Friday, December 25, 2009

The battle of the cues.























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I didn't exactly wanted to show the world how I blundered. I gave this example in my previous post in order to investigate how the mechanism of the choice of moves works. I thought this was a clearcut example. But the blunder element turned out to be distractive.

I tend to overfocus somewhat when thinking about something. Such focussing seems to work by means of suppressing the signals that could interrupt. Or by raising the threshold.

Nevertheless, certain signals manage to exceed the threshold and certain do not. This determines which move we chose. Guidance of focus seems to manipulate these signals or thresholds. Whether this guidance is conscious or not. This guidance seems to be driven by habits when its not conscious.

Besides that, those patterns that are stored with strong cues for retrieval seem to produce stronger signals.

Forgetfulnes dampens the signals overtime. Especially those that are acquired on automatic pilot.

I estimate the amount of patterns you need to know to play chess well somewhere between 100 and 400 patterns. This amount is so little that it means that on the highest level of chessplay the difference cannot be made by knowing more patterns. Hence other factors must be decisive.

If you look at a position, some patterns seem to scream "see me!" while others do not. Which patterns manage to scream louder than the threshold are highly personal and depend on the make up of the cues.

Take for instance the following example: we have a few older members of the club who play chess for 40 years or so. One of them is rated about 1500. He gives lessons to the youth. He tells them exactly how to move the pieces in the opening. Develope well etcetera. The strange thing is that when he plays himself, he doesn't obey these rules at all. He has forgotten everything.

Now what kind of cue is that? Which let him retrieve certain knowledge from memory when giving lessons while leaving him on his own when playing. There seem to be a lot of circumstancial factors.

4 comments:

  1. "One of them is rated about 1500. He gives lessons to the youth. He tells them exactly how to move the pieces in the opening. Develope well etcetera. The strange thing is that when he plays himself, he doesn't obey these rules at all. He has forgotten everything."

    It's more likely that he hasn't actually forgotten them, he may even think that he's following them. When we do something for a long time, we develop automated ways of doing things. When we explain something to another person we break it down to what we believe to be the building blocks of that automated process. That's a big difference.
    It's possible that the building blocks are different from what we thought them to be. It's also possible and even likely (otherwise we wouldn't and couldn't do it in an automated fashion) that we have found shortcuts and also introduced different rules at different levels of abstraction from other fields, both consciously and subconsciously.

    In other words, I think he has developed a wrong "technique". It's very difficult to break free from this even if you try, because it feels to yourself as if you had optimized and condensed the right process when in fact you have done this for some process which has only some similarities to the right process and may even be counterproductive. But this is invisible to you or else you would have come up with a better process, even if your understanding of what the correct building blocks are may have increased in the mean time and you may have become a perfect teacher. It has very little actual influence on what you're doing in the game, unless you open up the package that is your technique. This is very difficult to do if you have played chess for a very long time.

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  2. Your example, I think, points out what de la Maza was talking about when he wrote that there is a gap between chess knowledge and chess skill. I'd be very curious to find out your example's rating history. From similar examples that I have met, these types don't usually peak above the 1700s (USCF).

    Another explanation may be that your example learned, at some level that effects his OTB play, that the general "Reinfeld rules" don't always apply, so why try to apply them himself? I recommend the "No rules" chapter from Aagard's Excelling at Chess for those who haven't read it. I think Aagard scratches the surface, arguing in favor of the rules. I think we have to delve a little deeper and ask 'how are we to apply the rules?'

    My view is that the rules can sometimes help you find the correct move, but the rules can never definitively tell you if a move is correct -- for that you need calculation and analysis.

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  3. Both of you make good points. Maybe I can distill a post out of them.

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  4. "The strange thing is that when he plays himself, he doesn't obey these rules at all. He has forgotten everything."

    Knowing something is one thing, applying what you know is another. One may not mix those things up as if its one.

    I have seen this by many chess players, myself included. One knows much about chess. Can instantly tell you some rules on how to play a certain position when you set it up on the board.

    But when playing themselfs they have problems in the applying section. They dont know when (and how) to apply the rules they have stored in their brain.

    Because playing its different then one sets up a training example. Since the training example is worked out into the little details. While when playing oneself one has to consider an opponent who doesn't play like in the training example.

    This makes the player who knows all in the training example go bogus when playing himself. He cannot decide which rules to follow anymore and eventually goes wrong because he applied the wrong rule or has a position where one just has to go against all rules to find the correct move.

    Like i said before in other comments on other blogs, rules are guidlines, not laws. Its up to yourself to find out when to follow then and when to shove them aside. That is what i like about chess.

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