What if it isn't? What if you had 32men tablebases and Re5 is just as good as the rest of the moves, in that the theoretical result of the game doesn't change?leavenfish wrote:In any case...to those who might go 'ga-ga' over 35. Re5....Man-up and admit, it is just a big stupid move! It's bad. Period. All too often what some refer to as 'style'...is just poor chess.
Style exists, because for 99.999andothernines% of positions, objectively, there's no such thing as bad moves, or good moves, unless they change the result of the game with perfect play, so a style can choose between the Ruy Lopez or the Italian, or between castling Queenside or Kingside.
One thing that is very apparent is that the top engines with the strongest elo have become more or less homogenous in their styles, in that, either they all agree a move is best, or after interactive analysis they can be made to agree on any move by refuting the others.
But this chosen move isn't best, and we know, because Komodo 13, Houdini 8, or Stockfish 10 are going to play different, stronger moves, in those positions, just like we're playing stronger moves than Komodo 9, Houdini 4 or Stockfish 6...
It's a dog chasing its tail, and it has no ending, until we reach the draw barrier with diminishing returns and chess engines hit an elo block (A0 didn't lose a single game, that's alarm bells for this), we just keep pursuing that way...
But I am willing to gamble, that I am able to produce games, where top engines of today destroy their previous versions, and other set of games where those previous versions destroy even older versions, and if I deleted the names of the players, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference, so what progress was actually made?
You can't tell the elo of the engine by how it plays, you need specialized software that tells you such and such is stronger than such and such and by how much.
But style? Style is very apparent and jumps out of the screen to smack you! You don't need to know at what strength those engines are playing, and their difference in strength is irrelevant.
What matters is the games! Again!
And in this thread, I guarantee you, that more people saw the games Brendan posted, played them out, and enjoyed them, than people actually going through the games that, say, Graham Banks continues to play over the years.
The saddest thing that has happened to computer chess is people running games on tournaments just to extract math from them, produce PGNs of endless series of games that nobody cares to replay and watch, turning chess, and using so many time and resources into producing text files with moves nobody reads and that are just used to calculate some arbitrary elo difference and perhaps add them to some book statistics for better move choices.
Engine style is the answer to this, let's use chess engines to produce chess games we can watch and enjoy. That's why I'm in this side of the issue, being more interested in what Personalities can be created that play chess moves never seen before that no other chess entity chooses, than what engines join the top 10 in elo and kick Chiron out of it...
Let's bring back chess to computer chess.
