Fundamentals Of Chess Quotes

The only way to get smarter is by playing a smarter opponent.

One must attempt to increase whatever weakness there may be in the opponent’s position; or, if there is none, one or more must be created.

All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elefant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains makkeable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of the rules. Generally, all the best mechanistic games - those which can be played in any sense "perfectly", such as a grid, Prallian scope, 'nkraytle, chess, Farnic dimensions - can be traced to civilisations lacking a realistic view of the universe (let alone the reality). They are also, I might add, invariably pre-machine-sentience societies. The very first-rank games acknowledge the element of chance, even if they rightly restrict raw luck. To attempt to construct a game on any other lines, no matter how complicated and subtle the rules are, and regardless of the scale and differentiation of the playing volume and the variety of the powers and attibutes of the pieces, is inevitably to schackle oneself to a conspectus which is not merely socially but techno-philosophically lagging several ages behind our own. As a historical exercise it might have some value, As a work of the intellect, it's just a waste of time. If you want to make something old-fashioned, why not build a wooden sailing boat, or a steam engine? They're just as complicated and demanding as a mechanistic game, and you'll keep fit at the same time.

Universality is the distinguishing mark of genius. There is no such thing as a special genius, a genius for mathematics, or for music, or even for chess, but only a universal genius. … The theory of special genius, according to which for instance, it is supposed that a musical genius should be a fool at other subjects, confuses genius with talent. … There are many kinds of talent, but only one kind of genius, and that is able to choose any kind of talent and master it.

We can imagine that this complicated array of moving things which constitutes “the world” is something like a great chess game being played by the gods, and we are observers of the game. We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics. Even if we know every rule, however . . . what we really can explain in terms of those rules is very limited, because almost all situations are so enormously complicated that we cannot follow the plays of the game using the rules, much less tell what is going to happen next. We must, therefore, limit ourselves to the more basic question of the rules of the game. If we know the rules, we consider that we “understand” the world.

What do we mean by “understanding” something? We can imagine that this complicated array of moving things which constitutes “the world” is something like a great chess game being played by the gods, and we are observers of the game. We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics. Even if we knew every rule, however, we might not be able to understand why a particular move is made in the game, merely because it is too complicated and our minds are limited.

But now Holland was beginning to realize just how prescient Samuel's focus on games had really been. This game analogy seemed to be true of any adaptive system. In economics the payoff is in money, in politics the payoff is in votes, and on and on. At some level, all these adaptive systems are fundamentally the same. And that meant, in turn, that all of them are fundamentally like checkers or chess: the space of possibilities is vast beyond imagining. An agent can learn to play the game better-that's what adaptation is, after all. But it has just about as much chance of finding the optimum, stable equilibrium point of the game as you or I have of solving chess.

„What do we mean by “understanding” something? We can imagine that this complicated array of moving things which constitutes “the world” is something like a great chess game being played by the gods, and we are observers of the game. We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics. Even if we knew every rule, however, we might not be able to understand why a particular move is made in the game, merely because it is too complicated and our minds are limited. If you play chess you must know that it is easy to learn all the rules, and yet it is often very hard to select the best move or to understand why a player moves as he does. So it is in nature, only much more so.

There has been an enduring misunderstanding that needs to be cleared up. Turing’s core message was never “If a machine can imitate a man, the machine must be intelligent.” Rather, it was “Inability to imitate does not rule out intelligence.” In his classic essay on the Turing test, Turing encouraged his readers to take a broader perspective on intelligence and conceive of it more universally and indeed more ethically. He was concerned with the possibility of unusual forms of intelligence, our inability to recognize those intelligences, and the limitations of the concept of indistinguishability as a standard for defining what is intelligence and what is not. In section two of the paper, Turing asks directly whether imitation should be the standard of intelligence. He considers whether a man can imitate a machine rather than vice versa. Of course the answer is no, especially in matters of arithmetic, yet obviously a man thinks and can think computationally (in terms of chess problems, for example). We are warned that imitation cannot be the fundamental standard or marker of intelligence. Reflecting on Turing’s life can change one’s perspective on what the Turing test really means. Turing was gay. He was persecuted for this difference in a manner that included chemical castration and led to his suicide. In the mainstream British society of that time, he proved unable to consistently “pass” for straight. Interestingly, the second paragraph of Turing’s famous paper starts with the question of whether a male or female can pass for a member of the other gender in a typed conversation. The notion of “passing” was of direct personal concern to Turing and in more personal settings Turing probably did not view “passing” as synonymous with actually being a particular way.

If subjective confidence is not to be trusted, how can we evaluate the probable validity of an intuitive judgment? When do judgments reflect true expertise? When do they display an illusion of validity? The answer comes from the two basic conditions for acquiring a skill: an environment that is sufficiently regular to be predictable an opportunity to learn these regularities through prolonged practice When both these conditions are satisfied, intuitions are likely to be skilled. Chess is an extreme example of a regular environment, but bridge and poker also provide robust statistical regularities that can support skill. Physicians, nurses, athletes, and firefighters also face complex but fundamentally orderly situations. The accurate intuitions that Gary Klein has described are due to highly valid cues that the expert’s System 1 has learned to use, even if System 2 has not learned to name them. In contrast, stock pickers and political scientists who make long-term forecasts operate in a zero-validity environment. Their failures reflect the basic unpredictability of the events that they try to forecast.

Our fundamental impulses are neither good nor bad: they are ethically neutral. Education should aim at making them take forms that are good. The old method, still beloved by Christians, was to thwart instinct; the new method is to train it. Take love of power: it is useless to preach Christian humility, which merely makes the impulse take hypocritical forms. What you have to do is to provide beneficent outlets for it. The original native impulse can be satisfied in a thousand ways—oppression, politics, business, art, science, all satisfy it when successfully practised. A man will choose the outlet for his love of power that corresponds with his skill; according to the type of skill given him in youth, he will choose one occupation or another. The purpose of our public schools is to teach the technique of oppression and no other; consequently they produce men who take up the white man’s burden. But if these men could do science, many of them might prefer it. Of two activities which a man has mastered, he will generally prefer the more difficult: no chess-player will play draughts. In this way, skill may be made to minister to virtue.

Harris: Let’s talk about how the AI future might look. It seems to me there are three paths it could take. First, we could remain fundamentally in charge: that is, we could solve the value-alignment problem, or we could successfully contain this god in a box. Second, we could merge with the new technology in some way—this is the cyborg option. Or third, we could be totally usurped by our robot overlords. It strikes me that the second outcome, the cyborg option, is inherently unstable. This is something I’ve talked to Garry Kasparov about. He’s a big fan of the cyborg phenomenon in chess. The day came when the best computer in the world was better than the best human—that is, Garry. But now the best chess player in the world is neither a computer nor a human, but a human/computer team called a cyborg, and Garry seemed to think that that would continue for quite some time. Tegmark: It won’t. Harris: It seems rather obvious that it won’t. And once it doesn’t, that option will be canceled just as emphatically as human dominance in chess has been canceled. And it seems to me that will be true for every such merger. As the machines get better, keeping the ape in the loop will just be adding noise to the system.

Using magnetoencephalography, a technique that measures the weak magnetic fields given off by a thinking brain, researchers have found that higher-rated chess players are more likely to engage the frontal and parietal cortices of the brain when they look at the board, which suggests that they are recalling information from long-term memory. Lower-ranked players are more likely to engage the medial temporal lobes, which suggests that they are encoding information. The experts are interpreting the present board in terms of their massive knowledge of past ones. The lower ranked players are seeing the board as something new...[de Groot] argued that expertise in the field of shoemaking, painting, building, or confectionary, is the result of the same accumulation of experiential linkings. According to Erikson, what we call expertise is really just vast amounts of knowledge, pattern-based retrieval, and planning mechanisms acquired over many years of experience in the associated domain. In other words, a great memory isn't just a byproduct of expertise; it is the essence of expertise. Whether we realize it or not, we are all like those chess masters and chicken sexers- interpreting the present in light of what we've learned in the past and letting our previous experiences shape not only how we perceive our world, but also the moves we end up making in it... Our memories are always with us, shaping and being shaped by the information flowing through our senses in a continuous feedback loop. Everything we see, hear, and smell is inflected by all the things we've seen, heard, and smelled in the past...Who we are and what we do is fundamentally a function of what we remember.

Our mathematics is a combination of invention and discoveries. The axioms of Euclidean geometry as a concept were an invention, just as the rules of chess were an invention. The axioms were also supplemented by a variety of invented concepts, such as triangles, parallelograms, ellipses, the golden ratio, and so on. The theorems of Euclidean geometry, on the other hand, were by and large discoveries; they were the paths linking the different concepts. In some cases, the proofs generated the theorems-mathematicians examined what they could prove and from that they deduced the theorems. In others, as described by Archimedes in The Method, they first found the answer to a particular question they were interested in, and then they worked out the proof. Typically, the concepts were inventions. Prime numbers as a concept were an invention, but all the theorems about prime numbers were discoveries. The mathematicians of ancient Babylon, Egypt, and China never invented the concept of prime numbers, in spite of their advanced mathematics. Could we say instead that they just did not "discover" prime numbers? Not any more than we could say that the United Kingdom did not "discover" a single, codified, documentary constitution. Just as a country can survive without a constitution, elaborate mathematics could develop without the concept of prime numbers. And it did! Do we know why the Greeks invented such concepts as the axioms and prime numbers? We cannot be sure, but we could guess that this was part of their relentless efforts to investigate the most fundamental constituents of the universe. Prime numbers were the basic building blocks of matter. Similarly, the axioms were the fountain from which all geometrical truths were supposed to flow. The dodecahedron represented the entire cosmos and the golden ratio was the concept that brought that symbol into existence.

Similarly, the brains of mice that have learned many tasks are slightly different from the brains of other mice that have not learned these tasks. It is not so much that the number of neurons has changed, but rather that the nature of the neural connections has been altered by the learning process. In other words, learning actually changes the structure of the brain. This raises the old adage “practice makes perfect.” Canadian psychologist Dr. Donald Hebb discovered an important fact about the wiring of the brain: the more we exercise certain skills, the more certain pathways in our brains become reinforced, so the task becomes easier. Unlike a digital computer, which is just as dumb today as it was yesterday, the brain is a learning machine with the ability to rewire its neural pathways every time it learns something. This is a fundamental difference between a digital computer and the brain. This lesson applies not only to London taxicab drivers, but also to accomplished concert musicians as well. According to psychologist Dr. K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues, who studied master violinists at Berlin’s elite Academy of Music, top concert violinists could easily rack up ten thousand hours of grueling practice by the time they were twenty years old, practicing more than thirty hours per week. By contrast, he found that students who were merely exceptional studied only eight thousand hours or fewer, and future music teachers practiced only a total of four thousand hours. Neurologist Daniel Levitin says, “The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert—in anything.… In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again.” Malcolm Gladwell, writing in the book Outliers, calls this the “10,000-hour rule.

All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of the rules. Generally, all the best mechanistic games—those which can be played in any sense ‘perfectly,’ such as grid, Prallian scope, ’nkraytle, chess, Farnic dimensions—can be traced to civilizations lacking a relativistic view of the universe (let alone the reality). They are also, I might add, invariably pre-machine-sentience societies.

And then I realised you can’t even have anarchy without rules. You can’t have a glass of wine without the glass. You can’t play chess without a board that has sixty-four squares. Some things are fundamental.

Some AI proponents might argue that in order for an AI system to gain any 'actual' understanding, it would need to be programmed in a way that involves bottom-up procedures in a much more basic way than is usual for chess-playing computers. Accordingly, its 'understandings' would develop gradually by its building up a wealth of 'experience', rather than having specific top-down algorithmic rules built into it. Top-down rules that are simple enough for us to appreciate easily could not, by themselves, provide a computational basis for actual understanding-for we can use our very understandings of these rules to realize their fundamental limitations.

As I read it I was thinking of the phenomenon of endgame. Although the concept can apply to many games, it is most common in chess, which is where I study the subject exhaustively. As the middle game draws to a close and the endgame approaches, a fundamental change occurs in the players’ attitudes, and, I swear, a macabre eeriness descends over the board. The surviving pieces take on different roles and importance. For instance, pawns become vital; not only can they move to the opponent’s first line and become queens but they provide important defensive barriers that limit the other player’s moves. Similarly the king spends most of the game in hiding, protected by his minions. But in endgame, he often must go on the offensive himself. Each

Here lies the characteristic paradox of good and evil: for action, in terms of practical effects, is superior to inaction, and the congenitally active evil an can frequently win advantage over the sometimes inactive good. Indeed, the fundamentally stable and restful spirit of goodness is a lure to evil inspirations, an encouragement to villains who are aware that, in the moral and political chess game, they have the white pieces and the first move.

There is profound meaning in the game of chess. The board itself is life and death, painted as such in black and white. The pieces are those that make a life fundamentally healthy. The pawns are attributes we gather with nourishment and significance. The knight is our ability to be mobile and travel in whatever form it takes. The rook or castle is a place we can call home and protect ourselves from the elements. The bishop is that of our community and our belonging. The king is our mortal body; without it, we can no longer play the game. The queen is the spirit of the body - what drives our imagination, urges, a life force. A captured queen removes energy from the game, and the player may become complacent. A crowning reminder of the game is that the spirit can be possessed again through our attributes.

Metaphors matter because they give conceptual shape to life, and we live within the dimensions of those shapes as if they were real. The cognitive scientists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson suggest: ‘Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.’ Life really is ‘a journey’, ‘big’ things really are significant, sophisticated ideas really are ‘deep’. Such conceptual shapes are real because we make them so. It helps to wake up to the fact that we are to some extent free to create new conceptual shapes, indeed that this may offer our only hope for a genuinely new world.

With patience and resources,” Mr. A would come to say often on his weekly calls with Peter, “we can do almost anything.” Tolstoy had a motto for Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov in War and Peace—“ Patience and Time.” “There is nothing stronger than those two,” he said, “. . . they will do it all.” In 1812 and in real life, Kutuzov gave Napoleon an abject lesson in the truth of that during a long Russian winter. The target, Nick Denton, is not a patient man. Most entrepreneurs aren’t. Most powerful people are not. One of his editors would say of Denton’s approach to stories, “Nick is very much of the mind that you do it now. And the emphasis is to get it out there and be correct as you can, but don’t let that stand in the way of getting the story out there.” Editorially, Nick Denton wanted to be first—which is a form of power in itself. But this isn’t how Thiel thinks. He would say his favorite chess player was José Raúl Capablanca, and remind himself of the man’s famous dictum: To begin you must study the end. You don’t want to be the first to act, you want to be the last man standing. History is littered with examples of those who acted rashly in pursuit of their goals, who plunged ahead without much in the way of a plan, and suffered as a result. One could argue that the bigger of Nixon’s two blunders wasn’t his attacks on the Democratic Party but the decision to go after Katharine Graham and the media, and yet both decisions were the product of a fundamental lack of patience and discipline. Or consider the late head of Fox News, Roger Ailes, who responded to a series of Gawker articles and attacks by allegedly hiring private detectives to follow the reporters around. Not only did he find nothing of practical value, but these heavy-handed tactics came back to embarrass and discredit him at his most vulnerable moment. In fact, two weeks after the news of this disturbing conspiracy broke, he would be dead. How ought one do it then?

Chess simulates a truth that we tend to suppress, namely that life is hazardous and we are always at risk. The game is fun but is not entirely innocent fun which is why we tend to reach for chess metaphors in tense situations with high stakes. Love for instance, is a tense situation with high stakes. Or at least it can be. Historically various works of art and literature associate chess with courtly love and by extension with love in general. However chess is a metaphor for love not because the players long for each another or want to knock down the pieces and make out on the board - though there is of course a time and place for that. The link between chess and love is much more oblique. The spirit of eros permeates the game in the forms of suffering and passion that characterise unrequited and unconsummated romantic love ... And shared attention of any process of co creation is a rare and profoundly intimate process. In fact the intimacy we feel through shared attention may be an unconscious emotional driver that keeps us coming back to the game. Moreover, chess thinking in some ways entails compassion because it is about cultivating order through chaos through caring about the felt significance of particular pieces and squares and ideas and outcomes … Caring is a fundamental feature of being in the world … Controlling for all other variables, those given a potted plant to look after consistently lived longer than those who were not.

The purpose of studying opening theory should not be accumulating any set amount of knowledge, but being content with whatever knowledge one has.