glacon sahvanah haliaka
Jacinto Dieujuste
I created an opening book from over 9million games and then I used a 350K game database of both players over 2500 elo and the 'learn from a database' Fritz feature and I came up with 100% certainty that 1.d4d5 is the best opening.
1. d4 d5 2. c4 is more than fine , I think you're getting a bit confused on how to use and interpret a DB, Steve Giddins had written a nice book on this topic, how to build your opening repertoire. It's old so could be a bit outdated for today but tbh why bother with DBs to see what's happening on move 2, pick 1-2 model players whose style you like and see what they play.
Don't use DBs to find the "best opening", there's no such thing. If you want to get a taste of how play in various openings look like, better to get your hands on annotated games in a variety of openings, e.g. good game collections.
Thanks for the reply, but it is not exactly that which is puzzling me. It s a feature in Fritz, after you build an opening book you can ask it to learn from another or the same database. Each time white wins that line's weight increases and if a defeat it is reduced. The same for black. So, the final product-book is not just db stats like an untuned book.
For example I took the advise of a teacher and started with the Italian game, but I was not getting the lines I wanted since Black wouldnt cooperate, I tried the London, didnt like my bishop locked in front of my pawns, I tried the Scotch didnt like the positions and now I m playing the Vienna. Hardly any of them are main, fancy lines that db stats would propose. I picked them. I ve also definitely settled to the Caro-Kann as black and I still have absolutely no idea what to play against d4, but I doubt anyone really knows .
To see what's playable, instead of the statistical approach on the 2500+ range see what openings super GMs have played over the last decades. This may miss a few sound openings they didn't play due to fashion but almost all their choices will be openings that are sound and have rich positions.
Pick one and stick to it, through good games and bad games. Every difficulty you face in an opening is not solved by changing openings but by analysing your games, finding flaws in your game and improving in those areas.
The value will come from playing 50, 100, 200x the Italian game, then analysing your games. Then you will know the structures very well, the typical tactical motifs, when to release tension, which pieces to keep for your endgames etc.
If you like the Caro against d4, QGD is an option as there is some overlap i.e. in the Carlsbad and IQP structures, so knowledge gained on one helps the other. In another thread here, someone pointed out that actually there's a QGD line that transposes to a Panov line directly and there's a book/course on that ( haven't read the book so don't have an opinion ).
In chess, individual moves mean nothing without the underlying ideas. This DB analysis (and all similar attempts) fall into the ditch of thinking that the moves are the important thing, and trying to work out the best plan, starting from the moves.
A particular line of defense for Black has been played hundreds of times in Master tournaments, and has always proved to be a solid and reliable defense. It has accumulated excellent performance stats, with many solid draws and even has more wins than losses on record... an excellent score for an opening with the Black pieces.
Then White finds a convincing refutation of the entire line. And plays it in a tournament game, which causes quite a stir among tournament players. Suddenly everybody abandons that whole line of defense, not wanting to end up in a position that has clearly been refuted.
Answer : Since nobody is willing to enter that line anymore, no new games are played and the statistics cannot update to reflect the fact that the entire line is now known to be WORTHLESS. The database continues to show that line as a GOOD option for Black, even though it's WELL KNOWN to be a forced loss!
That is interesting, though it seems that today's best engines would be able to at least see any opening move through to quiescence. If what you say is true, it is encouraging, as it suggests computers are far from "solving" chess. Seeing Komodo's results would be very interesting. Is it possible to let it "think" without any human input? I feel it would choose 1.e4, but I am interested to know what it's other options might be.
Thank you, Firebrand! I'm pleased you find this question interesting. I wonder if someday down the road, when computers are up to the task you describe, some disgraced opening might prove to have been the answer all along! You also have me wondering about the implications for a human player today. Does the computer's acknowledgement of its own limitations suggest that we are better off playing simpler openings? I left the Giuoco Piano behind forty years ago. Maybe it's time to go back!
Maybe a good example is B+B vs N pawnless endgame. Humans long considered it to be a draw. Only after engines solved it did we discover it's a win... but that doesn't mean you memorize 12 moves and are done with it. It's very difficult to win even after you study it.
Professionals work with engines all the time to explore openings. But if an engine, by itself, found a disgraced opening is playable, it's likely to be like the endgame I described, too bizarre to be playable in a practical sense. (Well, the 5 piece endgame is not unwinnable, but an opening will be exponentially harder!)
This has opened up a can of worms I wasn't expecting. While computers aren't perfect, they are better than humans. I am surprised, if it is true, that no engine has tackled this problem in earnest. While the compounded history of human chess thinking has produced amazing results through the collective experimentation of millions of players, we are still guided by concepts (e.g. control of the center, rapid development, king safety) that are by-products of chess thinkers 400 years ago, who surely could not see as deeply as computers. The evolution of chess theory, including Hypermodernism, has not strayed from these tenets, as to us humans, they make perfect sense. Thus, all grandmaster games overwhelmingly follow rather narrow patterns and very little investigation has been done on less familiar paths. When I solved the Rubik's cube, the essential realization was that I had to make it worse before I could make it better. So much has been discarded because in the short run, things look bad. Perhaps these early setbacks lead to superior positions later, if one knows how to navigate them. But as they are abandoned once the position seems unfavorable, we will never know. I'm not speaking of moves with a clear and decisive refutation but of the nebulous moves that databases tell us are favorable but lacking in statistically signifigant samples. What a fascinating experiment it would be to ban all "sound" openings from grandmaster play for twenty years, and see what theory emerged.
Also, the underlying logic is hard (impossible) to overturn in most positions. The center is the closest to all other parts of the board. The king's mobility is directly linked to the winning/losing condition.
That said, it is exciting to think about the exceptional cases that must exist, where bizarre or counter intuitive moves are actually the best. To some extent this happens already. Humans are used to ignoring "engine" moves in favor of more practical approaches. Even someone like me, who is far from a professional, has the habit of setting the engine to show me its top 3 choices... and I only explore moves or lines that make sense. (It's not possible for me or my opponents to play based on huge calculations.)
Hence why I mentioned "brute force". That is the term used for when an engine is forced to evaluate every possible branch. However, this slows them down significantly. As such, openings cannot be solved by brute force alone. It has to be worked out in practice, building a database of what failed and what held.
It is always amusing to see how quickly these threads stray and become combatative. To return to the OP, and perhaps phrase it better, is anyone aware of research being done with computers aimed directly at the opening, with no human heuristics added? For those who find this topic worthy of exploration, I suggest an, admittedly, imperfect book called Play Unconventional Chess and Win by Noam A. Mandella and Zeev Zohar. It looks at the seemeingly bizarre and counter-intuitive moves computers play, and what we might learn from them. It is not the Holy Grail, but it is the only book I know of that addresses these matters, as they apply to praxis.
The problem is that the opening can ultimately only be evaluated based on the edgames that result from them and then have to traverse a multitude of middlegame positions, with all the complexity those positions have.
But again, the opening can't be looked at in isolation. Barring some literal quantumn leap in computing, chess won't be solved for a very long time, if ever. That said, there is likely no best opening and there will be a number of them, maybe most standard openings and possibly many unorthodox ones, that will lead to equality with best play.
I went ahead and stopped analysis at 8 hours and a ply depth of 40 at default settings. By this point Komodo 9.3 had chosen the open Catalan as the primary thread at +0.20. That's actually pretty interesting considering how complex that opening is. Komodo definitely seems to be more positionally programmed.
c01484d022