychology. Figuring out your opponents (called "reading" your opponents) is as important in poker as knowing your own hand. And a lot of times you have more than one opponent to figure out.
The skills that poker teaches would go a long way to creating very smart and savvy entrepreneurs and business operators and managers.
What you say about genius versus being elite at chess is spot on. To me, the elite in chess are like robots. ...
I have long felt that if we teach chess in schools, we should also teach poker. Not using money of course, the only prizes would be chips so that it's not considered gambling. The thing about poker is that it teaches skills that chess doesn't teach. The primary one is how to deal emotionally when you do everything right, play perfectly, and still lose. That is part of the real world which chess does not encapsulate, although in chess you can do everything right and still settle for a draw.
Another skill poker teaches is patience and variety. The player who is going all-in on most hands is soon eliminated once his or her pattern is detected. Chess can teach patience too, but not so much the variety.
And one big thing in poker that isn't nearly as prevalent in chess is psychology. Figuring out your opponents (called "reading" your opponents) is as important in poker as knowing your own hand. And a lot of times you have more than one opponent to figure out.
The skills that poker teaches would go a long way to creating very smart and savvy entrepreneurs and business operators and managers.
I admire that poker players can read a table of opponents but playing all-night games isn't healthy. And most lose lots of money. Bridge may be a healthier social game. Or being in a choir. Physical sports are healthy until stopped by injury. But in all activities, we need balance with non-gaming time. Things like regular sleep, eating, physical activity, sunlight, laughter, cleaning and helping others.
There are child prodigies in music, math and chess. There is some higher brain processing in chess grandmasters. There is a combination of recognizing geometric patterns, precision analysis and creativity in finding solutions. It's important to learn how to accept losses. Chess also develops concentration, patience, decision making and time management. But is also an ego-driven adrenaline rush and responding to sudden changes by your opponent which requires emotional control.
When I was young I could sit at home and passively watch Leafs hockey on tv or listen to rock music records. Chess was more engaging. Chess wasn't like robotic one-solution games or jigsaw puzzles. Chess offered choices: queen side or kingside, knight or bishop, pawn trade or push, defend or counter attack, ... It was a battle of ideas and opponents would prove my ego's ideas as ridiculous. And feel satisfied when an unclear tactical attack ended with a pretty mate. Going to the chess club expanded my social circle and exposure to other cultures.
There are child prodigies in music, math and chess.
Yes, this has always interested me. The connection between math and chess makes sense, they are both cold and purely rational activities. Neither the chess player nor the mathematician is attempting to impart an emotional response in viewers, though these can take place incidentally. But this is precisely what the musician does. The musician organizes sound in such a manner as to create emotional, or aesthetic responses. Yet all three activities produce prodigies. Some theories suggest that the same parts of the brain are involved in all three activities.
If Einstein is a genius and Mangus is a genius, then so is Lemmy.
The teaching of poker would also be a good aptitude test. Those more prone to bluffing would likely make the best politicians.
Yes, and they would always understand: if you bluff all-in, then once your bluff is called, your game is over. Few politicians recover from having their bluff called (Bill Clinton: "I did not have sex with that woman").
It makes sense that ex-politicians brought down in such manner should be able to do well in poker, where there is always another game willing to let you buy in.
But I don't think poker "glorifies" bluffing. That's because you cannot get away with constant bluffing. Your bluffing has to be timely and you can even learn to deliberately lose a bluff to set things up for when you actually DO have a good hand: because you bluffed previously and got caught, someone is willing to give you action when you do have a hand. There should be a term for that kind of bluffing, where you actually bluff with the INTENTION to be caught and lose the hand. Maybe a "pseudo-bluff" or something like that.
It is interesting to speculate on how the skill of bluffing and even pseudo-bluffing can be useful in the real world. We try and teach our kids to always tell the truth, but is that really a good thing? Can a little white lie sometimes be good, and if yes, how do we recognize it when those situations come along?
There is some higher brain processing in chess grandmasters. There is a combination of recognizing geometric patterns, precision analysis and creativity in finding solutions.
I don't feel that there is very much of creativity in chess. Firstly, if there was truly creativity, then all sorts of chess variants would be accepted and welcomed by all chess players, as long as the variant provided the kind of skills you just mentioned, such as recognizing patterns and precision analysis. The fact that serious chess players only want to play standard chess plus maybe one variant, being chess960, is due to the fact that the elite of chess players and the budding elite of chess players have invested years and years of memorization (openings, endgames, middlegame tactics) into the one game of standard chess. If variants suddenly became popular, all those years of work were mostly wasted.
Even chess960 is not truly a variant, it only makes the opening setup variable, it doesn't change any rules (except castling).
Secondly, the chess search tree is finite. It would take more atoms than there are in the Milky Way to contain it, but nevertheless it is finite. Therefore we can say that the entire chess search tree does exist if only hypothetically, and that means there is an optimal solution, or perhaps many optimal solutions all of which result in a draw. It is well recognized that a win cannot be forced in chess, a win only comes about because of mistakes.
But more important is the process itself. Let's pretend that all digital artists created their images pixel by pixel, starting at the top left corner of some particular size of image. Let's say it's the size of an HD TV image, 1080 by 960 pixels. Each pixel can have any 32-bit digital value (RGBA : Reg Green Blue Alpha). So they assign the first pixel a value, then the next, and so on until all 1080 x 960 pixels (1,036,800) have a 32-bit value. Obviously there is only a finite number of possible images. Is it really "creative" to be choosing one of these possible images in this pixel by pixel manner? The choosing of each pixel value is akin to choosing a chess move, the only exception being you don't win or lose, you just keep choosing pixels (moves) until all pixels have been chosen (a chess game of 1080 x 960 plies has been played).
But instead, the artist pays no attention to pixels, they use some program like Paint or Photoshop to imitate drawing with brushes and various other artist tools. They are seeing "the big picture" and that does amount to creativity because the end of the process is not after the 1,036,800th pixel is given a value, but the end of the process is when the artist is happy with the big picture. Chess is the pixel-by-pixel process, with hard and fast rules as to when the process must stop. There is nothing in chess akin to painting with brushes. There is only choosing moves.
I am not saying that chess isn't a pleasure to play. Of course it is. Part of the pleasure is that we cannot see the big picture. And when the game is finished, it has taught us something and we do see the big picture of that particular game, and we can analyze it to see how it could have turned out differently.
Perhaps it is just that some people prefer the pixel-by-pixel form of creativity and some people prefer painting with brushes. Maybe creativity itself has many forms.
I don't feel that there is very much of creativity in chess.
I tend to agree, and certainly think that the "creativity" element is vastly overblown. We do not "create" the best chess games/moves, we discover them. We do not invent them, we find them.
Tweet
Comment