Chess originated in India before the 6th century and reached its current usage
in Europe during the 15th century. It is the game of war, battles and politics,
in short, doubtful activities. Much of the philosophy you may
see in the game is still true today. Let us start with the king. Everything in
the game is about the king. The king is respected, is rich, has glamor, but is a
symbol and a fool. He could be as well a goat; assuming his father was also a
goat and a king. All his enemies want to kill him. In fact, they want to kill
everybody, but at most the hostile king. They do not know exactly why, only that
is war, and that it is needed. The king is a pain in the neck
for his government. Actually, his wife the queen can be seen as the commander-in-chief,
who has most of the power. The king is only a fool and a coward. In a
miserable condition, he moves only a slow step on the battlefield, and is much too vulnerable. The best a chess player can
do is to place the king out of the way and protect him by a couple of pawns.
This is called castling.
The queen is very feminine, intelligent, and dynamic; she has
it. If she wants, she can go to any place of the board, in two steps at most.
As many women, she has a passion for colors. She insists on a light
colored start-square if she is white and on a dark colored start-square if she
is black. Her man don’t care about such things, he cares about nothing for as
long he is safe in his castle with his iPad. She has a good relationship with
her political bishops, too good some believe, and she is very competent to lead
and mislead the mighty rooks. The queen, the rooks, the bishops, and the knights
can be seen as the government, which actually fights the ware game. The knights,
coming out the working class, are the minor; they are more soft-soap for the
people. During a war, a government needs the sympathy of the lower classes and
knights are well to control. They are the workhorses and you mostly see them as
such.
GambitVB has more value for knights. Sure, knights need many steps to go to another place on the battlefield sometimes, but within its own area, the knight
is very fit and very proficient. Moreover, he cannot be blocked by others, unlike the
queen, the rooks, and the bishops. GambitVB classifies knights as good as the
bishops, although the bishops are very popular with the minor classes. GambitVB
thinks that is because of their outfit and he sees that they have equivalent
restrictions as the knights: for their whole life they can only be on either the
dark board squares or the light squares, thus half of the board. The rooks are
like the queen, very strong, but can be easier blocked on the field. The early
chess games in history used elephants rather than rooks, but today they could be
as well apache helicopters. Very strong and aggressive, but have to operate
close to the ground, what makes them touchable. And they are expensive; if you
loose such a beast, you probably loose the war. Probably, because you almost
never know the future in a chess game, like in a war, or in our lives.
Some chess players have no respect for pawns; they sometimes sacrifice them for
more chess game pleasure; that is really true. GambitVB will never do so. Not
because he is so respectful, oh no, if he smells blood, he becomes terrible
aggressive without any compassion. Sometimes, I am ashamed for my own creation.
No, GambitVB knows that winning or loosing a war does not depend upon the king,
the glamorous queen, the rooks, the bishops and the humble knights,
but on the pawns. It can be that after a battle, the hostile king can be
killed, sure, you never know. But most of the time, everybody kills everybody,
except the kings, some lonely pieces and some pawns. The pawns came
with a lot and usually a few survive.
To play a better chess game, you need to know the theory of tactics and
strategies. It is interesting to see how those relate to the real war game. In
chess, tactics have to do with foreseeing the future in the game. It looks that
the military are incapable for that; they always wait for the behavior of the
enemy seen in the previous war. On the other hand, chess players are much more
intelligent and look for which moves can be played, what the answers can be, and
what the answers on the answers can be. A chess player cannot do that forever, he
has not enough time and he has not enough neurons. A computer can do that much
better and can win over the chess player. It is said that the best chess program
running on the best computer can beat the world chess champion, but that looks a
fake. Please, keep the following confidential; GambitVB does not play according
the rules of chess. What he does is like a chess player with a copy of the chessboard on his lap under the table. A ghost board
viciously used to move the pieces to possible positions in the future for
examination. That is strongly prohibited during a chess game, but who knows and
who cares.
Better chess players see tactical maneuvers on the board madly fast, like better
readers read books. In addition, they know a lot about chess strategy. You can
buy hundreds of books about chess strategy. GambitVB is weak on strategy; he
never buys such books and I think it is extremely difficult to learn a computer
application what better chess is. By the way, the military is ok with strategy. They
have plenty of money to buy their armaments and to visit the user-guide workshops. Chess
strategy is about the phases of the game. Everybody knows there is an opening, a
middle game, an end game, and each phase has its own approach, its rules of the
thumb, its recommendations. That’s clear, but you cannot do much with that
knowledge. There are so many openings, many sub-phases in the middle game, and
awful many end games. That is not all, where exactly begins a particular
phase or sub phase? That is mostly insecure and no chess player can make that
crystal clear. A chess player uses his gut feelings and makes his educated
guesses. That is not only about a current board position; he also
anticipates the behavior of his opponent; he has an instinct or something like
that. On the other
hand, chess-move search algorithms normally assume that the
opponent always plays the best move. If a computer plays stronger chess than
you do, he sees more than you see and sees good opportunities for you. Subsequently, he
tries to avoid those opportunities for you, and spoils its time with tactics and
strategies that would have never happened, because you would not have seen it.
Who said that computers do things more efficient? And who said that this is
artificial intelligence?
There is also good news; there is a red thread through the chess phases:
strategy is all about pawns. They must free the way for the minor and major
pieces, which have to be placed on strategic positions. They should go onwards to
the frontline, but also protect the king who stays in his castle. They should
protect each other. Sure, other pieces do protect them as well, but those loose
their attention rather fast seeing things that are more exciting. Something surprising, charming, and heart warming
happens to the king in the endgame. He is still in his castle, but his power has
been minimized. He still has his iPad, but nevertheless, he is missing his wife,
the queen. She was raped and killed, a common leisure-time activity in wartime.
The king finds its way to the frontline and he unite himself with his pawns. He
finds there a nice female pawn and promotes her to his queen. Gender reassignment
is also possible; he learned that on his iPad at home. I do no know how he did
it in the early ages. Below his opponent, less successful.
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