I certainly have no trouble believing in pre-Columbian Phoenician explorers. The Phoenicians rivaled the (later) Polynesians in long-range exploration.
In fact, if I'm a die-hard fan of any controversial chess writer, it would be Kmoch and his Pawn Power in Chess masterpiece... which many players (including some GMs) absolutely hate.
I'm no stranger to controversy so I applaud that. I should have kept my big gob shut, metaphorically speaking.
hi
Capablanca covers that in his book he calls it the element of position.
You can be ahead in force, space and time but still have a lost game because of position
I gave that as an example to show the piece value doesn't matter. Realistically speaking, both piece value and what I am proposing, space value, should be considered. I don't know why pointing this out makes people feel they have to give up their religion to believe what I am stating.
Check my edit above. The piece value only "doesn't matter" in very specific and (usually) contrived positions.
Your point that "not all squares are worth the same" is of course correct, but this is not something that can be formalized to a count because it depends on the location of the two Kings, the activity of the opposing forces, and precise dynamics of the tactical interplay.
I think there's a confusion of granularity levels here. Let's try a Gedankenexperiment, and hope I don't lose you completely.
Consider Chess as an abstract vertical stack of concepts.
The bottom few levels of the logical stack are all tactical. The bottom-most granularity level is the actual possible moves of the pieces in their current position. The next level up considers those moves as threats and strings them together into sequences of moves. The next level up attaches meaning to those sequences. And so on. Many, many levels above that you will encounter concepts such as "Pawn Structure", "Space Advantage" and "King Safety".
The point of the STF static analysis is to roughly approximate the output of ALL of the lower levels of that logical stack and present the player with information that would normally only be available if you patiently worked your way up through the stack, starting with the current position and the possible moves of each piece.
The important point is that all of the inputs to your STF analysis (material count, space count) are PRIMITIVE data. You just point. Then count. Then write it down.
But assigning different values to different squares depending on the two King's position, the activity of nearby pieces, tactical I-go-here-he-goes-there calculations... this requires ALREADY PROCESSED information. It requires OUTPUT, from intensive previous calculations.
We're supposed to be talking about INPUT. You are putting the cart in front of the horse. You can't do your calculations using the output of your calculations... you don't HAVE that data yet.
> Here is another example
@MARattigan writing about others.
I noticed Larry Evans doesn't count the 4th rank in his space count he starts at the 5th rank but it makes sense to start at 4th rank because it is no man's land at the start, in point count chess you only count the space behind your own front lines because it basically splits the subject up into smaller topics like centre control, superior development and open files etc.
These tips are really useful. I'll leave a post here so that I can refer to this later.
ohio
Bhold, an old topic from the days when people used the froums to talk about chess things.
ohio
And a representative of the type of people who ruined it.
Why the arithmetic of numbers doesnt correspond to the mathematic of the position?! It is because of that school gambit or blunderwin school as it is called often c4 c5 school. Until now there is no medicine to c4 queen gambit but to take the blunder c4 and to give back material with no benefit. Or to take the c5 sicilian and to go into a circus of an opening
So basically what I get from those comments is that you count space and force and then depending on a magical number you determine kind of what you have to do according to Evan's guidelines?
@blueemu should show us a "pretty girl" where he used that way of analyzing!
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I expect he was reading my posts here, in the "is chess a draw" threads where people couldn't even agree on basic definitions and didn't understand that analysing chess to a full solution in all possible lines couldn't be done in millions of years at present computing speeds (and the data would be impossible to store).
I pointed out that the only way forward was by algorithm development. It's much more difficult than Evans suggests because as yet chess isn't sufficiently understood to design such algorithms. It's a bit like trying to design a computer model of the brain that will provide the same functions as the brain does. Completely impossible when all the World's neuro and cognitive scientists not only don't know how the brain does what it does but they don't even know what it does.
Chess is actually like that because, if algorithms are to be developed, generalised pictures of highly complex, tactical exchanges would have to be developed. Thankyou for reading.
This is hardly a level playing field for determining a person's accuracy.
You're obviously a fan of his. Maybe a relation.
I'm sorry, all I did was see some obvious mistakes and send out a warning.
You should see the "Solving Chess" thread. A lot of crazy people full of their egotistic ideas. It isn't easy. And, in the Hans Nieman thread, Ziryab just called me "gullible" for thinking that the Phoenicians may have reached South America (something that is quite strongly established, even though it was "refuted" in Victorian times, according to their boundless knowledge. All I was doing was hinting that previous visitors (to the Phoenicians) are likely to have been responsible for certain similarities with other cultures, rather than aliens. It was something to do with Occam's Razor, regarding which I thought his explanation was somewhat confused.
I probably ought to confine myself to sorting out stamp collections. Evidently too much ego here!