Aura vision

Aox has, a bit by accident I presume, developed a nifty program to train aura vision: mate in 1 - hard.
As usually I'm overly critical about everything and take nothing for granted. That makes me quite annoying, not in the least place for myself. But there is nothing mean, or personal, or stubborn or nagging meant. I just doubt everything, that's a habit I had all my life. Twelve years of fruitless chess improvement has made me an expert in being wrong. Kinda. So I hope you will bear with me.

A bit about automatic training.
Although this post is about aura vision, I can't resist to talk about speed.
In the past we talked a lot about speed and automatic training. I came to the conclusion that training has to be conscious to yield results. There remained one clear exception though that contradicted this statement. I became better at playing Troyis by just playing it without any thinking whatsoever. In fact that even made me perform like a 2600 rated grandmaster at this exercise. The skills acquired by Troyis transferred to the chess board.

So I must admit that there are areas where unconscious automatic training will yield results. But you have to be careful. In the first week you make the biggest progress. After that you will plateau soon. But hey, who cares when you are already performing like a grandmaster?

I think that when you stall at mate in one, you already might have a very reasonable level of performance. It doesn't make much sense to try to improve beyond that level.

With Troyis you soon reach a plateau beyond which further improvement is next to impossible. There is a method though. When you give up automatic training, and try to figure out a strategy consciously. You can figure out a few rules, and integrate that into your play. The same is true for mate in one.

Well this are just a few thoughts to hopefully give you new ideas. If not, consider it not written.

Aura vision.
Let's talk about aura vision.

White to mate in 1 (hard)

The aura that radiates from the white pieces forms a cage around the black king. I take my time to visualize-II that cage. Since visualizing-II is the only way I know to communicate with my unconscious mind. After five days of training, it is hard to say if it works. It feels like it does, but usually this period of training is subject to euphoric bias, so I'm cautious. It certainly does not show it is working in a measurable way yet. For that a few weeks more training is needed. I intend to walk this path and to postpone the development of a thought process a little. I want to focus my energy in order to find out if this path is a dead end or not.

Thought process.
In fact, I can use these aura vision exercises perfectly well to investigate the ins and outs of a thought process. In each position there might be quite a few things going on:

• Are all squares around the black king under attack or blockaded?
• Is my king in check?
• Is the piece I want to move not pinned against my king?
• Is the square I want to move to not covered by the enemy?
• Can the opponent interpose the check I intend to give?

As you see, there are quite a few subtasks to perform. All subtasks are closely related to the four actions of a piece that Radovic talks about:

• Attack
• Restrict
• Block (shielding the line of attack)
• Protect

So the training might yield results that transfer to other areas of the game.
I must be careful to train slow enough though, otherwise these subtasks may soon disappear from the training. If I try to improve the speed of the exercise in stead, it is easy to adopt a few strategies that are counter productive. For instance, I know that the black king will be mated on the square it stands on. So I can most of the time skip the check if all squares around him are covered. That changes the exercise from finding the mate to finding the right check. Since I'm not punished for a mistake, I might as well replace thinking with trying. I even found myself playing Qxg7 without even checking if the queen was protected there. It had to be, otherwise it was no mate. That way, speed prevents me from training the right subtasks, and leads easy to bad habits. So slow training is paramount.

Subtasks.
Even the "simple" task of mate in one proves to be pretty complex. There are rumours that it is a good idea to split mate in 1 in several subtasks. There might be a way to simplify the exercise by dividing the database in different categories. Now there are "hard" en "easy" mates. I can imagine different categories of mates:

• No redundant pieces.
• No pinned pieced.
• Only white pieces.
• No black pieces that can interpose.
• No checks possible on a covered square.
• Etcetera.

Every category has a complement. Pinned pieces being the complement of no pinned pieces, for instance. Just philosophising.

@Aox, thanks for this beautiful program!