Enter Your Reply The Comment You're Replying To M Winther wrote on Wed, Apr 22, 2009 06:01 AM UTC:I think I do understand how chess engines work. It's obvious that Larry better understands what I'm talking about. I gave the example of the rook maneuvre to the king side, in front of the friendly pawn chain. There is no way that any program, not even Rybka, can calculate any gain from that maneuvre. He cannot even back up the attack with another piece. So, within the horizon, it's a useless move. Nevertheless, he just positions it there and hopes that it can be of good use in the future. But in doing this he weakens the first rank, etc. But it doesn't matter that it's a bad plan. If the human doesn't play well then the computer can have good use of the rook position. A human player must take measures against it and try to find a refutation. This is the kind of chess that humans like to play, i.e. a game which isn't perfect, instead it is full of, perhaps, silly and refutable plans. But this allows room for creativity. Look at the games of Adolf Anderssen, for instance. Sometimes unscientific creative chess is called 'café chess'. It builds on the fact that a brutal pawn storm, for instance, can succeed although the positional criteria are unfavourable. After all, chessplayers do succeed in many games with bad plans and bad openings. It is because it's initiative and creativity that counts. Humans don't like the perfect and the clinically sterile. They like oil paintings of Henri Matisse and William Turner. They don't appreciate perfectly realistic sterile computer reproductions of reality. Such creations are dead. And so is every chessgame played by today's advanced computer programs. /Mats PS. How about the Vicuna and the Llama then?DS. Edit Form You may not post a new comment, because ItemID MatsNewPieces does not match any item.