Chess is a game of position. The position of your pieces in relation to your opponent’s pieces is crucial. You constantly have to evaluate these positions and set up goals and long term tactics.
You have to be aware of the value of the pieces on the board, the control of key squares, the safety of the king and how the pawns are structured. When you make a move you always have to consider all the possible moves that your opponent might make.
An easy way to evaluate the game in a given moment is by calculating the total value of all the pieces left on the board. These values vary with position, but in the most basic calculations a pawn is given one point, bishops and knights three points each, rooks five points and queens nine points. The points change depending of the position of a particular piece and how the pieces are coordinated. This means that an advanced pawn is worth more than one that’s still in the starting square and that a cornered bishop is worth less than out in the open. The importance of position is something chess has in common with both backgammon and most games for poker. Another similarity is the importance of thinking ahead.
The side controlling most space on the board usually has an advantage in chess. The more space, the more options to exploit. What you want to do is to have control of the center of the board. An important factor here is the pawn structure. The pawns are the least valuable and least mobile pieces in the game and the pawn structure is relatively static. How the pawns are structured largely determines the strength of your position – weaknesses in the pawn structure is usually very hard or even impossible to repair.
Source: http://transition.turbulence.org
Special thanks to Jon Buckley for sending this in.
Nice symbols.
Who invented them?
Wonderful site!
Now you are able to see how you think at:
http://transition.turbulence.org/spotlight/thinking/chess.html
I was going to suggest linking directly to the program to play:
http://transition.turbulence.org/spotlight/thinking/chess.html
or at least the home page:
http://transition.turbulence.org/spotlight/thinking/index.html
which outlines the purpose the Thinking Machine was created could be helpful.
Thinking Machine 4 explores the invisible, elusive nature of thought. Play chess against a transparent intelligence, its evolving thought process visible on the board before you.
The artwork is an artificial intelligence program, ready to play chess with the viewer. If the viewer confronts the program, the computer’s thought process is sketched on screen as it plays. A map is created from the traces of literally thousands of possible futures as the program tries to decide its best move. Those traces become a key to the invisible lines of force in the game as well as a window into the spirit of a thinking machine.
Best!
Jon
Thank you Jon.
You are the only one admitting
that machines can be helpful in
our thinking on this blog.
(although i don’t think that the beautiful diagrammes helps me)
As for pure thought, i don’t think that neither GOD or machine can really help us humans.
But may help us to see wider even
in the simple 10^120 game of chess.