Anand vs Topalov Game 7

[Milos]

Engines beat humans in direct matches because they can avoid blunders. Top players are often able to pick better and more logical moves - just to throw everything away with one single error.

Nicely said, and mostly true except for a minor detail.
Top players often pick more logical moves to us who also use the same logic, but they not so often pick better moves (when they disagree with engines), I would even say they rarely pick better moves.

[Uri Blass]

Engines beat humans in direct matches because they can avoid blunders. Top players are often able to pick better and more logical moves - just to throw everything away with one single error.

Nicely said, and mostly true except for a minor detail.
Top players often pick more logical moves to us who also use the same logic, but they not so often pick better moves (when they disagree with engines), I would even say they rarely pick better moves.

topalov and anand are clearly at higher level than us so I do not think that we use the same logic(they are better because they use better logic than us to choose their moves

[Milos]

topalov and anand are clearly at higher level than us so I do not think that we use the same logic(they are better because they use better logic than us to choose their moves

When I said "us", I meant humans, since they use human and not computer logic, or do they?

[Uri Blass]

topalov and anand are clearly at higher level than us so I do not think that we use the same logic(they are better because they use better logic than us to choose their moves

When I said "us", I meant humans, since they use human and not computer logic, or do they?

The fact that they use human logic does not mean that we understand their logic.

human logic of top GM's is different than human logic of average players.

Uri

[Dr.Wael Deeb]

Anad missed it, and SF is back to +.44 for white.... Stupid strong engines making World Champions looking like beginners! :'(

I totally disagree.

1)The strong engines are not stupid.
2)People do not expect world champions to be as strong as chess programs with rating of at least 3000.
3)It is not something that stockfish can see easily in few seconds and I do not expect anand to play better than the level of stockfish32 bit 1 cpu at 20 seconds per move.

Totally agreed.....Stockfish will smash both of them running at a quad machine if allowed to participate in the championship....it will realy make them look like begginer club players
Dr.D

Silly speculation. If you watch the play it's hard to tell machine from man in many cases.

Check how close the lines and level of play really are. Closer than you give credit.

And I'd say silly observation from your side....take a close look how many strong moves were missed by the human players and we're talking about the World chess Championship if you didn't notice....

Include Stockfish or IvanHoe running on a quad in a triple match for the world championship and watch the floor shining like a crystal ball after wiping it with the human players....
Dr.D

[Dr.Wael Deeb]

Check how close the lines and level of play really are. Closer than you give credit.

Sure, these guys are great in memorizing lines.
Switch to chess960, and you'd see what a real machine power means.

I don't care about chess 960 and it's irrelavent to this discussion AFAIC.
Although. you might be surprised what they could do.

Don't lecture me on computers I was there since the beginning.

And these guys are far better than just memorizing lines, How lame and disrespectful. It's pure ignorance.

Terry,you assume that if one of these players play against Stockfish for example,a 12 games match,the human will win
Keep on dreaming pal,dreams don't hurt anyone and most importantly don't change the reality....
Dr.D

[Dr.Wael Deeb]

Yes, I remember that SF gave 42. Qa4 a mark above +2 for white. White could have won this game. The thing is that such moves are nearly unreachable for humans, as their consequences are not obvious at all.

Anyway, even if my previous joke gave birth to a debate that shouldn't be (as it was JUST a joke) here is my point of view :

- YES, the engines now obviously play much better than any human being, would he be a world champion.
- BUT, I think it's still a lot of fun to watch human matches, and engines help us to have fun : will Anand/Topalov see the good move? Wow, incredible he saw it, this guy is an alien! Having strong engines to help us analyzing human matches realtime gives us a lot of fun I think. I, personally, would maybe play 50% of the moves an engine suggest, while a GM would probably be over 95% : engines are a good way to measure a player's strength.
- ANYWAY, I think that, from time to time, a human player can find a better move than the one suggested by the engine. For instance, during this match, I noticed that Anand/Topalov played a different move than the one SF suggested, and as the result, at the next move, SF's evaluation for the opponent decreased (!), which shows that the engine didn't put enough "thinking" into this move, despite it was better than the one it chose. Engines are not that almighty yet it seems. Problem is : which percentage of moves differing from the engine's suggestion are improvements? It seems like it's under 50%, or white would have won in the 7th game, for instance.

Tell this to Terry,it looks like he missed it....
Dr.D

[Mincho Georgiev]

I though that maybe when 32 men tablebases becomes available, this argument will be gone forever.

[Dr.Wael Deeb]

I though that maybe when 32 men tablebases becomes available, this argument will be gone forever.

You're wrong....Terry will pop up from somewhere claiming that the humans are still having the upper hand

[shiv]

Well it appears that Ivan Cheparinov had prepared the Novelty for him that went twenty moves deep into this game.

"At the press conference the Bulgarian said that it was his second Ivan Cheparinov who had prepared the line for him."

[d]8/8/4q1kp/1Q4p1/2p3P1/2Pp4/5NK1/8 w - - 0 42

With 42. Qa4! White could have prevented the black pawn going to d2. 42... Qd5+ (42... d2? 43. Qc2+ ) 43. Kf1 Qe6 44. Qa2! Qd5 (44... Qc6 45. Qa1! Qd5 46. Qe1! ) 45. Qa6+ Kg7 46. Qa7+ Kg6 47. Qe3! +/- Shipov. {Also Stockfish 1.7.1}

Source: http://www.chessvibes.com/reports/wch-g ... more-24861

Actually this game also exposes the weaknesses of engines quite a bit. Stockfish and other engines thought the position after Nd2 was just losing for white.

And this Qa4 position is another case in point, what if black just plays 42.. h5 after Qa4 trading the g-pawn. I tried with engines and yes you will see a +0.5 which keeps going down, but the engines are just evaluating the position, there is no win of course.. Shipov of course has caught on the engine disease. I might be proven wrong but positions like occurred in the game are confusing for both humans and engines. For the same reason, I do not trust the +0.44 after Qh3 either. Just shows how complex a game chess is.

For several other moves in the game, I turned on the engine, but found unreliable evaluations.

I do not see +0.5 after Qa4 h5 gxh5+ Kxh5 Qa7

Of course score of more than +3 is no proof that white wins and I did not analyze enough to be sure that Qa4 wins but you can be sure that nobody is going to claim that white can win based on +0.5

I can add that I did not see evaluation by engines that suggested that white is losing after Nd2.

I am using Rybka 3 and after Qa4 h5 gh5+ Kh5 Qa7, I see a +0.5 score. I did not let it run overnight. However, for a human such as much, I do not see a clear way to win as white has to bank on the c3 pawn and winning at least one pawn.