Are Computers Draining The Beauty Out Of Chess?

[rabbits23]

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder; right Dann?
Allan

[carldaman]

You will find error when you analyze the evergreen game, the immortal game or a Paul Morphy masterpiece. Yet the beauty of the game does not change for those who appreciate them.

Right.

Computers have actually made it easier and easier to see beauty in chess (provided you know what you're looking for and have a base level of chess understanding).

The problem is that players who are new to the game (or those who ignorantly worship the engine without ever thinking for/analying themselves) have lost respect for strong players.

When I was getting stronger at chess, I used to follow the 1999-2000 events live on FICS very passionately...

At the time Kasparov was destroying everybody with beautiful, aggressive, sacrificial chess.

At that time I had the latest engines...yes.

It was something like Fritz 7, Junior 7, Hiarcs 8, Shredder 7.04 and Chesstiger, I believe...I didn't have access to Rebel and was dedicated to CB products.

Anyway, these engines are all GM strength with nice styles, but I'll tell you something...

I never loaded up the games in Fritz to "check" while following for example, Corus 2000....Why kill the fun and the anticipation?

These days in any event I regularly see 1300 ELO players shouting in a chat box during the broadcast "Anand SUCKS! Stockfish says Rfd8 was -0.54. We need a real player to take over...he's getting old!"

If Topalov plays a beautiful sac...instead of putting their head on their hands and digging in to figure out how the hell it works....they mindlessly throw it on Stockfish, see that SF now says Topy is losing (who knows, if the position is in chaos..) and says some ignorant B.S like "Topalov was good before...he plays like a patzer now"

10 years ago we would have applauded the guy (or in 2005 when Topy was smashing everybody), but now when he shows signs of his previous brilliance, it can only be measured against SF.

So the beauty is still there, but most of the fans (especially new ones coming through) have no idea what the hell beauty is in chess.

Most of the new chess generation are nerds and statisticians, not artists and prefer ELO over brilliance.

"Who cares if Topalov/Aronian/Kramnik played a game of genius...he can't beat Magnus right? He's a patzer" - that's the mantra.

Perhaps we could say computers are draining the beauty out of chess society.

The computer-empowered 1300-level players usually give themselves away when they promptly blurt out such things out as, "Oh no, so-and-so GM just blundered", whenever the engine eval goes from say, +4.00 to +3.00...

They also tend to blindly trust the engines' verdict and prematurely declare many complicated positions as 'won' or 'drawn', regardless of all the technique required to achieve those results, when in truth they (and most players) would be clueless to find the best moves over the board, unassisted.

CL

[carldaman]

10 years ago we would have applauded the guy (or in 2005 when Topy was smashing everybody), but now when he shows signs of his previous brilliance, it can only be measured against SF.

no brilliance, simply good form, or, equivalently, opponents' bad form.

brilliant is a player who consistently gets good results, usually the world champion, and not a player who gets good results only when in good shape.

Brilliant player with a boring life style ? Aljechin is more interesting.

Topalov is the post-computer generation version of Alekhine with much tougher opponents.

An opponent like Karpov, Kramnik, Kasparov or Karlson (lol) is going to make being "brilliant" much tougher than guys like Reti, Bogo, Nimzo and those guys.

The level is much more advanced, which makes the chess Topalov plays even more impressive.

And let's not forget Karuana. I remember when he had that magical 7-0 start at Sinquefield a couple of years ago, and then he missed a win in the 8th round; while watching live I actually felt part-relieved (besides part-disappointed), when he actually failed to find the winning move suggested by the engines and proved he was really human after all.