Thursday, November 01, 2007

Alltime high
























Amateurs do it the difficult way.


My new rating has just been published: 1765, a new alltime high!

I had written a long comment on Blue Devil's comments on my previous post when the internet connection failed and sent it into bloglivian. So I decided to make a post of it. Text of Blue is italic.

If it works, then you still have to check to make sure there aren't in-between moves, refusal to capture (stopping the sequence short), etc..

I'm trying to unify my Law of conservation of Threats with this beancounting. This should take care of in-between moves. I suggest you have a look at it too.

The refusal to capture is taken care of by my formula in an implicit way. If my fomula gives you the green light you will gain wood. No matter if he refuses to take back. I think you will have no problems to know when to stop taking back yourself.

My coach just saw the results of counting problems without actually doing the bean counting.
That is another matter. I expect that when we become seasoned beancounters we will start to emulate the same behaviour. It all starts with the realization that it is simple.

I think this gives us an idea about the kind of character you must have for being a grandmaster. Always be prepared to take an empyrical law for granted. Not worrying about the details and if it is actually true. The past nine years I have tortured my short term memory with visualisation of trade sequences since my intuition told me that this empyrical law of beancounting wasn't so simple below the surface. Lacking the superficiality you need to be a grandmaster. I bet they use tons of unchecked empyrical guidelines for themselves, thus neglecting almost every skill what is needed to be a real amateur. Maybe I must make empyricism my inner god in stead of logic. DK would love that.

If we're gonna just be pragmatic, then Heisman is probably sufficient.

I found in Heisman's articles no solution for stopping the sequence short other than the warning "beware!".

15 comments:

  1. Congrats for your rating high, Tempo. I am eager to hear how your formula (once finished) is working in practical games over the board, and if it turns out to be more simple than just looking at capture sequences until a quiet position and then count wood lost for both sides and decide who has got a profit and how much.

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  2. Congratulations! Looking forward to see you breaking into the 1800's.

    Blue will arrive in a skirt and pom-poms shortly...

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  3. Congratulations you kick ass. In USCF terms, that's probably close to 1900. Awesome.

    OK, on to beancounting. Just enclose the entirety of what follows in fluffy pink pillows to lighten my language, as to express myself clearly I perhaps come off a bit curt.

    You said:
    "The refusal to capture is taken care of by my formula in an implicit way. If my fomula gives you the green light you will gain wood. No matter if he refuses to take back."

    If it is implicit, I don't see it. Cumsum also takes care of it but more explicitly and it's simpler.

    "I think you will have no problems to know when to stop taking back yourself."

    This sounds a lot like your description of Heisman:
    "I found in Heisman's articles no solution for stopping the sequence short other than the warning 'beware!'."

    Tempo it seems you have complicated this way too much. If you want formal, cumsum is simple and works. If you complain that it is too formal, that you want pragmatic, then Heisman or Wolff seem a great resource and why even bother with this pseudo-formalism? Those are the two horns of your dilemma.

    But if you find your method helpful then I can't say anything bad about it as something for you to use personally. I personally find it complicated and confusing. Though in your defense you often start out that way, and then slowly circle around to a simpler formulation.

    I agree that the immediate perception of the outcome of a sequence of trades in the IM is a different thing altogether than what you're talking about. That was my point. Just as a thought process in chess is the training wheels for thinking during games, so the beancounting methods are training wheels for recognizing outcomes of sequences of exchanges. This isn't a criticism at all: until we can do something well without thinking about it, it helps to think about how to do it well!

    I have read that conservation of threats post a few times and don't really understand it. I have seen you refer to it many times in the past so know it must have something important in it.

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  4. Blue,
    I don't understand your cumsum method.

    My method in short:
    Sum the value of the attackers. From as much attackers as there are defenders.
    Sum the value of the defenders. From as much defenders as there are attackers.
    If the value of the defenders execeeds the value of the attackers then you will gain wood.
    But not more than the value of the victim (due to the fact that the opponent stops retaking when you threaten to gain more than the value of the victim)

    I cannot see why you call that complicated.

    I'm preparing a post on threats.

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  5. How your own stops are guided:
    If your attacker has less value than the victim you can stop retaking after the first capure. Or not.

    Not really exciting.

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  6. Blue, I guess that cumsum is cumulative sum and means counting the material only at the end of the whole sequence of moves (requires marking them as captured in the short-time memory) and not after every move. Right? I took long before I learnt this trick and it improved my handling of complicated captures a lot.

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  7. Your attempts at clarification have not helped me. For instance:
    "Sum the value of the attackers. From as much attackers as there are defenders."

    What does the second sentence mean? Each of your formulations has had sentences like that which I don't understand. Multiple times. It is not as simple as you think.

    Ultimately you are just adding up the values of pieces involved in the exchanges and comparing the values. That's all counting is.
    Cumsum is just the literal mathematical expression of this (compare the cumulative sum of material exchanged during the course of the swapping of wood). I'll express it more later perhaps depending on how dead this horse feels.

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  8. Christian: Not quite. See comments to previous post on this where I discuss it in detail. Maybe I'll make my own post.

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  9. Blue.
    Say, you have 5 attackers and 2 defenders. You want to know the sum value of the attackers. It is of no use to know the sumtotal of the value of all 5 attackers. For the simple reason that you don't need all 5 attackers in the trade sequence. You need only to know the value of the first 2 attackers. This is what "From as much attackers as there are defenders" means.

    You said:
    It is not as simple as you think.


    And:
    Tempo it seems you have complicated this way too much.

    Am I making it too complex or am I making it too simple? Please choose:)

    If you think my formula is too simple, please give me a board position where my formula doesn't work.

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  10. Tempo: you are right I contradicted myself. I meant your attempts at reformulation use language I don't understand, which you think is simple but is not, but that ultimately this should be a very simple problem.

    I gave a counterexample in the previous post as your formula didn't address when someone stops in the middle of the exchanges.

    So you added "If your attacker has less value than the victim you can stop retaking after the first capure. Or not."

    Huh? So either stop or don't stop. That's not helpful.

    While you seem to understand what is implicit in your formula, and when certain exceptions need to be considered, I don't, so I formulated it in a completely general way that I understand and which would always yield the right answer.

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  11. Blue,
    it's true, my method supposes the use of common sense, which is not necessary for your method.

    Read for instance the following sentence with your common sense ON:

    "If your attacker has less value than the victim you can stop retaking after the first capure. Or not."

    That should read as follows: If you have just won his queen with your knight it problably doesn't matter how you continue since he will resign anyway.

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  12. Tempo: LOL. But what about premature stopping from the opponent? What about pawns and queens? I don't see why you are attached to this formula so much when it gives wrong answers. My generalization gives the right answers. That is the best reason to prefer it. I am thinking too much like a mathematician maybe and not enough like a chess player, so we are focusing on different aspects.

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  13. Between the boundaries of common sense it gives the right answers via a simple method. Why shutting off your common sense and create a more complicated method to replace it?

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  14. Mine is certainly not something that would be useful in practice. At least not that I can see yet. My hope is that starting with the full complicated model there are motivated simplifications that will help in real situations, consequences of the model when you feed in certain special cases that happen a lot in practice. This is what often happens in neuroscience modelling: start with a really complicated, but accurate model, and then use rational procedures to simplify down so it is easier to work with but still contains the essence.

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  15. Voila,
    there you find my motive for this formulation. My main demand was that it had to be simply applicable in practice.

    Maybe there will come a day you will learn to appreciate how elegant I solved this problem:) By only adding rules and exceptions that joins seamless with what you would do based on common sense.

    I admit that a translation of my formula in better english is needed. Since things are still under construction that is not where my priority lies.

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