Harbin Snow and Ice World © Flickr user SlytherinPrefect under
Creative Commons.
'Chess board: Pictures of the snow and ice sculpture park just a little north of downtown Harbin.' • Wikipedia: Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival.
While working on my post titled Calculating Collusion, a critique of Did the Soviets Collude? A Statistical Analysis of Championship Chess 1940-64 by Moul and Nye, a subject unrelated to collusion caught my attention.
More recently, Ryvkin (2005) has focused attention on the problem of how tournament design not only motivates effort but can also be structured to reveal the relative strengths of various players. In this light, the purpose of good tournament design is to maximize the probability that the result of the tournament will produce outcomes that conform to the "true," unobserved relative strengths of the participants. Many discussions of tournament structure have instead focused on "competitiveness." The latter goal actually values a large number of upsets or unlikely results -- such as seem likely to emerge from multi-round knockout tournaments which are common in tennis or collegiate sports.
In contrast, the chess community seems to put a very high value on competitions that accurately "reveal" the true strengths of players. Judging by the history of the world championship and its biases in favor of the incumbent world champion, there seems to be a revealed preference for a system that anoints the strongest player as World Champion. Periods when the official world champion was clearly not the strongest player -- as occurred when Garry Kasparov split from FIDE in the 1990s and created a parallel system for the championship -- have seen a loss of legitimacy for the systems that produced champions not widely viewed as the dominant players.
[Reference: Ryvkin, Dmitry (2005). "Tournaments: A Review." Unpublished working paper.]
The observation that, among chess players (is this unique to chess?), 'there seems to be a revealed preference for a system that anoints the strongest player as World Champion' is certainly true. The 'loss of legitimacy for the systems that produced champions not widely viewed as the dominant players' refers, of course, to the FIDE knockout tournaments, won successively by Khalifman (1999), Anand (2000), Ponomariov (2001), and Kasimdzhanov (2004). Excluding perhaps the event won by Anand, all of these knockout tournaments were criticized for producing a less-than-worthy World Champion.
As for the knockout event that produced a challenger -- Anand (1997) -- or the events that qualified players to the next stage of the championship -- Aronian (2005), Kamsky (2007), and Gelfand (2009) -- there was no criticism whatsoever. The chess world accepts the knockout format for identifying a challenger, but not for choosing a champion. Why should this be?
My most recent chess960 post, A Few Novel Ideas, got me thinking about a subject that is not limited to chess960: What factors make one player more successful at correspondence chess than another player. I came up with the following list.
I could have also mentioned Talent, but some people would say that it plays no role whatsoever, so I left it out. Next I came up with four categories of player and assigned each category a value for each success factor, according to the following table.
For example, a titled player has a higher capacity for work than a Master/Expert, while a Master/Expert has greater Chess Knowledge than a player in the next tier, an Average Player. My assignments are all subjective, and someone else might quibble with them, but they work for me.
Finally, I added another category called Engine Operator. These are players who simply transmit the best move calculated by a chess engine after letting it run for some time. I've encountered a few of these players in my own games and am certain that they exist. Where do these players fit in the hierarchy?
I believe that operators currently fall in the band between Master/Expert and Average Player, overlapping both. This means that it is possible to defeat them with good chess knowledge and some concentrated work on that specific game. Some positions are more amenable to knowledge and work than are other positions, but that isn't relevant here.
As stronger chess engines become commercially available, the playing strength of operators is constantly on the rise. Will they eventually occupy the highest tier? This would mean that chess knowledge and work capacity will ultimately count for little to nothing.
***
(*) Operators and Things: The Inner Life of a Schizophrenic by Barbara O'Brien.
In my last post, 'An Enormous Investment of Effort and Time', I quoted from Bareev and Levitov's 'From London to Elista', regarding the pre-match effort involved in World Championship Opening Preparation. Bareev, who served as Kramnik's second in 2000 and in 2004, continued his explanation of pre-match preparation with a discussion of the team of assistants who helped Kramnik prepare his openings for the 2000 match with Kasparov (p.16):
Team Politics
Levitov: On what principle did [Kramnik] form his team before the match with Kasparov?
Bareev: On the professional principle -- those who were capable of work, could withstand the serious physical and psychological burden, and wouldn't give up. A limited number of people participated in the preparation. The team that formed was international, on the whole each person worked at home, and Kramnik himself held several study and coaching meetings with various chess players. [...]
In general, each person answered for his own sphere. I worked on the white color [e.g. Nimzo-Indian], with the exception of the Gruenfeld Defense. Dolmatov and Kramnik prepared the Berlin Wall together in about two weeks. Neither Lautier nor I knew what, specifically, would be our main weapon against 1.e4.
L: That's nice! [Kramnik] trusts you!
B: I think that in the first place, [Kramnik] himself didn't even know what would happen. In the second place, experience suggested how he should behave. It is well known that Kasparov -- a representative of the Soviet chess school -- is a pupil of Botvinnik and Karpov. They were famous for intrigues and behind-the-scene squabbles, which they won on most occasions. That's why it was impossible to absolutely exclude the possibility that an attempt would be made to -- I'm not afraid to use this word -- swipe something. In case of a loss in some area, Kramnik divided the field. That way something would always remain. [...]
Continuing the subject of who was responsible for what, I'll tell you that Kramnik and Lautier worked on the Scotch Game (Kasparov didn't play this opening, but it came in handy later, in the match with [Deep Fritz 2002]). If we're talking about the main opening for White, then Illescas worked on the Gruenfeld, and he did very serious work on it.
Based on the assumption that it was impossible to look at everything, Kramnik determined which openings might occur and which wouldn't, and cut out the unnecessary. He thought that 1.e4 would be Kasparov's main weapon. 1.c4 [Kramnik] himself plays as White, so he didn't put any particular work into this move. And about 1.d4 he simply decided that it wouldn't happen in the match -- a mistake that almost cost him a loss in game 15.
The degree of specialization and accompanying secrecy is surprising until we recognize the unfortunate incidents that occurred in previous matches, e.g. The Dorfman Affair and The Vladimirov Affair. Kramnik won the match +2-0=13, both wins with the White pieces, proving that his strategy was successful.
Wikipedia: 'Original airdate 14 January 1968; A gold shipment, sent to fund an anti-communist resistance movement, has been seized by the country's government and the IMF must get it to its intended recipients, but an international chess champion and con artist is also after the gold.'
M:I Se2 Ep17 "A Game of Chess" (Part 1) (10:00) • 'Mission: Impossible Season 2 Episode 17 "A Game of Chess" (1/5)'
Those were the days! Top players wore ear pieces attached to wires and blew smoke at their opponents. 'Phelps: Is the computer set? Barney: And checked. It's unbeatable at chess and it even makes time fly.'
The daily stats produced by my server host revealed nothing unusual, so I dusted off my homemade stat analysis software, downloaded the server log for February to-date, and imported the log into the software's database. A little tweaking revealed that someone (or something) has been requesting my FAVICON.ICO file every ten seconds for days at a time. This was the traffic spike I noticed.
The FAVICON.ICO file is the source of that little icon that is displayed in your browser bookmarks or on the browser address bar next to the address of the web page. It's a tiny 16x16 pixel image file that sits in the web site's root directory in case browsers ask for it. The fuzzy image at the beginning of this post shows each separate pixel in my icon, a chess King's crown.
Why would someone request this every ten seconds? Beats me. If I find out more, I'll mention it here.
***
While I was looking at the stats, I noted my site's referrers, i.e. other sites that are sending me traffic. The top five were...
773 www.google.com
233 en.wikipedia.org
139 www.google.co.uk
111 search.yahoo.com
108 www.bing.com
...meaning that www.google.com, for example, sent me 773 visitors over the period covered by the log, which was about two weeks.
The Google number are somewhat understated because the longest URLs are no longer processed correctly by my software and because there are so many Google domains. I counted 86 different Google domains (www.google.co.in, www.google.ca, etc.) that sent me traffic, out of 270 different domains total. By comparison, Yahoo traffic came from 23 different domains (uk.search.yahoo.com, etc.), Wikipedia from 21 (pl.wikipedia.org, etc.), and Bing only from the single www.bing.com.
Along with the search engines I received a lot of visitors from sites that have nothing to do with chess. One example was a forum thread called MSPaint Adventures - Homestuck Edition (somethingawful.com). The thread was discussing this picture of a chess board -- You fill each empty square with a bit of MOTOR OIL... -- when someone commented, 'I'm hoping that the game was a real game and some nerd has annotated it', and someone else pointed to my 'Every Move Explained' analysis of 1960 Leipzig - Letelier vs. Fischer. Since this is getting stranger and stranger, I'd better stop here.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Polugaevsky demonstrated
a new, modern approach to the opening: if you want to gain an advantage in critical variations, you have to take a risk, and play concretely and sharply, move by move. (Kasparov's My Great Predecessors III, p.105)
That sentence, which was italicized in the original, is the best summary of opening play that I have ever seen. It is self-explanatory, except perhaps for the phrase playing 'concretely', which is, as I understand it, the opposite of playing 'intuitively'. It means calculating everything, rather than relying on positional considerations.
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