Has programming chess improved your own play?

[Michael Sherwin]

And by how much?

It has helped me a lot. I can hold my own against some rather strong chess programs. I can almost hold my own against free-Rybka (on dated hardware) and might even be able to win a draw odds match. I am tempted to return to over the board play.

Just curious if anyone else has experianced anything similar.

[Uri Blass]

And by how much?

It has helped me a lot. I can hold my own against some rather strong chess programs. I can almost hold my own against free-Rybka (on dated hardware) and might even be able to win a draw odds match. I am tempted to return to over the board play.

Just curious if anyone else has experianced anything similar.

No
It did not change my own playing strength.

Uri

[ilari]

Programming has improved my play a lot, mostly because I wasn't that good at chess to begin with. I estimate that I went up from 1500 ELO to about 1800 ELO, just be tuning my program and playing against it. Tactically I'm still very weak, but I can now win many endgames against my program.

[David Dahlem]

And by how much?

It has helped me a lot. I can hold my own against some rather strong chess programs. I can almost hold my own against free-Rybka (on dated hardware) and might even be able to win a draw odds match. I am tempted to return to over the board play.

Just curious if anyone else has experianced anything similar.

I have learned a lot, and i'm sure my playing strengh has improved tremendously. How much, i don't know, as i spend so much time programming, i don't have time to actually play much chess.

Regards
Dave

[Alessandro Scotti]

I am still the same old patzer.

[bob]

And by how much?

It has helped me a lot. I can hold my own against some rather strong chess programs. I can almost hold my own against free-Rybka (on dated hardware) and might even be able to win a draw odds match. I am tempted to return to over the board play.

Just curious if anyone else has experianced anything similar.

No
It did not change my own playing strength.

Uri

It certainly helped myself and Bert Gower. It probably depends on where you start out in terms of chess skill. An IM/GM player is probably not going to learn a thing by programming a computer to play chess, other than how hard it is to incorporate well-known chess knowledge into the thing. But someone on the other end of the scale could learn a lot when trying to improve an engine.

[Zach Wegner]

I'd say it has. I rarely play chess anymore, but programming and watching my program play makes me aware of strategical play and common tactics, as well as the common heuristics of evaluation.

[Ryan Benitez]

No, I it has hurt my play. I used to study chess now I program in my spare time.

[Ron Murawski]

Has programming chess improved my own play?

Yes, of course it has. I've progressed from totally inept to merely bad!

Seriously, programming has helped me understand positional factors that had escaped me previously. Ideas like forcing a swap of pieces on a square that causes the opponent to create a weakness, protecting against such an exchange, playing for good pawn formations, avoiding bad ones -- these are themes unknown to me before I started programming. I can sometimes glance at a position and know the strongest move. I could never do that way back when.

Ron

[Geolm]

IMHO, when programming a chess engine you try to make the computer understand the strategic view of the game so you can learn a lot . But on the other hand, I didn't improve at all on the tactic side when programming my engine since even the most basic alpha-beta algo is better than a human being.