I've played about 5 games of chess on my iPad this evening.
I have all these chess games all with learning tools. But most of the time except for obvious blunders, I am not sure why the computer analysis line is superior, especially in a conceptual sense.
I am also a paying member of chess.com which has thousands of educational lectures and training tools. All for, the most part, very good.
I guess this is my frustration with chess and other games. Having to chose between working hard to improve or playing repeatedly as a poorly ranked idiot. All I want are games that can point out my mistakes in some presentation that resembles how I actually think!
So, who are you? Scholar or idiot?
I'm a morosoph. 8)
I prefer grand strategy/civ building/TBS games. I only play the ones that I show some proficiency in. I will put as much effort in as I can for a period of time to learn the game. If my understanding of the game becomes clearer, I continue to play. Otherwise, it's relegated to the non played pile.
The type of work I do allows me a great amount of time to self entertain. If a game has my attention, I will plan my next several moves while I work. When I get home, I will put them into play. I try to play through the consequences of my moves regardless of the outcome. I learn something about why what I did worked or didn't.
I'm hopeless at chess though ;-)
Which would I be if my primary joy is in the learning of new complex gaming systems, and not actually playing one, repeatedly, for long periods?
Idiot, I believe. ;)
I'm just starting to get more reluctant to learn new systems. I'll give it a go and if it doesn't click right away; I'm done. Mental fatigue or something.
I remember it took me about 50 games to finally beat Fritz 12. I literally did a victory dance around my computer room.
Did you beat it running at full bore maximum ELO?
If so, I suspect the EXE was suffering a memory leak that day, or you, Sir, are a closet Grand Master!
Haha! Yeah right. The ELO couldn't have been any lower. I'm thinking checkers or tic-tac-toe might be more my speed.
Quote from: MarkShot on September 22, 2012, 07:41:33 PM
I've played about 5 games of chess on my iPad this evening.
I have all these chess games all with learning tools. But most of the time except for obvious blunders, I am not sure why the computer analysis line is superior, especially in a conceptual sense.
I am also a paying member of chess.com which has thousands of educational lectures and training tools. All for, the most part, very good.
I guess this is my frustration with chess and other games. Having to chose between working hard to improve or playing repeatedly as a poorly ranked idiot. All I want are games that can point out my mistakes in some presentation that resembles how I actually think!
So, who are you? Scholar or idiot?
Scholar
So, Jim, what is your ratio of study to play?
I am kind of funny. I'll invest a lot of time when I start out to study something. But after I get that initial boost of improvement I tend to slack off and not hit the books.
Of course games with ELO ratings only rub it in, since you can see that your progress is stagnant!
Chess seems far more limiting than playing wargames.
I respect its heritage. But I'd rather push pewter, cardboard, or pixels.
Quote from: LongBlade on September 22, 2012, 11:51:00 PM
Chess seems far more limiting than playing wargames.
I respect its heritage. But I'd rather push pewter, cardboard, or pixels.
I'm in Longblade's camp.
I very much remember teaching Chess to myself at around 8 yrs old, by RTFM'ing, but since then it's not been terribly high on my huge list of new shinies. ;D
Yep, but you'll never find a better programmed AI than chess.
That's why I am drawn to chess. I hate it when you play a game for 3-6 months and can finally best the AI and despite your love of it, the honeymoon is over. I don't MP or PBEM.
I could play chess until my dying day and I will never be able to beat any of the games I have running at their max capability.
Remember there was this original Star Trek episode where this immortal guy had been grooming this immortal hot female android (as in robot; not smart phone) to spend all eternity with him. That's kind of the way it is with me and chess engines. They will never let me down unless William Shatner comes along and makes their NAND gates go all piter-pater!
I love chess. I love it so much that I even enjoy losing. Which is often. But I always try to have at least one take-away. And thinking 2-3 steps ahead in chess has helped me improve my everyday thinking too. Seriously.
Not sure if that makes me a scholar or idiot though.
Quote from: MarkShot on September 22, 2012, 10:00:22 PM
So, Jim, what is your ratio of study to play?
I am kind of funny. I'll invest a lot of time when I start out to study something. But after I get that initial boost of improvement I tend to slack off and not hit the books.
Of course games with ELO ratings only rub it in, since you can see that your progress is stagnant!
3:1
Do you have a favorite chess engine, Gus? And why?
Why yes. The Wife. She is excellent at the game and usually takes 2 or 3 games from me but I always learn from her. I have never played AI chess, if you can believe it. I have always been intrigued but since many humans can beat me, I have never felt ready.
I do like chess and have played it since I was school. Does anyone play Shogi, which is Japanese chess?
Is Shogi the same as the Chinese game of Go with the black and white stones?
Also sounds a little bit like the old MB game Othello.
Quote from: MarkShot on September 23, 2012, 12:40:26 PM
Is Shogi the same as the Chinese game of Go with the black and white stones?
No they are quite different. Go is the game with the B+W stones and is essentially an capture game. Shogi is much more like chess insofar it is played on a squared board (9x9) and used different movable pieces. However, there are some very big differencies. For one thing, all the 'men' are the same colour and are shaped so that the 'pointed' end faces your oponent. Given certain circumstances, in lieu of a move, you can 'drop' a captured piece on the board orientated against your oponent. In addition, many of the pieces have a 'promotion' side which give them extra abilities (the pieces are flat and have a Japanese symbol on each side). Three 'squares' out from each side of the board is a line called the promotion line, and when you cross your oponents line you can 'promote' the piece by flipping it over, again within certain restrictions.
There is no queen, so you do not have a single powerful piece. What tends to happen is that you spend a lot of effort on building up an assault that results in a exchanges - the object being to finish up with more of his men than you lose. Its very attritional, and quite complex. You can find a lot about it on the web.
I do have a set, just a cheapo one that I managed to find years ago - the main problem is finding some bugger to play it with!
Sho-Gi means 'Wooden Comander, or so I'm led to believe.
Sorry for any spilling mistooks - seems like the spil chucker has gone tats ip. :)
Interesting. I never heard of Shogi before. I know Go is supposed to be far more complex than Chess and computer implementations are at best mediocre. Are there Shogi engines?
I was actually going to learn to play Cantonese (or HK) mahjong, since it is so ubiquitous. But since we decided to go to Taiwan instead of Macau ... I am no longer planning on it.
Bob, so, how did you get introduced to the game?
Gus, you play any other board or computer games with your wife? My wife last played CIVNET with me 20 years ago. She never forgave me for doing a tank rush, and that was the last game we ever played. :(
Actually, I should take that back. When I was trading stocks (not exactly a game), but my wife had a lot to discuss with me with regards to candle stick charts, setting the best price for the next day's open, stop loss orders, earnings season, whisper numbers, etc... (I still need to some time put together my thread on the game of stock trading in the real world. I learned so much, but not enough to win!)
One last comment on the market ...
You could read books and understand moving averages, Bollinger Bands, Stochastics, Oscillators, ... and feel like a "scholar", but by the closing bell, I often felt like an "idiot". :)
I found out about Shogi in a UK Games mag, many years ago, in which there was an article about it. I had just been introduced to Go and thus got quite interested in oriental games in general. I managed to track down a copy of the game, (which I still have), and learned to play it.
Another interesting game is XiangQi, which is Chinese chess, and is totally different from either Shogi or 'western' chess, although I have not been able to get a copy of that.
Its now pretty easy to buy all these games now, although a few years ago they were little known in the West, but do now enjoy a considerable following (there has been a Go Association for a long time).
As a matter of interest, there are several different versions of Shogi using a variety of board size and extra playing pieces, although these are mainly played by Tibetan Monks (I kid you not). The largest one was recently discovered in a monastry and featured a massive board with hundreds of playing pieces - something like 128 per side!
Anyway - here's a link for you;
http://www.crockford.com/chess/shogi.html
Between globalization and the Internet and China's re-emergence on the World stage, there is is renewed interest in the East. Years ago no one was learning Chinese in the USA. I took one semester before going overseas, since a friend of mine was teaching it and in jeopardy of being cut due to lack of enrollment. (mainly it was Chinese kids from NYC's Chinatown looking to coast through with an easy A ... just me and one other guy, and the prof, were the only non-Chinese) Now, my local suburban/rural high school teaches Mandarin.
However, there was a period in the late 1980s when the American business community was enamored with all things Japanese. But that died when their economy tanked.
A few months ago I was working really hard on reading and writing Chinese, but I just got too busy. Too bad ... I wish Taiwan would just learn to speak Cantonese instead of Mandarin. My wife always holds a grudge as in the national language referendum Mandarin won by one vote ... cast by Dr. Sun Yat Sen (father of the Republic) who was, himself, Cantonese, but voted for Mandarin to promote unity. Aaargh!!!
Is your Wife Taiwanese?
Judging by my performance in AJE, most definitely Idiot.
No, she is Cantonese from Macau which had been a Portuguese colony (oldest in Asia). Macau was returned to the PRC in 1999 two years after Hong Kong.
We met in Taipei in the early 80's while I was working for the military. She was an overseas student on a scholarship at National Taiwan University.
The KMT (ruling party at the time) offered people in her situation citizenship. Quite a few of her college friends from Macau and Hong Kong remained. Others have gone back to Taiwan. Now, we are also returning, but I'll be on the equivalent of a Green Card.
(posted wrong thread)
Unfortunately The Wife and I only play chess...I have been unable to get her interested in gaming with me but my daughters appear ready to start.
I've been taking Jim's ratio to heart. I've been doing mentor and tactics from chess.com. Lot's of practice, but only played one game tonight.
I'm a scholar, but a casual one.
What always limited my interest in chess is that there's only one game to learn--and it's the infinite complexity of that game which makes it seems so repetitive to me. I like most TBS computer games, because they are typically composed of far more finite mini-games. It's the interaction between those games that makes it interesting.
In Civ and almost all the 4X games it has since spawned, you have multiple games--a strategic map, individual city-building choices, research choices, etc.--that all influence and interact with each other. I like not just taking apart the individual games, but trying to arrive at an intuitive understanding of the relationship between those games, as well as the killer combos that might work best. (e.g., "If I'm playing the Dwarves in Master of Magic, and I find an Adamantium mine, then as soon as I start producing the heavily armored Hammerhands, my movement up the power curve explodes.")
I don't like building nuclear reactors in my spare time. Just paper airplanes. But when I start to see and manage the complicated interactions between the paper airplanes I'm building, that's when I love a game.
Well, I found the balance between mentor and tactic exercises between fun and learning. Books and lectures can be too much like school.
Chess is now a good choice, since I'll be sharing the iPad2 and laptop with my wife. But I have chess everywhere. Also, I think I am going to be in the hospital for a week. I wouldn't want to leave an iPad around the room, but a little handheld chess computer I could afford to lose.
I eventually found a link showing the largest Shogi varient. Take a look, guys, its really something!
http://history.chess.free.fr/taikyokushogi.htm
I wonder how long a game lasted? Was it the WitP of its generation?
Ouch! Idiot!
(https://www.grogheads.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fhome.comcast.net%2F%7Emarkshot%2Ftempimages%2FSNAG-0000.jpg&hash=0a524be5a40ea6527def7f07c12511db2b5d18cd)
Quote from: Staggerwing on September 22, 2012, 08:00:07 PM
I'm a morosoph. 8)
we must be related, as I am a moronosaurus
Quote from: MarkShot on September 24, 2012, 06:08:19 AM
I wonder how long a game lasted? Was it the WitP of its generation?
lol - yes, but only if you're a Tibetan monk!
It seems no matter how much I invest in exercises, I still play like an idiot. Chess, that is.
Maybe you're trying too hard. Best way (IMHO) is to just play and enjoy the game, you will find you get better without realising it.
Quote from: bob48 on September 27, 2012, 03:08:28 PM
Maybe you're trying too hard. Best way (IMHO) is to just play and enjoy the game, you will find you get better without realising it.
give it time MarkShot, it takes more than a few knights to master.
...was that a gauntlet i heard hitting the floor......?
Quote from: bob48 on September 27, 2012, 03:32:57 PM
...was that a gauntlet i heard hitting the floor......?
I wouldn't want to rook you into it
Is that just a gambit?
Quote from: bob48 on September 27, 2012, 04:05:37 PM
Is that just a gambit?
not really, just something I do 'in passing'
groan!
OK, you win mate.
Quote from: bob48 on September 27, 2012, 04:09:46 PM
groan!
OK, you win mate.
play the latest version of warlock yet? 1.3?
Yeah, I've got an Elf campaign on the go atm - good stuff, innit.