Psychological Process of Learning Chess

Iconoclast

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Expository Essay (Process Analysis), Final Draft
The Psychological Process of Learning Chess
Comments This is supposed to be a four-page essay. I really like teaching things to develop my own understanding, so regardless if any of you have the damn balls to read through any of this spanning I don't really have much else to do with this now in its objectional form.

Of the many games, chess is perhaps the board game most documented by nearly a thousand published books and older writings dedicated entirely to teaching between either all of the basics of the game or perfecting play in one of the many concepts. No one is known to have ever mastered chess, and the titles of "master" and "grandmaster" are only truly given as worldwide-competitive ranks preceding the world champion rank. Even the best of chess players are known more so by their specialization in the game by its three unique phases: the opening, the middle-game, and the endgame.

In the opening phase both sides develop their armies, pronounce their plans on how to approach leading the game, and accept the risk of giving information away to their opponent. It begins from the initial position of a chess game and ends based on the opening sequence chosen. Every pawn move creates a permanent weakness because they can never move backwards, but there are two special first moves that are covered here. Moving the King's knight to the third square of the King's bishop's file is the opening move that gives away the least amount of information to Black because it emphasizes love of the initial position and enforces continuing the information already given between both sides by the existence of that beginning position. For this reason it is the most flexible opening move. Moving the Queen's knight to the third square of the Queen's bishop's file generally does the opposite and neutralizes the strength of the initial position. For this reason this hateful move also avoids giving away information to the opponent by balancing emphasis over natural continuations to less natural ways of playing. In the beginning position the King's knight "the Knight of Love" may take no less than five moves to reach the square of the enemy King, but the Knight of Hatred can reach that square in four moves.

The middle-game phase begins where both sides are thought to have generally finished introducing their thematic styles in the chosen opening system. In this phase both sides justify their ideas of leadership and sometimes may approach checkmating the other side if the game is based on strong differences. When the white army is being mimicked by Black, this most often is said to be agreement or sometimes peace with your ideas, but properties such as "check"--in which the enemy's King must command a move removing him from danger as if it could otherwise be captured on the next move--and moves crossing the horizontal line of symmetry on the board, are two important elements that guarantee mimicking is never eternal in a serious game. Thus the longer a perfectly symmetrical game continues, more interested should the players be when a difference must arise. The real challenge in middle-game analysis is more frequently reserving destructive attacks that may succeed in a conscious repertoire while developing patiently in certain games. Patient development occurs through better natural understanding of the consequences of your decisions up until the ability to predict endgame results, but when one side may destroy the enemy with sacrifices or other major positional commands, truth may end the game quickly if the side enduring such attacks does not surrender defensively for a painful but cleaner chessboard at best.

When both sides have survived long enough, fewer pieces remain on the board. Even after so many captures and questions, it seems checkmate isn't within near sight. The two Kings begin to move out of safety to get involved towards the center of the board. New ways of looking at the board and how to win (such as 'patronizing' the enemy King to move out of the way to give your King ground) begin to appear, and beginners begin to see their natural talent at the game fail to correspond to this new fight. When patterns like these show on the board the current phase is called the endgame phase. Few chess games make it this far, and a position in which the game is not a draw can be as simple as that in which only the two kings and a rook are left on the board. The most challenging endgame analysis that even many of the greatest chess players have failed to succeed in is the process of checkmating with only your King, your bishop, and your knight against the enemy King. Often the Fifty Move Draw Rule--in which professional games can be declared by either side as drawn after fifty moves of no capturing or moves advancing pawns--intervenes in this mentally intensive process. However, it is known to be always possible to force, and much documentation has been written solely on this process.

Completely distributed mastery of all phases as a general master of chess can be answered by manufactured (or machine) intelligence. Even though there are crucial differences between this and human intelligence, private researchers of the game who engineer software have better understood the process that the human mind goes through in thinking on a chess position. Since after 1980, many advanced but fundamental questions have been raised on the development of a chess calculator that, if answered, would contribute greatly to the understanding of the functions of the human mind.

It has been said that computers never make mistakes. This idea is true for their functions based on arithmetic and logic, but chess is one of the most physically difficult applications for mathematics and, by proof, logic. Even geometry and statistics may apply not so much with chess as with many other problems. In today's engineering intelligence, no one has ever designed some specific mathematical function to solve a chess position for the perfect move, yet humanity succeeds well in the game without the worry of assumptions over clearly useful conjectures. For this reason, the following basic idea of emulation of human analysis of chess is approached most commonly.

To begin with, chess computers store the inputted position as a table of variables essentially and other values, and they use classes to define legal moves to check the position for a list of legal moves. They then analyze consequential positions that would result from each of those moves (beginning from the bottom-left corner square of the board as the origin by practice), and they choose the move whose resulting position has the highest numerical value assigned based on the observation of human-defined patterns to look for. When all positions resulting from all of the currently legal moves of the current position have been checked, the computer is said to have completed the first Ply of analysis. At a depth of two Ply, the computer has also checked all of the positions consequential to its opponent's reactions to each of its moves, and so forth in later Ply the number of positional evaluations (nodes) grows exponentially.

Often humans best improve at chess by inspiring themselves with winning attacks as beginners but reflecting on their losing games as advanced players, and one of the greatest difficulties is trying to learn to improve with this switched around (or playing computer opponents). In my experience, I have heard many students ask questions (And in no other way would I have remembered my consideration of these questions when I was beginning.) such as, "If I consistently play on the defensive throughout the course of the entire game can I never lose," or "Is a perfect way to play more related to a secret procedure of developing your own army as a team without any capturing of pieces or focus on your enemy until a clear mistake has been made," or "If chess games can never be won without the property of check or checkmate, wouldn't chess play be better in the long run when such play makes commands implying only direct concerns involving our two kings?" In the time that players learn to surrender these fascinating but skeptical concepts in trade for learning the game by practice and lectured analysis of positions of the many sorts, it seems self-awareness is gained at the cost of memory. Only after great improvement can we normally continue to learn playing chess without an artistic-compositional view of the game.
 
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