How Life Imitates Chess
Is it possible to be overly rational in chess? If we disregard the intended pun in the title of Kasparov’s book, one can say that chess as a simulation of life is far from perfect. Chess is a zero sum game, life is not always. Chess is all about fight, when it is not, it does not fulfil its purpose, while life is hopefully more than just fight. It is fairly easy to describe how can one act overly rational in life: if in certain situations one is guided by ratio instead of by emotions, instinct or intuition, one is described as a calculated person, if one always looks for compensation, utility, and counterfavours and never for charity one cannot be descibed as generous, if one is strict in controlling expenses one is said to be cheap. How about chess?
Comments (45)
What kind of answer are you looking for? A rational one as far as I can tell but that is a point against what seems to be your thesis - that we're overly rational [on occasion I suppose]. I sense a contradiction in your approach - you don't trust rationality but you wish for rationality to prove that rationality can't be trusted. Nice paradox!
Chess software doesn't program in emotion, so I think the way to win is entirely through rationality.
There is of course a human element in chess and it is possible to play on psychological anxieties of the opposition. I believe it was Tartkower who said that the best move in chess is the one that causes most problems for your opponent. Mikhail Tal is notorious for playing combinative attacking chess that is upon close analysis often incorrect, but befuddled his opponents. Still also Tal will have to accept that with correct play on both sides one move is better than another.
He compared chess to bridge. He considered bridge to be an example pf a game adhering to the 'English' (Humean) conception that truth is a matter of consensus between people. In bridge, together making sense of the situation in which both partners are in, is key to victory. Most of the 'board' is actually hidden and the point is to assess the probabilties given and communicating them correctly to your partner.
Whether everything he says is correct is debatable, but I think his main insight holds: life is not like chess, but bridge comes a lot closer...
Nice post. I'm also a chess player (around 2000/2100 on chess.com) and I agree with you in some respects and disagree in others. I agree that life is not really like chess; chess to me is basically war, especially under short time controls. The more calculated, careful player does not always win. Chess really ought to be played under some sort of time control, it's just a matter of what time control we're talking about. One absolutely must manage their thinking and calculation time efficiently/treat it as a resources, and resources are not endless and require proper management.
I am not too sure that there is an objectively best move in every situation. I remember Hikaru Nakamura commented on his stream one time that there's typically 3-4 'good' moves in a normal, non-sharp position and my own thinking more lends itself to pragmatism so until that "objectively" best move is demonstrated I'll probably remain a little skeptical. I would also ask what makes a certain move in a non-sharp normal middle game superior to another when considering 2-3 candidate good moves. I think perfect chess on both sides would just always result in a draw. We're really just talking about the ability to navigate a game tree and hoping your opponent screws up, but if your opponent is perfect then he'll navigate the game tree perfectly and so will you... so draw.
Anyway your points about Tal and Tarkatower were spot on - how chess has evolved!
This can be also about the Kasparov’s book. Namely, here at wikipedia are mentioned only two reviews, none of them is very favourable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Life_Imitates_Chess
Unlike this one: https://blas.com/how-life-imitates-chess/
You can most certainly be too rational in chess. And in poker, for that matter.
One instance of that might be Karpov’s reluctance to give up a pawn if not entirely sure it leads to a win?
No, one plays less than rationally all the time, in chess and in poker. Why? Because if you can tell, from experience, intuition, instinct, etc., that the other player is bad and in what ways he's bad, you can very easily take advantage of it by making moves that are sub-optimal, even bad. That's not playing like a computer would play, which is completely based on logic but has no clue about their opponents.
I would never use the scholar's mate against a good player, for instance. Against a child, yes. A computer, however, would not. To play a child the way a computer would is to be way too rational/logical/theoretical about the game.
What is the kind of thought process that can give away a 1:50 advantage in response time to reasonably decent players?
https://youtu.be/uoJFnuJv60c
https://youtu.be/1lXeygPM5CY
Even more impressive to me are blind simultaneous games, and in one of them Magnus received moves out of order (along with the table number), whenever the opponent had one, which must be yet another level harder, than playing in normal sequence, I guess. I never learned how to play blind, whenever I tried, I would soon be lost after a few moves, and I can’t imagine how they manage to do any of that. Although each chess player has to have certain visualization capabilities in order to be able to analyze a few moves ahead, without actually moving pieces on the board, that is immensely harder when you cannot look at the board.
Chess imitates a battle, not life. Life does not imitate chess, it does not imitate anything...Battles of course are a part of life, so there are situations in which chess comparisons are helpful. Bridge of course also does not imitate life, but it imitates some kind of negotiation game or decision making under consitions of uncertainty. Therefore there are some situations in life which can be compared to bridge. Other than that I do not see much point in such analogies.
The OP doesn't seem to extend the analogy to anything "other than that". In fact, all analogies are limited to similarities and that's that!
Apart from this being a paradoxical affirmation and negation of critical thinking - it seeks or asks for a good reason why reason is bad - it also relies on an analogy that exposes the OP's got it backwards. Chess imitates life not the other way round.
Too, Inter arma enim silent leges. The only law that people seem to possess a natural instinct to "obey" is the "law" of the jungle. Chess has unbreakable, inflexible rules - do anything whacky with your pieces and you're out of the game, literally and figuratively. In life, rules are changed, bent and broken to suit the needs of the day - this happens most often and as anticipated when the stakes are high and when are stakes not high, right?
In a social setting that might be different. The one not calculating a lot and acting spontaneous might actually have an advantage in building bridges to other people. Calculation in a social setting might be seen as cold while in chess with its win or lose parameters it is always virtuous. So sure, chess and life can be usefully compared but there are fundamental differences, this being one of them.
G.K Chesterton, that glib, facile thinker, said something about insanity resulting from rationality, and I think may have pointed to chess and chess players as evidence of this claim. But I think to be rational is to be reasonable, and don't think one can be "overly reasonable." At the higher levels, though, I think chess play has become less and less a matter of intuition and ingenuity. I don't think there's much room left for inspired play among grandmasters; too much is book. But I may be wrong.
I recall reading somewhere that aesthetics used to the fashion in chess at some point in history, don't recall what era.
Indeed, some can play dozens of blind chess games simultaneously.
That makes sense to me. I think it still does, at least for me. For example, there are some openings/defenses which I think look better than others, a judgment which has little or nothing to do with their merits. Not to say that aesthetics is purely a matter "looking good." But I have to admit that some defenses, for example, simply "look" or "feel" good to me. e.g. the Dutch Defense, though it weakens the king side.
I think that's true. But the assessment of responses is, I think, a process of judging what is reasonable given the position and rules of the game.
In the wiki article on chess aesthetics that I just looked up I guess the specific aesthetic factor in the Dutch Defense would be paradox, the range of things that violate 'good practice' in chess, for example, the deliberate exposure of one's king.
All the factors:
Two robots (resembling humans in appearance) sit down to play chess. They both look at the board in its initial set-up for a long time. Then the taller one, playing white declares without moving a piece: "Mate in 243 moves." The other one exclaims: "Aw! You always win!"
:up:
:rofl: Yer such a smartass :rofl:
Actually I think that it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that chess software can more or less simulate emotion. In my recently updated chess.con app, for example, they’ve added ‘personalities’ to the computer matches. Some of them are more aggressive than others or display varying combination (see list of aesthetic factors in my previous post) styles.
Those programmed in personalities might make for a more interesting game, but not a stronger one.
I'm stating the obvious here. If you name your calculator George and program it to have a happy go lucky personality and to ask you about your day, it's worth as a calculator will still only be measured by how well it adds and subtracts.
That's not entirely true, because we're not entirely rational beings. Studies show that the devices we use, such as calculators, are typically judged to function better if they're aesthetically appealing, even if they don't actually function better than less aesthetically appealing devices.
In chess, a particular programmed pattern or style of play may throw off a human player for some reason without it actually being a more powerful or deep thinking program.
This is a decent summary of the discussion. Plus, convincing oneself that suboptimal play is intentional, is rationalization. Every now and then it may be, the rest of the time it is a result of incapability to find a better move.
This I don’t like. There is no such goal, and not participating much in philosophical discussions, I did not know that rationality is “all-time philosophical blue-eyed boy”, otherwise I probably would not raise this question at all. Although, in that case I would also still not know who is Jane Elliott.
I can only wonder how you came to such conclusions, I am certainly not apologetic about using arms to bend or break rules, and install the law of jungle instead of civilization, I don’t think I could thrive in such circumstances. Probably this was caused by my mentioning of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry
I also don’t understand fixation on the title that was supposed to be witty, joke, funny. How many times one has to repeat it?
I think that rationality is a fundamental human virtue, especially when it allows you to calculate that the best life strategy is to always be true to yourself. The fact that it can be unnecessary or even excessive in certain aspects of life, does not undermine the fact that it is irreplaceable in others, such as science, math, technology, engineering, economy, ...
Little does the little kaka know that I preempted his queen's gambit by very cleverly having got a divorce seven years ago. Hahaha!
Between my arms, silent legs.
What does this have to do with chess?
:rofl: Good one!
What could have been known to Chesterton, Steinitz was the worst example of, not excessive rationality, but excessive mental activity and stress caused by chess, leading to insanity. However, there are other factors that may have affected Steinitz, such as syphilis and financial problems. Until today, I didn’t know who was Chesterton, so, thank you for this post.
People can be just as rude. In fact I’ve disabled chat in the app that I use because people are too often that way online.
He can be quite amusing and is insightful sometimes. A clever man rather than a thoughtful one, I think.
Nobody objected to this, but if this is really true, that such conclusion can be a result of calculation, can anyone show the exact procedure? In mathematical examination, presenting a correct method is equally important as presenting a correct result. What I meant there is that a good calculation ability is a fundamental human virtue, despite of the fact that a calculated person is considered a negative attribute connotation.
And not be true to yourself may mean different things, intentional self deception, denial of truth, or unintentional bad self assessment. So, to calculate anything about it, one should first define precisely what is it exactly one is talking about.