From: Jeff Mallett CRUZIO COM> Date: 24 oct 1995 Subject: Re: chess and shogi >I am currently writing a book on chess psychology Cool! I'll reserve a space on my bookshelf between Krogius and Benko. >and training techniques. >One thing that interested me was the possibility of using one game to learn >the other. You've got IM Larry Kaufman's email address I assume? The other day I was email'ing a friend about this very topic. Here's an excerpt: ------------------------------- >How are you doing in all the different games you're >playing? Do the chess skills help with other board games? Some players have shied away from variants out of fear that it will hurt their chess. That's always a hot topic for bughouse players. Some strong chess players like Capablanca played other forms of chess though. In "The Encyclopedia of Chess Variants" Pritchard writes: "Suchart who won a gold medal at the Thessaloniki [Western chess] olympiad, has been national champion for the past ten years" in Makruk (Thai Chess). Other examples abound. According to Fairbairn in "Shogi For Beginners": "Very often it is the chess players who make the fastest progress [in Shogi], and they claim incidentally that shogi improves their chess!" What I think is that in some sense it's like learning languages. The more you've learned well, the easier it is to learn a new one well. A human's ability to analyze a position is transferrable to other games like a computer's basic search algorithm can be applied to other games. The danger is that learning more games will form strong irrelevant neural connections in a part of the brain that was already optimized for chess. When I use a chess to play bughouse or Thai chess, am I unlearning the normal moves of the pieces? ------------------------------- >My renewal of interest in shogi was in some ways an attempt to recapture >"beginner's mind" before writing my book. Recapturing is nearly always a good idea! :) Unfortunately for an international master like yourself, you might have to visit a realm without bishops and rooks and kings to do this. Perhaps that partly explains why so many of my 2000-2400 chess-playing friends have later become Bridge masters or dan Go players... Whatever the reason, some people are better than others at playing games. I know that I am much better than my wife at every game there is, even though she's equally as "smart" as me. Similarly I've met people who are CLEARLY better at games in general than me. (Want one as a reference?) >I am interested to hear anything - I'm curious about the stronger emphasis >in shogi of learning from proverbs - is this analogous to the beginner's >advice in chess, or do they have a greater influence? I've thought about doing something along those lines: creating chess "proverbs" couched in the style of a Tao-Te-Ching translation. >Jonathan Tisdal Jeff ----------------------------------------------------- Jeff Mallett jeffm cruzio com Strategy Labs, Inc. Voice: (408) 338-6324 Fax: (408) 338-6325 -----------------------------------------------------