The Axiom System - Part 3: How Do We Make Decisions

@NimzoFloridian said in #19:
> Personally, I think modern chess concepts (words) like "initiative, space, development, material" have real value in the see and evaluate skills. Often when I am weighing one move over another, I will consider what these moves do for me, and how important that specific concept currently is in the position. Also, when identifying candidates, I might ask questions like "What can I do to keep the initiative?" or "What are good candidates for continuing my development?" or even better: "Do I have any moves that accomplish or initiate several ideas at once."
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> For example when playing the white side of a Yugoslav Attack in the Dragon, often material is less important than the other three. So in my move choices I will be less inclined to preserve my h-pawn if losing it advances one or more of the other three significantly. Mind you, concrete variations are still important, but when I am making a "good decision" I tend to allow these modern chess concepts to help direct where I will spend the most time evaluating.
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> Still, I like where you are going with this. Your main point is not that modern chess concepts are wrong per se, but that they may not be a good basis for improvement. Learning them, while useful, may have poor returns on improvement, if you haven't refined your mental processes for move selection. I agree! But they are still ultimately useful, IMO.

Thank you for your thoughtful and constructive feedback! Indeed it may be the case that certain concepts from modern chess are beneficial when it comes to seeing and evaluating. I actually believe this to be true specifically with seeing (and I'll discuss this more when I talk about the idea of 'vision tools' later). However I'm more sceptical of the helpfulness of such concepts when evaluating - that's what I'll be discussing in the next part.

@SmaragdElefant said in #20:
> if

Thank you for your feedback and comment. I can appreciate that you are arguing in good faith and I'll try to address your points.

I provided that part where I said "Jack, duh! Everybody already knows that..." in anticipation of people annoyed with my tone and so on might react. I'm not saying that they are correct though - because they are not. Not everyone knows about the idea of the decision making process consisting of only two fundamental processes - seeing and evaluating.

I don't agree that it's pointless to write such things. Even though on reflection the statements might seem quite intuitive, sometimes seemingly simple statements can lead to more interesting conclusions quite rapidly, such as every mistake in an unknown position is either due to flawed vision or flawed evaluation.

Apologies but I don't quite understand your other critiques, however, I will explore statements such as "Do you think it is better to learn to judge if a knight is strong or weak against a bishop in a position" in the next article, where I will argue that learning explicit chess concepts to help justify/deduce the evaluation of a certain position is likely impossible.

I can't help but think that you're underplaying the importance of the known positions. I would argue that known positions(memorization) are at least as important as unknown positions.(decision making process) There are two reasons for this: 1 -the opening is the most important part of the game, the middle game is an extension of the opening and 2- chess is a timed game and spending time thinking on move five for example in a theoretically known position is going to put you at a major disadvantage (yes, maybe it's possible to logically deduce what the actual theory is at the bored but this is not only impractical but also terrifying) In my experience, In a lot of unknown positions, the only reason I was able to find a working plan was because of my knowledge of a known position that resembled it (for example, if black plays the owen's defence with e6 and d5 it starts to resemble a french defense, therefore one can start to transpose ideas even into the middlegame. So my argument is that known positions are more important because of the fact that they improve your decision making in unknown positions.

@DailyInsanity

Yes, in some way I think the next article could be interessting because I don't understand the main idea. Of course rules or guidelines will never be perfect. You could say that they are a kind of stereotype and stereotypes aren't helpful for good decisions. And at the same time we know that we need a point of reference to chose a move. We are not engines that can just calculate all alternatives in 20 moves depth and decide on that information.

I don't have an idea for the alternative that a human can do. We have more or less accurate points of reference that we are searching in unknown positions and then there are less unknown and more familiar. We could set intermediate goals and so on. Maybe there are some bad rules, but I cannot believe that they are wrong at all. Maybe some people use rules in an unhealthy way and take them as dogma.

For example there is a really good explanation by Tarrasch how to win endgame of knight/bishop/king against king.
You push the king on the edge of the board and in the wrong corner. And then there are only one correct move per piece and there are 3 possible tasks that moves could have and you can focus on the move that is next for every piece and ask your-self if it would fit to task 1 to 3. One move will fulfill a task and that is the right move.

And the I guess you say, but what if there is a piece more on the board? Okay, you can say all I know about that useless or you can say I know that I have won if I get rid of that piece. I know what I want to achieve and so I can think about the way. You can abolish all rules because they are only 99% accurate, but what next. How to find a goal and how to find a way to the goal? That is the point I don't understand.

But maybe it is more helpful than I thought at first, because at least a higher rated play explains us what helped him to improve and it could possibly work for us too. But the stronger impression I have is that it is some kind of flattery. Studying and understanding theory could be hard and it would be so great if we just could skip that. Of course all the masters told us nonsense and that is why we cannot understand them. Possibly kind of Dunning-Kruger effect.

And that is the plot twist! I know it is easy to say: I don't understand it, so it is nonsense.

It seems the framework might be "federative" in that enough people find their own competent reasoning chess player and learner in it. I think the bringing together value of it, while not acting as an oracle of truth, is a good omen. (lol). For progressing on a solid convened (but discussed) working foundation. I guess I must be in agreement. I have been, perhaps, reading backward from the discussion. I should start reading forward too. It is the first axiom few lines that tell me a lot (with the discussion to confirm).

I think I got the word "practical" wrong. It is about the scope of the learning theory observer framework, not the player and what is a "practical" endgame position, kind of practical. But, expanding the theory to include the previously-black-box dependent model of the player thinking (learning?). Now we are tracking with more internal objects to have names for, toward some shareable progress (not just naming everything in sight, but having a dynamical or mechanistic intent in that approach). Sorry, I tend to always look around what I am tasking myself to do. So, don’t mind me, when that goes off one's scope of interest. We are many.