Reminds me of when I'm trying to get the computer's opinion on a benko or closed sicilian type of position.
Every move it changes its mind... by which I mean it will say Bd7 is the best move... and after putting that move on the board it decides it's no good. Move after move, for both players. Stupid engine.
So I try a normal looking human-like plan. No calculation. Just logic.
Of course it hates my moves, until a few moves later, then it realizes that the moves are pretty good.
The problem is when I don't know the plans, or how humans play. Then I'm stuck with the idiot computer that can't make up its mind.
One year ago lots of people desperately tried to solve the chess puzzle of professor Penrose.
There was no problem with making a draw, but only a genius could find a win in this position. One man wrote Penrose a letter about the puzzle and the professor answered him. Here's an excerpt of his answer:
"If both players understand the position and play perfectly there is no way either player can win - black can always keep its bishops together so the white king cannot pick them off, and the 50-move rule would result in a draw. Human players understand this and don’t need to calculate the position.
However, we can see that Fritz (one of the better AI chess programs) looks ahead 20 moves and thinks black is winning. Fritz does not understand the nature of the position: It sees the material advantage and thinks it is ahead. The question is whether the human playing as white can use this lack of understanding to win. A small number of you ran the puzzle on chess programs and experimented with this.
Although we maintain that chess programs (such as Fritz and Stockfish) do not ‘understand’ the position, they played correctly and achieved a draw despite believing they had a likely win. However, some programs set to a low level of skill were so convinced they should win, they refused the draw through repeated position. They accepted losing the bishops one after another until they blundered into a losing position, allowing the white pawn on the sixth rank to be advanced and turned into a queen. To make this actually happen requires a bit of trickery and a great deal of patience.
...
Several people gave creative answers to the problem, such as to rotate the board 90 degrees and/or invert the colours. Since we were slightly ambiguous in our drawing, these solutions are legitimate creative interpretations.
We also asked you to tell us how it ‘felt’ to solve the problem. Most of you, and particularly the practised players, saw the position immediately. Others went away, came back and had an ‘aha’ moment. A few got the puzzle wrong, but this was mainly due to lack of practise or misunderstanding. We hope to study these ‘aha’ moments as part of the research at The Penrose Institute and might even contact some of you in the future to participate in this research."
To be honest, I'm pretty disappointed with his answer. It turns out that everything is relative and everyone can become a genius just playing against a weak program. But maybe the professor doesn't want to tell us the secret and still waiting for the right solution? Or the idea was to identify a genius among the people who had those "aha" moments? I'm not sure. What do you think? Fell free to share your thoughts about it all.