Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Tactics are short-term actions whereas strategy is long-term vision. Surprisingly (to me at least), it turns out that “chess is 99 percent tactics”. Many top chess players admit that you can go a long distance by being very good at tactics alone, i.e., by knowing a lot of patterns.   Computers, even the non-AI variety, are “tactically flawless compared to humans”, writes David Epstein in Range . What happens when man and machine combine forces on a chess board?   While the machine handles tactics, the human can focus on strategy. “It changed the pecking order instantly.” In 1998, when he was still near his peak, Garry Kasparov drew a man-machine match 3-3 with the same opponent whom he had crushed 4-0 in man-only competition… Kasparov, like most top chess players, had been so dominant because he was vastly better at tactics. The difference between him and others when it came to strategy wasn’t much. Shocking.   Once you combine man and machine, it turns ou...

In his book, Mind Master , Viswanathan Anand talks about the evolution of chess playing machines. “In the beginning the (chess) engines were ridiculously weak… The way they approached a problem was to consider every possible move to counter it, but because they were not looking far enough they would sometimes offer the most ludicrous solutions.”   Since computers did brute force calculations of every possible move, they could calculate only X number of moves. Yes, that number X would keep increasing, but that just moved the limit. Such a limit would sometimes led to weird situations: “For a long time… the machines would go wrong at a point where a long-term decision came into play.” While computer couldn’t calculate that far out, humans could intuitively feel it.   But even with that constraint, over time, humans began to find it increasingly difficult to beat computers. Why? “Even when we’d outplayed engines for long stretches in a game, we’d end up making a ...

Alexander Alekhine was the fourth world champion in chess. As Jonathan Rowson puts it in his book, The Moves that Matter , his longevity is unbelievable: “(Alekhine) held the title for most of the second quarter of the twentieth century (1927-35; 1937-46).” Alekhine is quoted as saying that a chess Grandmaster needs to be a “combination of a beast of prey and a monk”. Or as Rowson rephrases it: “We need aggression, but our fire has to be under control.”   Rowson describes the state in one of Alekhine’s games, seemingly “an utterly lifeless endgame position”. Can black win from here, asked Rowson’s instructor. It seemed impossible. But Alekhine had found a way. A very long route. “Seemingly out of thin air, the monk conjured an elaborate scheme that we were supposed to have guessed, while the beast of prey executed it with precision.”   Obviously, most of us (even Rowson, a Top 100 player) couldn’t dream of figuring out such a sequence. But there’s still a lesso...

The Scottish chess Grand Master, Jonathan Rowson, hovered around the Top 100 chess rankings, at his peak. So yes, you’re not likely to have heard of him. But he does have many interesting points on what chess can teach us about life in his book, The Moves that Matter . He knocks off the obvious one first: “The connection between chess and life is usually assumed to be almost exclusively about the application of strategic thinking.” After all, we hear a remark like this in so many contexts, don’t we? “Sporting commentators often announce disconcertingly that the tennis or cricket match you thought you were watching is now ‘a chess game’.”   Another obvious thing in chess is that you need to concentrate. Very hard: “The experience of how concentration ebbs and flows, how we replenish intellectual bandwidth so that we can keep examining the same set of things while also accommodating new things without the whole wave of thought collapsing on itself. To concentrate, we need...

Superconductivity is the phenomenon wherein certain metals, when cooled to near absolute zero (-273˚C), are able to conduct electricity with no electrical resistance. In Tales from the Quantum , Art Hobson explains how it works: At normal temperatures, each electron in the metal creates an electromagnetic (EM) field. The carrier for this EM field is a photon, which being massless, extends to infinity; As electricity tries to move through the metal, it experiences this EM field, and that is what we call “resistance” in our daily lingo; Remember how ice and water (or water and steam) are so very different even though they are chemically identical? Such radical changes in properties is called “phase change”; At near absolute zero temperature, the electrons pair up, and the character of the paired electrons is “radically different from normal unpaired electrons”. A phase change has happened; This transformed field of the paired electrons “causes photons to behave in a surprisi...

In May, 1997, the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeated then world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, and it made headlines everywhere. Maybe you are thinking: Ok, so computers got very smart or somebody wrote a great chess program, so what? It was bound to happen at some point. Big deal. Except that’s not what had happened. Kasparov blamed the defeat on a single move by the computer. What was so special about that move? Yasser Seirawan described both the move and far more importantly, the impact it had on Kasparov: “It was an incredibly refined move, of defending while ahead to cut out any hint of countermoves, and it sent Garry into a tizzy.” In other words, that one move had messed with Kasparov’s mind . Ironically, that move with such devastating consequence was “the result of a bug in Deep Blue’s software” ! Even worse (at least from Kasparov’s perspective), one of the developers of the software said that “the machine was unable to select a move and simply picked one at ...

“Chess has problems at the grandmaster level...They're not getting a great game”, wrote Christian Donlan . Amen to that: Anand and his challenger, Magnus Carlsen drew their first game in just 16 moves. It gets worse: games between the top 20 end in draws 60% of the time. And Donlan adds that “games often end in resignation when an actual victory starts to loom on the distant horizon.” That often means that the average player (or fan) often has no clue why one guy won (since he can’t see that far ahead)! Then there’s all that memorization (of openings, of end games and everything in between). All that memorization is sort of against the spirit of the game, says Zachary Burns, “We want it to be a game of creativity and positional play.” Many have tried to change the rules of the game in the past for these exact reasons, including Bobby Fischer with his Chess960 variant. More recently, David Sirlin tried to make things interesting via his variant, Chess 2. So what are his c...

It's just a game: that's something nobody ever feels when playing chess. Not even Viswanathan Anand , one of the nicest guys in the game: “When you lose, you really feel a sense of self...You actually feel that you are being taken apart, rather than just your pieces.” Anand acknowledges the other guy feels the same way too: “I understand that if I win, I’m probably crushing my opponent’s ego” But unlike Bobby Fischer or Garry Kasparov, Anand says that: “It’s not like I do that with great satisfaction.” You can see why Anand has the nice guy image when you realize he even finds a reason as to why Kasparov felt that chess “required the domination and demoralisation of their opponents”: “It’s true that someone like Kasparov has this sense of history, and I’m talking world history rather than chess history. He has a sense of himself being in it, which, for me, is very hard to understand or even relate to in any way.” But beyond not relating to that feeling, “The...

I’ve always wondered how some chess players play against multiple players simultaneously? (Not only do they play, but they also win against most of the others). It seems hard enough to keep track of one board, how do they keep track of so many as they keep moving from one opponent to the other? I read about some studies on top chess players that included scanners to track which areas of the brain they used during games. The surprising answer was that it was not the analytical areas. Instead, it was the memory areas that were used more! This is very counter-intuitive: most of us assume chess is all about cognitive skills. Turns out top players have great memories of board positions, clusters of pieces that indicate go-for-the-kill scenarios, weaknesses and helps them spot pieces that “stick out” from standard positions. In other words, they don’t see 32 pieces, they see clusters and pivot points. I think the results of those studies answers my question at the top of this blog: ho...