Temposchlucker

Connecting the rules in a framework  I have asked Claude (AI) lately to collect all chess rules he could find. He found about 150 rules. Often these rules are hanging somewhere in mid-air. Because the rules tend to be provided with too little context. Now the task is to hang them on the LoA (line of attack) framework. Take for instance the rule "improve your worst piece". That only applies when an attacker is not on its LoA yet. Otherwise it makes no sense. The LoA system provides structure and hierarchy to the rules. It provides the context so you can judge how to value the rules whenever you have conflicting rules. The LoA framework is especially important to get feedback from your games. Without a framework, you make the same positional mistakes over and over again without noticing it. A framework makes you life easier and helps you to make faster positional judgements, but it is not going to win you many games. Tactical chess language In order to win games, you have to be...

There seems to be the following levels of abstraction: Level 1 the purpose of existence What a piece wants regardless the position Attack invasion clear the path to promotion attack a target Defense prevent invasion prevent promotion defend a target What a pawn wants: to promote to keep invaders out give room to its own pieces Summary A piece wants to invade, a pawn wants to promote. No matter the position. Level 2 Invasion A specific position poses limits and restrictions to the pieces. Not everything that they want is possible. An invasion square: on the other side of the board cannot be defended by a pawn anytime soon is in contact with a target or focal point The concepts that revolve around invasion are about creating an invasion point and getting your pieces there Level 3 Defending an invasion square Pawns are the best defenders of invasion squares. Invasion squares that are not covered by pawns must be covered by pieces. The usual concepts involving annihilation of the defender ...

 I don't know where this post will be heading, so you are forewarned! The method I concocted is totally empyric. It came about by a mix of elimination, trial and error, and observation. Hence it is not optimized in any way, nor scientific. This means that I'm always on the lookout for improvements and more understanding. The core of my method is generalization of concepts. This means that I have to conceptualize what is happening in a position, and once the concepts are clear, the concepts must be generalized, so that they become useful for other positions as well. Both the creation of concepts and the generalization are done by system 2. The next thing is to ensure that system 1 has absorbed the matter. Attention is the spotlight, and both system 2 and system 1 are following the attention. Because that is their very nature. The bottleneck Because system 2 plays such big role AND is very slow, it is the bottleneck of the process. Any optimization of the process will focus on th...

 Conceptual abstraction is the base of my method. The transfer of knowledge from one position to another can only be reached by generalisation of the patterns that occur in a position. That conceptualization requires a lot of work. There is no free lunch here. You can only ask a grandmaster to gather the material and to draft an outline. So I went to look at AI whether it could help me. I watched a lot of videos and podcasts to see where it is heading. It turns out that AI is suffering from the same problem. LLM's will run out of input the next year. Everything from the internet is processed, and you cannot scale up the LLM's much further. Hence the ugly begging letters and policy changes at X, Reddit and Meta lately to use your data for feeding their LLM's. So the contours of the limitations of LLM's start to become clear, Now the hype is nearly over, it is time to ask the question "what's next?". AGI is the next target to pursue (Artificial General Intel...

 While fiddling around with the position of the previous post, it became apparent that black's Rc2 was a blunder. Let's look again at the position, but before the blunder. BLACK to move 2r1r1k1/p3bp1p/1p4p1/3q1p2/8/1P2PR1Q/PB4PP/R5K1 b - - 1 27 The arrows indicate the LoAs (lines of attack)  What are black's options to prevent the mate? Bg5 => gives black control over h6 (on the LoA) h5 => closes the LoA Qd8 => gives black control over h4 (on the LoA) Qe4 => gives black control over h4 (on the LoA) Bf8 => gives black control over h6 (on the LoA) f6 => closes the long diagonal (LoA) f4 => gives black control over h5 (on the LoA) LoA awareness prunes the tree of analysis. Only moves that check the LoAs need consideration. This gives a more precise picture of the tempi. Only tempi that have an influence on the LoAs are relevant. Rc2 is a blunder because it has no effect on the LoAs. The move Rc2 is typically inspired by blacks own LoAs, without considering...

I'm investigating the preconditions of the Art of Attack in Chess from Vukovic. Simply counting the attackers and the defenders is a bit too simple.  White to move 4r1k1/p3bp1p/1p4p1/3q1p2/8/1P2PR1Q/PBr3PP/R5K1 w - - 1 27 Van Vliet, Louis vs. Passmore, S., London 1900 If white played a straight forward move like 27.Bd4, he would probably lose. Only forceful moves will give white the win. Every move must have an additional punch. It turns out that that must be either a check or a mate in 1 threat. What are the relevant elements?: -killbox -escape route -#amount of attackers -#amount of defenders -tempo battle -lines of attack -piece sac to pry the box open -chasing the king wall of the killbox: -own pieces of the enemy -passive attackers -active attackers (forming a wall with tempo) -magnet to draw the king out in the open -double check It turns out that counting the attackers vs the defenders isn't very enlightening. Because the defenders need a tempo to execute their task. The...

There are a lot of different areas in chess where I can do better. I can't address them all at once. So I have to make choices. On the one hand I'm highly influenced by progressive insight, while on the other hand, I need the right training material, and I discover new books and videos all the time. Furthermore, I'm the slave of my curiosity. When I want to know something, I go for it, no matter whether it will bear fruit or not. You can't possibly know beforehand. Luckily I have most of the time the discipline to finish a few things first before I jump on the next bandwagon. A few weeks ago, I purchased a new course on Chessable: Attacking hotspots in chess The author divides the chessboard in four hotspots: And he has puzzles for every square in every hotspot. On every square he has quite a few sacrifices for every piece: Queen, Rook, Bishop and Knight sacrifices. These puzzles are a good base to get a deeper insight in the Vukovic gap. Tactics are supportive by their...