IMPLICIT AND EXPLICIT ELIMINATIONS 14

Often, a grand master has intuition. He thinks differently than a novice, or more precisely, his references are different. It is always a surprise to see that in a match, a grand master doesn’t necessarily use a higher level of analytical thinking than a beginner. Truth be told, a grand master only considers a small number of moves. But the way he looks at the chessboard functions like a filter. He doesn’t “see” bad moves when evaluating a situation. A beginner blocks out only the illegal moves. He has structured his perception of the game in such a way that he would never consider moving a rook diagonally or a bishop in a straight line. The grand master has also structured his perception of the board. But for him, bad moves are just as invisible as illegal moves are to most players. You could call that an implicit elimination of some of the branches of the tree of possibilities. In opposition to that, an explicit elimination of these branches would imply considering all possible moves and after analysis, deciding or not to take them into consideration.

That being said, as powerful as it may be, a computer is noth-ing more than a calculatnoth-ing machine. It only appears “intelligent.”

This is especially clear when working on form recognition (or au-tomatic translation). The human mind can interpret an imperfect picture or understand an incomplete message. Anyone can under-stand a telegram wishing you “est ishes for appiness” or a wine list offering “Mondav Opu One.” But, imperfections surprise most pro-grams. Machines don’t know how to treat semantic reductions. That is why they cannot compare to the human mind.

Kouatly– So, chess programs that can rival a world champion are not for anytime soon.

Karpov– Today, the best programs are grand master level, no more.

But, I would like to come back to what Jean-Franc¸ois was say-ing about the imbalance between a player and a software program.

Today computers can access extremely large databases, and they dis-pose of unimaginable volumes of information. They know every game a player at a certain level has waged throughout his career. Players have a certain knowledge of chess history, but they cannot memorize everything in the databases. Therefore, they have a serious handicap.

On the other hand, computers have specific basics for open-ings and endopen-ings. But most computers don’t “play” endopen-ings. They just estimate the final position. They calculate that such a position will win the game in 25 moves, another in 21, and yet another in 27.

So, the program doesn’t think. When its opponent moves a piece, the computer, after performing all its calculations, simply says, “Ah!

If I do this, I am only 24 moves from victory.” By doing this, it always plays the same way. It never forgets anything, but it doesn’t invent anything either. . . .

To make matches interesting, programmers would have to agree to communicate their databases, making them available to both players, man and machine. This brings me back to what I was saying:

if this were to happen, unless the programmer himself is a champion, I believe that the machine would clearly show its inferiority.

Phelizon– In any case the matches would be more interesting. All the psychological dimensions of a battle would be present. Instead of testing the player on the limits of his resistance (which is what happens today), there would be a real duel between player and programmer.

Kouatly– It seems that the appearance of information technology in the back offices has changed the cards. It seems it should reduce uncertainty. But doesn’t it minimize a player’s influence, even negate certain elements of surprise?

Karpov– Because of microcomputers, there is a big difference be-tween the chess played in the 1970s and what is played today.

When you analyze a game, very often you feel the need to refer to something you’ve read. You know it’s probably such and such page from such and such book, but you don’t remember the exact content of the page. Back then, in order to be sure to find

the correct reference, you had to have enormous documentation.

There were always a number of people on the team who did research in the literature, even though it was time-consuming. I remember a match with Korchnoi where we brought cases and cases of books on chess—almost a ton. Among the books there was even an old one by Capablanca dating from 1934 that I had brought along, because it contained a lot of ideas and useful commentary.

Nowadays, all the literature fits on a microcomputer or at least on a few CD-ROMS. There are very powerful search programs that enable you to quickly find what you want. You can’t use them during a game because games are not always adjourned, but the microcom-puter is an incomparable analysis tool when you are preparing.

Kouatly– What happens when one player adopts the direct approach and the other the indirect approach?

Phelizon– I would say that the Davids often win over the Goliaths.

Karpov– Or the judo practitioner usually holds more trump cards than the boxer.

Lateral Approach: Playing with