Shelby Lyman on Chess: Creative and Stronger
Column c2161 for release March 3
Monday, March 17, 2014
We are increasingly learning of the brain’s flexibility, for better or worse. My impression is that fewer analysts think IQs are constants. Poor environments — solitary confinement is an extreme example — may impinge negatively and permanently on mental function while enhanced circumstances have the opposite effect.
Chess intelligence, like sporting intelligence in general, seems to change with the succession of generations.
Computers, for example, broaden our perception of what is possible on the chessboard. Chess-playing machines “see” beyond the simpler concepts or heuristics humans have developed to find the best moves.
Curiously, these impersonal number crunchers are making us tougher and better fighters.
The American grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura, one of the top five players in the world, offers a summary of the contemporary competitive chess experience: “We (young players) are expecting them (our opponents) to find the best moves. … You know that people keep finding resources and not just lose the game. That’s the real difference now … because the computer taught us this.”
He explains: “If people are defending so incredibly well all the time, you have to be that much more creative and that much stronger in order to win.”
Source: http://www.vnews.com
Yes, I’d say that it’s not as obvious when a position is lost as it seemed a few decades ago: something can often be done to save a classically ‘lost’ position.
I’d like to be given some indication of what, other than sheer brute force calculation, we can learn from computers. Have new principles been discovered by computers that people can take on board?