What about concepts?

 We theorized that concepts and analogies would be at the core of the solution of the transfer of knowledge from one position to another. When we talk about familiarization of the ABC of chess, concepts definitely play a role. When you look at a position for the twentieth time and you try to deepen your knowledge of what you see, you clearly will notice that you make use of concepts and analogies. Yet there is an area that is even more intelligible for the use of concepts: strategy.

In the past we talked a lot about Troyis. A game where you had to move a knight in a contained space. That game illustrated perfectly the effect of training by trial and error. By just playing it an awful lot of times, you became better in it. To a certain degree. After that, you would notice that your game level would just plateau. No matter how much more effort you put in your training. Just like chess. Playing by trial and error means not playing by a strategy. Simply because there was no strategy, you could not play by it. Before you could play by strategy, you first had to develop a strategy of your own. In that realm, you will heavily need to lean on concepts and analogies.

The strategy of chess is still in its infancy. Nimzowitsch did a good effort, but his artistic approach obscured what he was trying to say, and we failed to recognize the system in his System. Even worse, GM John Watson build a system on top of it, saying that every rule of Nimzowitsch is superseded by concrete calculation and analysis. And so we entered the era of dynamism, where calculation is hoisted on its high pedestal. But the only reason that we appreciate calculation so highly, is that we are so bad at it while a grandmaster is not.

The only strategy a grandmaster could come up with is opening theory. Which is rather meager. You have to put a tremendous amount of effort in a variation that might only arise once in every 50 games or so, if you are lucky. A novelty might even have a shorter life.

Now we cracked the problem of calculation, by putting the emphasis on familiarization of the underlying patterns, I can't help to have a glance at some serious strategy. Opening theory is easy to avoid. In the first 4 moves, there are 25 billion possibilities. With a computer you must be able to find some moves that lead into uncharted territory that is playable nevertheless. I'm curious where concepts and analogies could lead us.