4. Computers and Humans of Different Generations.
Another related question is how history’s top masters would fare against computers.
It’s obvious from Kasparov’s time that computers would totally crush them all. Opening knowledge would not matter much. Computers swamp human opponents in the middle game, simply by calculating more variations more rapidly by several orders of magnitude.
The notion that computers are more advantageous to younger players in my opinion is not quite right. Younger players should have more energy and stamina in studying chess openings and endgames for long hours every day compared to older ones, but the use of computers would tend to make the learning process easier for every one including the older ones. Computers would tend to level the learning process.
As a corollary, computers also make it easier today for very young players in their early teens to peak at a younger age than in past eras, although they tend to level off in their early 20s to their high plateau, defined by their inborn talents and determination.
In brief, computers tend to level chess learning for everyone, young and old, in any era (in which they existed).
Observations on the computer-less eras:
A false notion is that the nature of the middlegame today is somehow different from the middlegame in the past. The easiest way to prove the wrongness of this proposition is by observing CG’s daily puzzles.
Do not peek at the names of the players that played these puzzles, and don’t look at the dates. Can you glean from the middlegame play and combinations in the puzzles the date they were played? You can’t. You would not know if it was played in 2025, 2000, 1975, 1950, 1925, or 1900. Chess combinations don’t just suddenly change their stripes just because a hundred years have passed. With or without computers.
Another observation is that when the best masters of pre-WW2, Lasker, Capablanca, and Alekhine, met the occasional ‘modern’ structures of the Sicilian Scheveningen and Dragon, KID, Modern Benoni, Benko Gambit, they played strategically perfectly, in just the way these opening structures should be played.
So how did these masters play openings and the resulting middlegame structures that are deemed incomprehensible to them by some of today’s dogmatically ‘modern’ kibitzers?
The answer is that chess rules and principles have not changed. Center, rapid development, open files and diagonals, holes, weak pawns, piece activity, initiative and attack, positional sacrifices and all types of combinations were as familiar to them as to us.
Note that it is the frequencies of a few middlegame pawn structures that have changed since WW2. Not the Ruy Lopez or QGD, but obviously Sicilians and KIDs are much more common post-WW2.
Since so many games nowadays begin with the Sicilian and KID, people associate these with being ‘modern’ (which is a rather vague undefined term). But certainly, Lasker and Capablanca understood the middlegame principles behind them and when they did get these positions they played them excellently, like the top masters they are. (To be continued)/PN
