Tactics cannot be very important for chess

[jp]

If you have no plan you can play Backgammon

So now you're trying to forbid engines from playing chess because they don't play it the way you want them to... That's great. I'm sure they'll listen to you.

[mclane]

I do only tell my opinion In a forum i founded together with others. In Germany Free opinion of people is a guaranteed right !! No body and no engine can take away.

I have nothing against engines moving pieces blind on board. Why should I.
I am doing computerchess since 1978.


Bob even earlier. My respect for his work.


But is computerchess making a move, or winning ?

IMO chess is to plan to win this game.

[Spliffjiffer]

tactic and strategy are human words to get an imagination of how this game can be enclosed...the real truth about chess is that it is an "endless" tree of calculation and it doesnt matter if we have SF 10 or 20 to get our thoughts oriented...in the end there is always one only thing: does it work or not... our world is build of illusions and not build upon any truth because our "truths" have always illusions in our mind and its not possible to change that in a human brain (its imagination but NOT calculation)..opinion and then truth and thats the illusion..strategy and tactic does not solve this issue...the only thing that does change matters to a truth is flawleess sighting of reality in terms of observation but we do not "observe" we iterpretate !!

[mclane]

Tactics is inside the search horizon,
Strategy is outside the search horizon.

[Spliffjiffer]

u dont get the point actually my lovely compatriot...the point is that there is no strategy beyond tactics... the truth lies in exact calculation and nowhere else...u say its outside "our" search horizon but why i should talk about us ...i tried to to talk about "IT"

[mclane]

If that is your point your point is damn wrong. LC0 shows this on a daily basis against stronger engines.

[towforce]

But what is the "plan"? Has to be to checkmate the opponent's king. If you can't see a way to force that, then you seek a way to reach a position where that goal is more reachable, even if you can't see it. But think about it, the game of chess is not infinite. So it is theoretically possible to search from beginning to end. At that point there would be no planning, no positional evaluation, just a sequence of moves that lead you to a won position. I'd have to call that a "tactical outcome"

If chess is a draw (which it probably is), and there is no way to win more material than your opponent from the starting position, then this philosophy falls over: it gives no guidance about what to do other than to avoid a losing move, leading to the meaningless shuffling of pieces that mclane is talking about.

I think the shift in interest that we appear to be seeing in favour of ways to generate knowledge is likely to continue:

1. if the position is drawn, knowledge is more likely to lead to nicer looking moves than deep search

2. from where we are today, it seems to me that knowledge is more likely to get us to a practical resolution of chess - the creation of a player that cannot be beaten

No computer will ever be able to search the entire chess tree: one of the limits of computing is that the maximum number of operations which can be done with a joule of energy is 10^35 IIRC, and the known universe hasn't created enough energy since its inception 14 billion years ago to have been able to search the chess tree. However, there may exist a mathematical proof that chess is a draw which can be achieved.

[dragontamer5788]

But what is the "plan"? Has to be to checkmate the opponent's king. If you can't see a way to force that, then you seek a way to reach a position where that goal is more reachable, even if you can't see it. But think about it, the game of chess is not infinite. So it is theoretically possible to search from beginning to end. At that point there would be no planning, no positional evaluation, just a sequence of moves that lead you to a won position. I'd have to call that a "tactical outcome"

If chess is a draw (which it probably is), and there is no way to win more material than your opponent from the starting position, then this philosophy falls over: it gives no guidance about what to do other than to avoid a losing move, leading to the meaningless shuffling of pieces that mclane is talking about.

If chess is a win for white (or even stranger: a forced win for black) then there's likely many, many different paths that would force a win. It would give no guidance for what to do aside from "pick from any of these winning moves that are available".

Case in point: have you ever played 3-dimensional 3x3 Tic-Tac-Toe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_tic-ta ... two-player) ? There's a few strategies which will always force a win for the first player, and as such it is a meaningless game. That is to say: any game which has been "solved" will likely be seen as meaningless. It doesn't matter if the solution is "win", "draw" or "loss", all three results are equally meaningless in a solved game.

A slightly more advanced game, Gomoku, (not to be confused with "Go", which is played on the same board), is basically "Connect 5". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gomoku . The game has been solved such that the first player always wins. There are numerous attempts to fix the game to make it more complex (Swap2, 3-and-3, etc. etc.), but the base game of Gomoku is meaningless because its relatively easy solution.

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That is to say, games have meaning because they're beyond our understanding. As soon as you understand a game completely, it becomes meaningless to play.

[Spliffjiffer]

If that is your point your point is damn wrong. LC0 shows this on a daily basis against stronger engines.

ok, i might be wrong !... i dont feel mad with this controversary but id like to mention 1 last thing to end the discussion from my personal standpoint :
this is not the end of getting the whole insight into chess when we regard the currently "cream of the crop- evaluation" by top engines of our days...i strongly believe that there is much more possible in terms of making advantages seeable or investigatable...momentarely i think in terms of precision nowadys and if this will be denied by superior strategies that will make me think "alternatively" (probably i will be to old or senile though to get this into my mind really)...so far im convinced that the real truth about chess is about tactics (so to speak: about precise calculation of variants) and i dont want to bother anyone who thinks a different way...everyone who has a personal view about chess is my really best friend..think yourself and most importantly: have fun with the game

[mclane]

The amount of positions in a game where tactics has to be solved is low.
In most positions there is nothing concrete to “solve” from a tactical point of view.

Also Engines beeing Good in solving tactical test suites are often weak in strategy and games and vice versa, LC0
is often weak in tactical test suites but plays marvellous chess games.