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Showing posts from April, 2021

On Explanations in Chess

I was watching this  video on youtube  in which Gary Kasparov says that machines revealed so many secrets, and magic or mysteries of the game of chess are gone because you could see it through the lenses of computer and even an amateur can actually understand immediately what is happening at the chessboard thanks to the machine’s advice. There is another video that I cannot find anymore in which he is more specific and says that engines can explain what’s going on. And he is right of course, in the context of chess, every explanation is expressible first and foremost in the language of moves, which engines do speak, however, besides that, human mind tends to reason abstractly about it, create concepts expressible in natural language, mastering of which is something that people primarily refer to when they speak about “understanding chess”, otherwise everyone can understand if he or she is losing consistently, that is kind of obvious directly from the moves, but why exactly this happens