Originally posted by N I Ki seem to remember reading that it went the other way round :
it seems to me that in general mathematicians tend to be good at chess. i was wondering who on rhp are mathematicians. (i myself am not one).
maths was poorly correlated with chess.
lawyers correlated with high chess ratings.
(i have fiddled with numbers a lot ... and like to blame that for me not being higher up in the ratings.)
I graduated with majors in math and comp. science. i suck at learning other languages like french and german, but not so with programming languages. There is a lot of recursion in chess that you see in algorithms, regarding planning, etc, iterating move by move how to make the next move. I guess mathematics helps with positional evaluation too, like when you've reached a certain position, you know the game is 'solved' with basic technique the rest of the game. My interests in math include differential geometry, PDEs, and real analysis. I'm not too great in algebra and that required a lot of training and study. i.e. Galois Theory was alien to me and I had to study hard, but it was a beautiful subject. Differential Geometry came to me naturally. I'm not dyslexic, but i'm a strong left-handed person. I think chess and math require the same type of Training. If you can train at math you can train at chess. ALSO, learning chess is like being a lawyer. Opening solutions are like law precedents. You use precedents to help you know what is good and bad in positions. Of course, you might be Fischer and re-evealuate the whole library...but that's Fischer...
Originally posted by DualSpacefischer ???
I graduated with majors in math and comp. science. i suck at learning other languages like french and german, but not so with programming languages. There is a lot of recursion in chess that you see in algorithms, regarding planning, etc, iterating move by move how to make the next move. I guess mathematics helps with positional evaluation too, like when y ...[text shortened]... ons. Of course, you might be Fischer and re-evealuate the whole library...but that's Fischer...
do you admire fischer?
why?
do you know what you are talking about?
Originally posted by arrakisI am a teacher maths yes english not good so.
Yes, it's true. But they are also usually bad in language. The reason is that one side of the brain handles logic while the other side handle language. Which is which I forgot. But people have a tendency to favor one side over the other.
You can always tell a person who is a genius as computer programming - they can't spell worth beans!
firstly, fischer's two lesson's for frank brady were:
(1) read MCO straight through
(2) do it again.
then, he kills Spassky second match, and everyone was complaining "oh, it's supposed to be even these lines in MCO, and Fischer beats him five moves later". I'd like to think Fischer re-evaluated what was a = draw and what wasn't in MCO, beyond Mr Korn and DeFirmian. 😛. that's why fischer wasn't your regular 'egg and ham'er' chess player.
Originally posted by ReelEmInReidWell, of course you can make silly statements like 'assuming optimal play, either one player will win or a draw will occur, and this will happen on move X', but a) the best known upper bound on X is probably extremely large, b) we don't know whether it's a win for black, a win for white or a draw, and c) it doesn't tell you any details about how to play optimally; and yes, in theory you could analyse all possible sequences of moves, but that's not maths, that's just brute force. What I mean is that there aren't any known mathematical tricks to reduce chess to something computationally manageable. There are simple games which have been solved completely (ie we know who will win from any given position), but even something fairly simple in structure like Dots and Boxes has not been solved in general (though mathematicians have managed to reduce the task quite a lot, so in that sense they have got at it).
What do you mean? Chess is a finite game so most mathematicians would laugh at this statement.
I've always been drawn to maths, and now tutor it at a senior highschool level for pocket money. I vaguely attempted some maths papers at university, but in the end I couldn't be bothered with studying. Funnily enough this also applies to my chess.
As a subject, I've always preferred English, so I guess that makes me some kind of all rounder. It's not THAT unusual though. I find that most language used in chess publications to be of a high standard. Wellington's leading daily newspaper has at least two strong players that I know of working as journalists for them. The lead political journalist is an International Master.
Interestingly, a lot of chess players I know are also highly proficient in music. And this isn't just limited to music theory, as you might expect. In fact, my sight reading is crap, though I can play the piano quite reasonably. All three fields, chess, maths, and music, are highly aesthetic. They have a lot of scope for creativity, will being areas strong in logic at the same time.
It shouldn't surprise me to find a lot of musicians on this site. Or at least that most of you have extensive music collections.
right. there is this 'combinatorial explosion'. So, you get to positional evaluation software. Get some expert system model that adjusts it's weights or 'synapses' or prameters based on grandmaster feedback or game results. feed a positon, what was the result, or what did experts think about it? that becomes math in that you're trying to reduce some find of error function or minimize losses for the software based on some model, iteratively, and you have to figure out how to adjust the parameters, etc, to further minizie losses in future games. Plus there is all that trickery about pruning search trees and stuff with random samplings of combinations and sample trees. You can blow away half the search time by knowing anthing past a certain node, ply leads to crappy scores. I dunno, I think chess software has pretty much figured out how to kill humans, but you're right again, in that this software won't be able to tell us how it did it. Fritz 9 replys: "I just read My System 8 times and everything just works out now" 😛