The Chess Mind

Fans of his opening work and readers of Chess Today will be familiar with GM Mikhail Golubev. A recent and fairly extended interview with him can be found starting on this page, but here I'll draw your attention to something he said near the very end:

[Question:] I practically never saw nice websites for those who may wish to learn how to play chess from the complete zero level...

[Golubev's Reply:] Personally, I prefer, for example, to analyse some Fischer Attack game with a novelty around the move 20. I like to annotate games. Also to annotate them in the "Informator style", without any words - in such way I annotated games for Informator and New in Chess in the pre-computer era. With some ideas and, not too often, decent quality. But I am afraid that nowadays it is possible to teach [a] monkey how to push a few buttons inside the Rybka or Fritz interface, and the result will be of [...] better quality than these old notes of mine... I see that explaining computer’s variations becomes a larger and larger part of the annotator’s work. This trend is not new, but it started to really disturb me only recently, right now I am still not sure what to do about that. Nothing dramatic, in any case. [Emphasis added.]

Ah, those darned monkeys! In truth, the monkeys won't replace the GMs. They really just exist online in the form of 1300s berating the grandmasters they're watching for missing some "obvious" move found by their quad-cores running Rybka; those of us who want to learn will read what strong analysts have to say. We might check their analysis with the computer, but whatever we come to understand almost always results from the text, not the printout.

Here's an interesting email from "Seena":

Hello Dennis,

Just a curiosity about computer programming and chess softwares; there's no expert on either field around here, so I thought it's a good idea to ask you: How does a chess software decide that in a certain position, no furthur calculation is needed, and the evaluation of the position (which is, for a computer, based on materialistic considerations) is satisfactorily precise? Grandmasters do that with their so-called "positional judgement". They can "visualise" the forthcoming position and evaluate it due to some well-known considerations (pawn structure, good/bad bishops, "compensation" for material, and so on). Hence, even though their calculating ability is limited, they can play the game masterfully.

Computers, on the other hand, have tremendous calculating powers but don't have a clue about positional play. So how do they evaluate positions? They can't calculate variations all the way down to the last move, so they have to "cut" the variations at some point. In a game with limited time, how do they decide that they've gone deep enough and the evaluation of the position will not suddenly change , in the very next move to come?

I'm trying to develop a draghts-playing computer programme, so any information on this issue would be helpful.

Thanks in advance! Seena

I'm not a programming expert either, so I'll leave a fuller discussion to my more learned readers, who are also invited to point Seena to other resources that might prove helpful. One note, though: I wouldn't say they have no clue about positional play (at least if we ignore ontological issues and assume for the sake of discussion that they have a clue about anything). While they lack concepts and the ability to wield them as we do, programmers do build positional ideas into their algorithms. The trick is just to mathematize features like space, mobility, pawn structure, bishops vs. knights vis-a-vis the pawn structure, control of open files, diagonals, king safety, etc. We make the same sorts of judgments in a more informal and intuitive way when we say things like "White is better thanks to the bishop pair", or "Black's superior pawn structure outweighs the opponent's bishop pair." (Very) broadly speaking, the computer makes the same sorts of judgments we do.

As you may all remember, Shakhriyar Mamedyarov lost, and quickly, to Igor Kurnosov in a late round of the recently finished Aeroflot Open in Moscow. After the game - at the end of it, really - Mamedyarov, bothered by the conjunction of Kurnosov's leaving the board after practically every move and his coming back to make crushing moves. Mamedyarov resigned after Kurnosov's 21st move, filed a protest over his opponent's behavior, and then withdrew from the tournament.

As I argued here (and others, including Kurnosov (here), have similarly argued), Mamedyarov's case for his opponent's cheating isn't very impressive on the face of it. (That doesn't mean that Kurnosov's behavior couldn't have aroused suspicion, only that his performance in the game (a) fell short of a Rybka standard and (b) didn't require Rybka either, but was well within the competence of a 2600-level grandmaster.) Ideally, that would be the end of the cheating allegation, and then discussion can move on to appropriate measures that allow players to roam around and smoke their lungs out while ensuring that they can't readily cheat.

Unfortunately, this was not the end, and Mamedyarov has released another open letter. You can check the link just given, but here's the gist:

In round 2 vs. Onischuk, Kurnosov responded to a novelty by making 15 Rybka moves, winning beautifully.

In round 4, vs. Moiseenko, he again responds strongly to a novelty with 14 Rybka moves, but this time the opponent's position was too solid and the game was drawn.

In round 6, we have the Mamedyarov game, again featuring Kurnosov playing Rybka's moves.

In round 8, now under heavy scrutiny thanks to Mamedyarov's allegations, he played poorly and got crushed.

The conclusion of his argument is that "this is [a] clear indication that Kurnosov used a computer program, leaving the tournament hall practically after every move".

Well, no, this doesn't follow at all. As already mentioned, his argument concerning his own game is very poor, and the inference he drew about round 8 is really preposterous. Let's suppose for the sake of argument that Kurnosov is innocent. His name has been dragged through the mud in a very public way, and now he's supposed to play at full strength, with confidence and complete concentration? Not very likely. Not only will he be emotionally affected, but now he can't even engage in his usual smoking routine because now it will continue to raise the suspicion. So what does he do? If he goes to smoke, he has to worry what others will think, and if he doesn't, his mind won't work the way he expects it to. If anything, his lousy round eight performance might be counter-evidence: if Kurnosov was such a brazen cheater (cheating every single move in all [but only?] his Black games, then even if he couldn't use Rybka, he'd at least be strongly motivated to play well to keep up appearances. And he is a 2600, for goodness' sake!

I'm not impressed by the round 6 or round 8 parts of his case, but how about rounds 2 and 4? (And why not rounds 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9?) First of all, Mamedyarov's claim that Kurnosov always went with Rybka's first choice is simply wrong, or at least I wasn't able to reproduce Mamedyarov's results. Further, many of the moves in question were fairly obvious. Some were components of a straightforward plan, some moves were obvious (e.g. recaptures) and some were elements in a tactical sequence. Out of the 29 post-novelty moves in the two games, only one - 21...Qf5 in the round 2 game - strikes me as even a candidate.

I can understand Mamedyarov's frustration in the situation, and I also get the tendency to dig in and retrench when criticized, as has happened since his initial salvo. But I don't find his argument any more plausible this time around, and I hope he'll drop the accusations (at least in the absence of far more impressive evidence than he has offered so far) as soon as possible.

I've already given and annotated Mamedyarov-Kurnosov; here are the three further games Mamedyarov refers to.

HT: Harris Nizel