Monday, February 11, 2008

Tussenrapport

















Please all give a warm welcome to Phaedrus. He is not exactly going to be a Knight, but he acted as a soundboard for me the past weeks. The advantage is that we can speak in Dutch. I can express more subtleties in my native tongue. Take for instance the title of this post. Even after consulting a dictionary I didn't find a satisfying translation of the word. Other words and expressions like ijzerenheinig and "laten we elkaar geen mietje noemen" are not translatable either. Or even worse, their meaning is changed during translation.

The overhaul of my ideas the past weaks seems to boil down to the hypothesis that the difference is made during the scanprocess in the first minute or so. In order to optimize this scanprocess extended assistance from complex motorskills is needed. To test this hypothesis we are designing exercises to train the motorskills needed. The so called extended scandrills. I tried this road in the past, but due to lack of consistency of ideas and unsufficient overview over the matter that project failed. But now we are in a much better shape.
I'm trying to program a few drills with the aid of Zillion of Games, which seems to be well suited for the task.

I'll keep you informed about the progress.

2 comments:

  1. hello tempo. question: its unclear to me what zillions of games does, at least in the chess sphere, or how this is different than any other chess viewer? mind elaborating?

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  2. DK,
    You can play about 1500 different boardgames with it. Among them 400+ different versions of chess. You play it against the computer which uses an AI-based engine to play against you.
    Besides that it is relative easy (allthough not trivial) to program new boardgames yourself with this very powerfull toolkit. Provided you have some computerprogramming skills in any language.
    It is particularly easy to adapt an existing game to your own needs.

    You basically define the rules of a game in a LISP-like scripting language.

    At the moment I'm adapting the chessprogram with a third player (human) that has to move after each computer move. This third player has quite different goals than White and Black. The third player must point out by selection all weaknesses in the position of the computer.

    For instance you play White, the computer plays Black, then you play as the third player and pinpoint all weaknesses, then you play normal as White again. The third player has further no impact on the game at all, but it allows you to exercise the scan for weaknesses.

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