Heh...good quote. I was in chess club in Jr high, playing lots. One day I was about two thirds through a book on chess openings and had a major moment of self reflection: what the hell am I doing, this is really boring. Luckily for me I was introduced to white box original DnD about the same time and that solved that problem...
It would be a lengthy business to mention all the different people who have spent their lives engaged in chess-playing or exercise with ball or the practice of roasting their bodies in the sun. They are not unoccupied when their pleasure form such a busy occupation. No one will doubt that those men are energetic triflers who devote their hours to the study of useless literature - On the Shortness of Life
Mistranslation is unfair. It's a translation that best reflects the spirit of the original. It would be distracting to the modern reader to refer to a game which would be obscure and unfamiliar, when most likely the point of the original text is to invoke a board game which would be universally known among the audience.
> XIII 1. Persequi singulos longum est, quorum aut latrunculi aut pila aut excoquendi in sole corporis cura consumpsere vitam. Non sunt otiosi, quorum voluptates multum negotii habent. Nam de illis nemo dubitabit, quin operose nihil agant, qui litterarum inutilium studiis detinentur, quae iam apud Romanos quoque magna manus est.
>It would be distracting to the modern reader to refer to a game which would be obscure and unfamiliar
I find it far more distracting to find a modern term in an ancient text that I know the author couldn't have known about. It's jarring and anachronistic. I would much rather see the original term. I can make a decision about whether to spend a minute to look it up (and learn something!) or skim over it if the meaning is clear enough.
I have to agree. It was jarring to me to find this in my translation. I think either the original term with a footnote, or perhaps something more generic like “Boardgames”
Considering that we don't have any history of chess until more than 500 years after Seneca's death, in India no less, I think it's fair to say that this is yet another example of "ye olde translationes" editorializing and using too much dynamic equivalence. latrunculi, the word he uses in this sentence at the beginning of chapter XIII, must have referred to a different game.
Plus, I doubt most people would really agree with de brevitate vitae. It's the equivalent of "grind culture" but from the first century. Amusing and interesting but probably not congruent with now most people want to spend their lives. (No shame from me if you do want to live your life that way, but it should just be known that this is far from a neutral perspective.) For a more balanced view of otium (pleasure, relaxation, opposite of negotium, business), I'd recommend the letters of Pliny the Younger.
I dunno. Who is to say it is "too much" dynamic equivalence? Seems to me the grand intent of the quote is preserved for the greater mass of English readers.
This makes me feel unreasonably better about my decision to stop trying to get better at chess. But I do miss those 3-day correspondence games with friends where you slowly get smoked by your better friends over weeks.
Me and my friends play long term board games on boardgamearea.com now. Ticket to Ride, Roll for the Galaxy, It's a Wonderful World, and more. We've usually got at least 2, sometimes many more, going at a time. It's a good time.
Doing a few chess puzzles a day (and aiming to get them correct, rather than trying to get through as many as you can) has done wonders for my move speed. For example, I recognize forks much faster now.
Lichess lets you pick several themes as well, if you want to focus on particular situations.
Meta Comment: A lot of the comments here that are about getting better at chess seem to boil down to: Do something other than bog-standard chess. Mess with time limits, do openings, play puzzles, etc.
So, can we get together a good list of websites/apps with links that are these 'not-chess' trainers?
That is a great title. For many people, chess is not interesting, now that computers are so good at it. But for me, chess is even more interesting now that we have developed (narrow) AI programs that instantiate more and more parts of what humans do when playing. (I know, humans don't play like computers, but we do things like heuristic board evaluation and heuristic game tree pruning.) So in a game, the player is not only trying to find moves, but is trying to prioritise which trees to explore, based on heuristics and some sense of value of information, and on the relative state of the clock (do you want to go for complications? it depends how much time your opponent has left); is aiming for an overall "style" of game that suits them but not the opponent; and even managing risk (despite the game being deterministic), in the sense that different incomplete game trees might have different (heuristically-estimated) variances of outcomes.
People spend time running in races against each other, despite the existence of cars.
People spend time lifting heavy weights, despite the existence of forklifts.
People spend time climbing mountains, despite the existence of helicopters.
That a machine can do something better than a human, is no reason to pretend that human to human competition is no longer worthwhile. A pleasant game of chess against a friend is as much a psychological battle as it is a tactical one.
I never played against computers, they could always beat me every single time. What would be the point? I play against humans, for the same reason I have conversations with humans and not with computers - even as they become capable of even that.
I do think that building an AI that does play like a human would be interesting, it's certainly never really been done. But it's interesting because it's an interesting problem to solve, not because playing against such a machine would be any fun.
I honestly think it's amazing the level of dedication people can have to things others think are a complete waste of time. Somewhere someone is the best in the world at building rice sculptures with chop sticks or shooting a bow and arrow with their feet or some other weird combination and I love it. The chess guy who spends his life dedicated to finding strategies which only really work against AI is awesome. There are still folks who can beat AI opponents in very time constrained games.
I think chess can be difficult to appreciate for many reasons, but computers beating humans is probably at the bottom of that list, if not on the opposite list of reasons to be encouraged to play as you already explained.
Anyway, I can only speak for my past self and a few people I've known, but it's usually simple why people don't play.
It can be socially unappealing if there's no tradition of playing chess within their circle or that the people that do play might be snobs about it.
It can be difficult to feel encouraged to play since the game itself is complex enough to require more attention than expected and the jargon is confusing. The names of openings, tactics, etc. are not necessarily literal enough, and even when expressed in notation are still vague due to the nature of the game (many variations). For many people there's also a lack of motivation and it just seems unproductive, especially when it becomes clear that winning, even against the weakest AI, isn't common when starting out. Like any game, chess can help improve analytical thinking, but it's abstract enough to not be obvious how. If it's not made a pleasant enough experience, it's just easier to do something else.
> For many people, chess is not interesting, now that computers are so good at it.
But why? I can understand that for a small number of people who has the ambition to become the best player, having an unbeatable figure looming over you is disheartening.
Most players are never going to become even close to that, and they know it. The fact that AI has beaten the best of human players should be, theoretically, irrelevant to their interest in chess, other than having a novel teacher to learn from. They are playing against the same pool of players who are on the same level, with or without the the AI advancement.
So I’m genuinely curious, does the chess community see a large number of discouraged average players?
- Chess was in times past seen as the ultimate game of pure intellect, where the player with the most of that uniquely human trait, intelligence, wins the game. Except that no, turns out a tiny piece of silicon the size of your fingernail can beat the best player on the planet. So why spend time and effort on chess instead of some other game where humans still reign supreme (office politics? Cheating on your spouse?)?
- And a variant of the above argument, humans are a tool-making species. We make tools to do specific things better than we can with our bare hands. So that we can use the tools to do the things that tools are better at, and then use our own hands/heads on things that humans are better at. So now that we have developed tools that are better at playing chess than a human, lets move on to another more challenging task.
- And since this is HN, a variant of the above is Larry Walls characterization of the virtues of a programmer: impatience, laziness, and hubris. We "solved" chess, time to move on.
Of course, all of the above justifications are, in a way, justifications against chess as some kind of noble pursuit that improves the condition of humanity. If you enjoy playing it as a way to spend your free time, go ahead, don't listen to all the negative sniping from the sidelines!
>Most players are never going to become even close to that, and they know it. The fact that AI has beaten the best of human players should be, theoretically, irrelevant to their interest in chess, other than having a novel teacher to learn from.
That is exactly what's happening, players learn from engines and try to understand why they play this move and not that move, and as a result, there are a lot of competing players in top level chess, except that players started memorizing lines and the opening phase of the game became a bit dull and boring, however, this was only another obstacle for players, they simply needed to adapt and they did. Magnus Carlsen is well known for winning endgames that seem to be a dead draw, he keeps pushing and pressing until his opponents make a mistake and this is why he has been the world champion since 2013 (e.g. game 6 from the 2021 World Championship [0]).
>So I’m genuinely curious, does the chess community see a large number of discouraged average players?
No, the Queen's Gambit [1] made chess very popular, online chess is at its peak, it's pretty interesting to have world champions streaming and seeing them play variations that they wouldn't play in real life since they involve too much risk, or simply lead to losing positions, but they also make for exciting and amusing games.
Yeah, computation time is a resource. Can be seen in some starcraft matches, where attention is being juggled and distributed as much as actual armies. Feels like there's some low-hanging fruit there, it hasn't been studied nearly as much as (time-independent) optimal decisions.
Examples of time asymmetry:
-recorded media (TV, movies, books) are incredibly time-asymmetric, have 100x / 1000x time spent on creation vs consumption
-legal systems built on examples + exceptions, have mapped out and tested entire decision trees that defendents traverse once
Something I wonder: are computers better at chess because they can think faster? What if we give a team of top grandmasters 1 day per move, versus like 1 hour for Stockfish. Will they at least consistently draw? To my knowledge, top human vs computer matches these days only use piece odds, not time odds.
No, on long time controls, humans cannot see enough of the tree in some positions. They might be able to push the game sometimes into a position where they can hold if the engine is not set up to prefer complicated positions.
But
This is one of my favorites. On extreme short time controls, humans can handle some really good engines some of the time! Here you have Andrew Tang beating Leela in hyperbullet: https://youtu.be/Wf-wFXRpwgo
Another approach that sometimes works is to be really booked up in dubious lines with an engine that does not have too much time, something Jonathan Schrantz manages from time to time https://youtu.be/FC2P6VUYu78
"Classical" chess engine (those based on alpha-beta search) are indeed better because they calculate faster, although so insanely faster that there is probably not enough time in a _lifetime_ for a human to win a single game against it.
The more recent chess engines (LeelaChess, and the latest versions of Stockfish) use neural nets to allow for more shallow calculations without decreasing game quality. In this case the engine is better because it's just "more intelligent" (and nobody understands how).
An easier way to do this would be to limit the hardware resources available to Stockfish. You can get the 24x time ratio just by giving Stockfish 1/24th of the compute cycles.
That said, 24x is not even close to enough advantage there -- that probably removes less than one ply of depth. Stockfish can read far deeper than any human; you'd need a dramatically larger reduction to compensate for this.
You could probably put Stockfish on a desktop computer from the mid 90's, and expect the team of GMs to win.
24x is more than 1 ply. Typical branching factor isn't so far from 24, and with alpha-beta the effective branching factor is more like sqrt(nominal branching factor), and I think modern engines are pretty good at pruning and extending the tree to make the scaling even better than that.
A ply is half a move. Or to put it another way, one move is one ply by white and one ply by black. This is a term that is common to all sequential games.
For mediocre chess players like me I recommend trying online speed chess for a few months. Bullet chess where each player gets a minute total clock is a completely different game where you move every half second on average. Aggressive playing is rewarded - as long as you get your opponent to waste time thinking. The quick play allows you develop a better sense of positioning, game flow, and end game tactics. When you return to normal slow timed chess games after playing bullet for several months you will find that your clock management will be much improved.
No, in my experience it forms bad habits such as being severely prone to going for one turn attacks. One turn attacks may be the most common mistake among chess players. Anyone who has learnt to calculate deeper and look for nuances within a position will crush someone who only knows to go for time pressure.
This is true. But the comment above is true as well.
It depends on who you are and where you are at. I have certainly developed a habit for those one-turn attacks you describe. But going from short games back to slow chess and puzzles has been nice because I learned to manage how to think under that pressure.
I’m now learning how to play tennis (another cliché gentleman’s game, I know). What I’m discovering is that it is very similar - there is the simple repetitive and purely textbook aspect of hitting the ball at just the right angle to make it go where you want. And then there is the energy management under time and pressure. So you sort of have to straddle this tension between these two and you gradually descend into just barely holding it together.
My thought here is that ideal chess is very similar. There are the routine strategies, tactics and perfect moves. And then there is this raw impulsive fast paced aspect of just making the least awful move to just survive what is thrown at you with the bits of focus you still have left.
Faster you do something, more you rely on your instincts, and instincts alone do not further your game -- or anything you strive to be good at really -- you need to be mindfully thinking it through.
It might be beneficial to spice things up, but this is in general not a good advice.
Precise thought patterns, acronyms, X seconds per move... This seems like a terrible, robotic way to play chess, at least when it comes to having fun. I've played in excess of 100k games on lichess (mostly 3 minutes, some 5 minute and bullet too, no increments) with my ELO rating being ~2100 and I don't consciously do any of these (whether these or approximations of such still take place unconsciously is a different matter).
In fact, I play purely by feel, looking at the board until a move "feels right". Similarly for time management, I try not to spend more time than my opponent at all times. If my opponent plays faster than me, I speed up. If my opponent is slower, I slow down but try to maintain a slight time advantage.
This translates to the game never feeling like manual mental labor. Instead, it's moves and decisions seemingly streaming out of me without conscious control, almost like a superpower I never knew I had. It feels great and is a lot of fun.
> No masters are sitting there counting TSAW TISP on their claws! I think this is misguided. A rigorous thought pattern is not a cage, it is an x ray. It shows our lion's bones. Strong players don't notice their thought patterns - you only notice bones when they're broken. The goal is not to think TSAW TISP in t, the goal is for good thought patterns to become so internalised that they form the skeleton our muscles hang on. Bones force our chess lion's muscles to work harmoniously - bones make it impossible for muscles to work any other way.
This is about helping new players figure this out. Or about helping players with poor time management figure out how to build that feeling and unlock the next level for themselves. “Play by feel” is unhelpful advice for those people and sometimes people are unable to get to the next level by themselves and need formal structures like this to figure out how to get better
The helpful advice is to just try to match your opponent's speed. This is 10 times more useful than the OP advice based on some formula.
Chess is about the ebb and flow of ideas between you and the opponent. If you're not calculating when your opponent is, you'll lose. This is why this the advice is the right advice. You have to develop awareness and "responsiveness" to what your opponent is doing.
I think I just don't enjoy chess, so maybe all advice is wasted on me and I should give up on it for this lifetime but I appreciate your sentiment.
Periodically I try to learn, and I know some openings out to a handful of moves and have done a bunch of end game puzzles and read about some concepts, but that middle area feels like a dark forest with no obvious path.
I either make the blunder that sets me up to lose, watch my opponent make their blunder, or we survive.
I think a more structured approach to the midgame would help me develop some of the sensibilities the grandparent poster is talking about. Does that even exist?
Opening/end game is easier to study since there are less possible moves. At mid-game, it helps to apply more general concepts. So look for forks, skewers, advantageous trades, etc
This is the actual answer and one that pretty much all strong players will agree on.
This "feel right" ability goes by different names unconscious mastery, intuition, GM-RAM, drunken chess, Blink, pattern recognition and so on.
How to develop it is another question.
Sadly I fear it is almost impossible to develop it past teenage years.
There is something magical that happens around age 13-15(Fischer said he just got good when he made this "jump", of course he was around 2300 before that). Suddenly everything just clicks.
I was a lowly A level player when it just clicked around the age of 15 and I was a master. Sadly/luckily I did not progress past FM. The "click" is a required but not sufficient condition for GM at an OTB play.
Sure for some it happens at a bit later stage for some at a bit younger stage. You have to do some work before that and to become a super GM you have to do work afterwards. (as Anand famously said you read a bunch of Informators afterwards)
As Tal said to young Kasparov - Garry you have to sac first and calculate afterwards.
I would think that you have spent a long time previously, thinking about the best move, to learn these habits and feelings that come to you instinctively now, yes?
Not consciously calculating, there is no effort put into minimaxing. I just look at how the board is set up, focus on the position, the patterns that the pieces dictate, squares that are weak, king position. It sounds like a script but my point is that it doesn't take conscious mental effort, these are mostly intuitive actions.
Of course I wasn't born that way, I've spent years playing chess and it's obvious that these years of playing resulted in a calibrated network of weights in my brain that allow me now to play by feel. My point is more that I didn't perform any structured routines when playing games like the article describes. I kept playing and doing tactics training and my brain did the rest through osmosis. Which leads me to my final point in that tactics and pattern recognition matter and I think, having discussed this with many folks including club players, that they are the best way to rapidly increase one's skill.
90% of time you do not calculate, you "feel" the moves.
There is a saying that a difference between SuperGM, GM, IM, and a master is how many times a game they have to really spend time on a move that they are not sure of.
SuperGM might be unsure about 1-3 times a game, GM 3-5, IMs 5-7, and as a master I have about 7-10 moves.
Notice that depending on your time control, you will still want to take time to verify-calculate your "feel" moves.
I'm a decent chess player. 1600 elo over the board, 1800 online. I think the conclusions reached give too much time to non-critical moves and not enough time to critical moves.
Let's take the 90 minute game, where it's suggested to use 88 seconds for opening moves, 165 seconds for non-critical moves, and 330 seconds for critical moves.
330 seconds (5 1/2 minutes) is too short for the critical position in a 90-minute game. I would be comfortable using about 15-20 minutes for the most critical move.
I think my disagreement stems from the author's estimate of "7 or 8 critical moves per game." That's too many in my experience. In a 40 move game (the average), that's 18.75%.
I'd say there are typically 3 or fewer critical moves per game. And there's no need to spend anywhere close to 88 seconds in the opening. When you're in theory, you can bust those out in a few seconds.
Aman Hambleton has an EXCELLENT although very long series on Youtube called Building Habits. He starts at a very low ELO and follows a set of basic rules. He loses several games but his win ratio is high. Once he gets to a higher Elo he has to introduce new rules, and again it doesn't mean you'll win every game but you build good habits by practicing over and over again.
I tried Aman's videos but found Daniel Naroditsky to be far more helpful in terms of explaining advanced theory and tactics in a way that's easy to understand and practical at any ELO.
If you are a beginner, studying tactics and doing puzzles. Always keep your pieces defended, even if there aren't immediate threats: undefended pieces may become tactical themes (which means, your opponent might be able to explore this two or three moves ahead). Always consider checks first, then captures, systematically.
A level up, studying openings.
Always go into a position with a plan (which generally means, which squares you want your pieces to occupy). A bad plan is better than no plan at all.
The plan must be continually checked with calculation (and here is where tactics is useful), and you must be ready to change plans if things don't go well.
You need also to study strategic concepts like weak squares, pawn structure, pawn majorities. This helps you to quickly identify what should be your plan even in a unfamiliar position.
If you have trouble winning a game that you should have won, study endgames. Specially, if you are ahead of material, try to simplify the position (trade pieces to give your opponent less chances to come back), and specially simplify into an endgame where you're sure you will win.
That depends on how good you are already. Beginners progress most by learning not to hang pieces. Up to the ~1000 elo level you will win by simply not blundering with little to no opening theory. After that the breadth of scope opens up a lot. I got to ~1750 over the board almost completely ignoring openings beyond move 4 or 5. Watching videos on strategy, how should I be arranging my pieces / where do they "belong", and simple tactics will take you far. Openings are important, I study them more now, but I wouldn't get bogged down by them. Picking up an intuition for analysing a position and it's thematic ideas is key.
Reached 1600 chess.com within a year starting from 600 and 2000 Lichess. What I believe to be more important is how you do something rather than what you do. What I mean is, someone can play many puzzles or games but if you are just blitzing out moves in puzzles even when you haven't calculated to a guaranteed advantage then you aren't learning anything. You are just exploiting what you have learnt over exploring by trying to look for patterns you wouldn't normally look for. Constantly even in complex positions people blitz out moves only to blunder.
I was a competitive chess player in my youth and am currently ~2300 on Lichess. Here are key aspects of any training regimen:
* Tactics - I did thousands of tactics puzzles using a program called CT-ART while under a time limit. I would have to complete 25 puzzles within 5 minutes while making 0 mistakes. If I made a mistake I would have to start from the beginning.
* Core positional concepts - Understanding pawn structure (double pawns, isolated pawns, passed pawns, pawn majorities, etc.), control of central squares, open files, king safety, and so on.
* Endgames - Many players neglect endgames. Master the basics: common rook-and-pawn and pawn-only endgames, how to checkmate with 2 bishops and bishop + knight, etc. Read Silman's Complete Endgame Course, Basic Chess Endings, and Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual (for advanced players) to improve your endgame play.
* Openings - Many people have mentioned learning openings, but it is generally a mistake for beginners and intermediate players to focus on this aspect of their game. It is not especially useful for a ~1000-rated OTB player to learn 15+ moves of theory in the King's Indian Defense only to end up in a position where there are slightly better according to theory but have no understanding of their position. It is better to center your opening repertoire around easy-to-learn openings and focus on improving other aspects of your game until you are strong enough to handle positions outside of opening theory.
Puzzles are great for learning tactics, but eventually you need to learn some strategy and positional play. You'll need to read a book or two for this. And don't forget endings!
Make sure you do defensive puzzles as well. I'm fairly decent at spotting a tactic to win material a few moves ahead, but terrible at seeing one coming from my opponent early enough to avert it. I'm not sure what lichess has, but definitely look for puzzles where you have to avoid a knight fork or some pin or incoming checkmate.
Learn end games before opening s. Learn k+q against a k. Learn k+pawn against k (how to advance a pawn to promote to q). K+r against K. There are others but get those 3 down.
I’m ~2000 online and got there by training tactics/puzzles and becoming really good at a few openings. I would suggest learning an opening or two for white and an opening or two for black. Kings Indian, modern defense, Sicilian defense, and danish gambit are some of my favorites.
Study and practicing openings. By this I mean you should memorise all the lines of an opening; not just the main lines. A vast majority of matches are won/lost within 30-35 moves by a few botched up opening moves.
I don't recommend puzzles that much. They give you mental satisfaction. However, it is one thing to think of a good move knowing before hand that there's such a move possible but entirely different to recognise that you are in such a situation in the middle of a game.
Studying openings is a waste of time, even counterproductive, if you’re a beginner who hangs pieces all the time. This advice is much better suited to someone hoping to get over the 2k rating milestone. If you’re below 1k or even mid teens then your best bet is just to play a lot (longer time controls against better opponents) and study your games to look for your blunders, mistakes, and inaccuracies.
I tend to agree (& thought similar about puzzles) but I think they are effective at training your pattern recognition so you more easily find tactics when you play.
My top tip is to only ever play in silence, with nobody and no distractions around, sitting or standing upright. These three things have added 200 points to my rating.
I also find that noticing from intuition (a strange move by your opponent might be a trigger, or a tight position where you want to play strategically might be another) when to spend more time on a move sequence helps a lot.
Taking a mental note that you spent a bunch of time on one move and need to play more quickly is another improvement. But this is also an art that comes with experience.
I was just thinking about this. I've had spells (as recently as last night!) when I do want to play, but my mind is pretty tired or my mood is off and I end up dropping 50 rating points in a session because I'm sort of half-assing it. I should probably just play unrated games at these times (or just puzzles).
I’ve always found Deleuze and Guattari’s comments on chess vs. go to be interesting. Some of the terminology might not make sense if you’re unfamiliar with their work, but I think you can get the general gist:
Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the state apparatus in the context of the theory of games. Let us take chess and Go, from the standpoint of game pieces, the relations between the pieces and the space involved. Chess is a game of the State, or of the court: the emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement endowed with relative power, and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game’s form of interiority. Go pieces, I contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function: “It” makes a move. “It” could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only situational ones. Thus the relations are very different in the two cases.
Within their milieu of interiority, chess pieces entertain biunivocal relations with one another, and with the adversary’s pieces: their functioning is structural. One the other hand, a Go piece has only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with nebulas or constellations, according to which it fulfills functions of insertion or situation, such as bordering, encircling, shattering. All by itself, a Go piece can destroy an entire constellation synchronically; a chess piece cannot (or can do so diachronically only). Chess is indeed a war, but an institutionalized, regulated, coded war with a front, a rear, battles. But what is proper to Go is war without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy, whereas chess is a semiology. Finally, the space is not at all the same: in chess, it is a question of arranging a closed space for oneself, thus going from one point to another, of occupying the maximum number of squares with the minimum number of pieces. In Go, it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival. The “smooth” space of Go, as against the “striated” space of chess. The nomos of Go against the State of chess, nomos against polis. The difference is that chess codes and decodes space, whereas Go proceeds altogether differently, territorializing and deterritorializing it (make the outside a territory in space; consolidate that territory by the construction of a second, adjacent territory; deterritorialize the enemy by shattering his territory from within; deterritorialize oneself by renouncing, by going elsewhere…) Another justice, another movement, another space-time.
In chess, the pieces are intrinsically different. Their role in the game depends on the kind of piece they are, which doesn't change (unless a pawn promotes, I guess), instead of their position or relation with other pieces, which changes constantly. In go, all stones are identical, and their differences arise from their relationships with other stones around them.
In chess, you play to kill the opponent's pieces. In go, you play to claim territory. It's possible to win without ever taking an opposing stone. Although what's territory can be very fluid, because stones can be placed anywhere, and thereby kill a group that was thought to be alive, save a group that seemed dead, destroy or claim territory. But it all depends on the stone's relation to other stones. Chess depends much more on what a single piece is capable of. Even a poorly positioned queen is worth more than a very active bishop, because the queen can move to a better position, but the bishop can't turn into a queen.
I'm sure a missed a lot of nuance. I have no idea what they mean by nomos and polis, and parts of the second paragraph sound like I disagree with it. Maybe my translation is more my own opinion than a translation of theirs.
You’re more or less correct, but the terms like nomos and deterritorialization are technical terms used by D&G. This section on chess is situated in a larger text on politics and space in general.
IMHO the 1950s and 60s were the pinacle of intellectual life ( at least in france). Students were actually "fans" of philosophical figures like jean paul sartre. The trendiest place for youth wasn't a nightclub or a gym. It was the café de flore, close to "la sorbonne" university, were one could hope to see a famous writer have a coffee. Young people would spend their saturday skimming through books at "gilbert joseph" bookseller.
This is simply gone forever. Whenever i see today's celebrities becoming famous via 20 seconds tiktok, or pseudo intellectuals debating over twitter, and i think about this era that was only 50 years ago, i feel like crying.
Were you one of those youths or are you just romanticizing someone else's past (which you know nothing about) so you can criticize a contemporary youth populace (whom you know nothing about)?
So what? Famously, Anna Karenina is about a woman who jumps in front of a train, why bother to read the other 863 pages.
Anti-Oedipus [1] and especially A Thousand Plateaus [2] is about living in rarefied, futural spaces. Deleuze would be the first to be disgusted even at the faintest idea that his writing has any meaning whatsoever: you want meaning? go and live your life, don't read a book, especially not a philosophy book. In What is Philosophy? [3], Deleuze and Guattari give a very straight and simple answer: "philosophy is the art of forming, inventing and fabricating concepts"—that's it, nothing more, nothing less. Why would you hurry to admire a concept, instead of doing it repeatedly, now, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow [4]: do you also not smell a flower because its florid and anyway you could synthesize ionones [5] into a vial, why bother with the flower.
There's a word for that, it's called "obscurantism". Profound and true ideas can always be put in simple language. See Richard Feynman for one example. When someone uses a lot of complicated words and sentences to make a trivial point, that's a red flag for me.
Again, Deleuze would be offended if you thought any of his work has "profound and true ideas", for him (and Guattari), philosophy is simply not about "profound and true", he mocks endlessly all these people sick with "sign-ificance", every sign must mean some-thing.
Also, accusing Deleuze of obscurantism is absolutely unfair and ignorant: Deleuze was truly one of the great teachers, those who can be pedagogical while keeping and increasing your interest in the topic, much akin to Feynman, in his works which disentangle the works of previous philosophers: Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), Kant's Critical Philosophy (1963), Proust and Signs (1964), Bergsonism (1966), Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1981), Foucault (1986), The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988). The aforementioned What Is Philosophy? is also extremely clearly written, and it is one of the best books ever to tackle in such a direct manner such a question.
Also, accusing Deleuze of "complicated words for trivial points" is just ridiculously funny: it's like accusing Bach of composing too much music: couldn't he just sum up all the toccatas, fugues, partitas, and so on in one single massive beat drop.
I disagree that Bach is simple (I'm not sure what pure means in this context). Bach wrote contrapuntal music. This means you can have two, three, four, or five independent voices that sum up to a whole while maintaining their individual lines. He also included techniques like inversions and retrogrades where the same lines occur backwards or upside down. And he included a great deal of symbolism and numerology in the music. The music is also, at times, very harmonically modern for his time. His music is often wildly virtuosic too — try playing the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue — it is a showpiece. "Simple" is just the wrong word.
"Pure" in this context means "without any extraneous and unnecessary elements".
Google has a few different definitions for the word "simple". I don't mean it in the following ways:
- easily understood or done; presenting no difficulty
- composed of a single element; not compound
I do mean it in the following ways:
- used to emphasize the fundamental and straightforward nature of something
- plain, basic, or uncomplicated in form, nature, or design; without much decoration or ornamentation
- humble and unpretentious
Keep in mind my comment was in the context of a discussion about postmodernism. I think that when compared with some of the more complex postmodern music, even the most virtuosic Bach pieces are simple. A couple examples:
Bach is a perfect example of the kind of thing that I'm talking about, and he's as far from postmodernism as I can imagine. His music is simple and pure. It isn't trying to impress anyone with technical virtuosity or sentimentality.
>Profound and true ideas can always be put in simple language.
Sure, you can reduce the passage above to "Chess is a game of specific, regimented roles, whereas Go is characterized an emergent, contingent understanding of purpose" — but you lose a lot of information compressing it like that, in the same way you lose a lot of information when you tell kids that black holes work like a bowling bowl on a trampoline. Sure, neither are incorrect at a phenomenological level, but it's such a reductive understanding that you can't accurately reason about it without reintroducing the "complicated words and sentences".
People love to say this, but this is extremely dense writing riddled with technical language, written for people trained in reading it. You could perhaps eliminate some of the jargon, but in doing so you'd have to substitute a book's worth of less "florid" writing to get the same point across.
"florid" as a word means "excessively complicated", not just "complicated". I'd describe this writing as florid because it its fanciness and complexity is obnoxious and unnecessary. Of course it's my opinion, but yeah, I think it's just bad writing, written to sound pretentious on purpose, doing a shit job of communicating its point because it wants to be inaccessible. You could easily write the same thing more clearly in no more space.
I'm not arguing against beautiful writing or technical writing; I'm arguing against this thing that was pasted above, which is obnoxious, full-of-itself, not-at-all-beautiful writing.
>You could easily write the same thing more clearly in no more space.
I certainly couldn't, and I have spent a reasonable amount of time studying Nomadology (the text from which this passage is taken). Why don't you give it a shot? Put your money where your mouth is, let's say just the second paragraph, as that's the more serious offender in terms of jargon. I sincerely don't think you can rewrite it to be ~12 lines, forgoing all the technical jargon used, and retain all of the semantic content.
Frankly, barring a demonstration of this task you could supposedly "easily" accomplish, it reads like you're just denigrating the writing because you can't understand it.
"In chess pieces have identity and thus differentiated functions, in go they don't. At the level of state/war machine there are also functionaries: the president, the general, but also interchangeable parts: soldiers, workers."
It just doesn't mean anything that you can summarize this or anything (Deleuze or not), you could even use a statistical learning tool to summarize it. You could summarize your deepest pain using just the words "it hurt", or your deepest pleasure with the banal, Owen-Wilson-esque interjection, "wow", so what?
These people have just been mesmerized by Marcus Hutter and the like that "compression is intelligence", or by Richard Feynman and the like that things must be simple and explainable to a child: yes, maybe, if you write equations; no, if you are expressing love: philo-sophia. I just imagine reading their love letters: "Dear beloved, Today, as previously told, I love you also, Signed".
>"In chess pieces have identity and thus differentiated functions, in go they don't. At the level of state/war machine there are also functionaries: the president, the general, but also interchangeable parts: soldiers, workers."
I'm pretty sure you're agreeing with me in a roundabout way, but for posterity: this is clearly not a lossless compression.
The faculty of re-solution is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study, and especially by that highest branch of it which, unjustly, and merely on account of its retrograde operations, has been called, as if par excellence, analysis. Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyse. A chess-player, for example, does the one without effort at the other. It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random; I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The attention is here called powerfully into play. If it flag for an instant, an oversight is committed, resulting in injury or defeat. The possible moves being not only manifold but involute, the chances of such oversights are multiplied; and in nine cases out of ten it is the more concentrative rather than the more acute player who conquers. In draughts, on the contrary, where the moves are unique and have but little variation, the probabilities of inadvertence are diminished, and the mere attention being left comparatively unemployed, what advantages are obtained by either party are obtained by superior acumen. To be less abstract --Let us suppose a game of draughts where the pieces are reduced to four kings, and where, of course, no oversight is to be expected. It is obvious that here the victory can be decided (the players being at all equal) only by some recherche movement, the result of some strong exertion of the intellect. Deprived of ordinary resources, the analyst throws himself into the spirit of his opponent, identifies himself therewith, and not unfrequently sees thus, at a glance, the sole methods (sometimes indeed absurdly simple ones) by which he may seduce into error or hurry into miscalculation.
Whist has long been noted for its influence upon what is termed the calculating power; and men of the highest order of intellect have been known to take an apparently unaccountable delight in it, while eschewing chess as frivolous. Beyond doubt there is nothing of a similar nature so greatly tasking the faculty of analysis. The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all those more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind. When I say proficiency, I mean that perfection in the game which includes a comprehension of all the sources whence legitimate advantage may be derived. These are not only manifold but multiform, and lie frequently among recesses of thought altogether inaccessible to the ordinary understanding. To observe attentively is to remember distinctly; and, so far, the concentrative chess-player will do very well at whist; while the rules of Hoyle (themselves based upon the mere mechanism of the game) are sufficiently and generally comprehensible. Thus to have a retentive memory, and to proceed by "the book," are points commonly regarded as the sum total of good playing. But it is in matters beyond the limits of mere rule that the skill of the analyst is evinced. He makes, in silence, a host of observations and inferences. So, perhaps, do his companions; and the difference in the extent of the information obtained, lies not so much in the validity of the inference as in the quality of the observation. The necessary knowledge is that of what to observe. Our player confines himself not at all; nor, because the game is the object, does he reject deductions from things external to the game. He examines the countenance of his partner, comparing it carefully with that of each of his opponents. He considers the mode of assorting the cards in each hand; often counting trump by trump, and honor by honor, through the glances bestowed by their holders upon each. He notes every variation of face as the play progresses, gathering a fund of thought from the differences in the expression of certainty, of surprise, of triumph, or of chagrin. From the manner of gathering up a trick he judges whether the person taking it can make another in the suit. He recognises what is played through feint, by the air with which it is thrown upon the table. A casual or inadvertent word; the accidental dropping or turning of a card, with the accompanying anxiety or carelessness in regard to its concealment; the counting of the tricks, with the order of their arrangement; embarrassment, hesitation, eagerness or trepidation --all afford, to his apparently intuitive perception, indications of the true state of affairs. The first two or three rounds having been played, he is in full possession of the contents of each hand, and thenceforward puts down his cards with as absolute a precision of purpose as if the rest of the party had turned outward the faces of their own.
