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Irving Amen - Chess Strategy

In Chess, Strategy is related to positional play and setting up goals and long-term plans for future play most importantly considering pawn structure and king safety. In computer chess, while tactics is the domain of search, strategy is almost the domain of evaluation.

The concepts of strategy and tactics in chess and other sports are derived from military origins as defined as a fourfold hierarchy of strategy, operational objective, tactic and task.

Quotes

• Gerald Abrahams: The tactician knows what to do when there is something to do; whereas the strategian knows what to do when there is nothing to do.
• Mikhail Chigorin: Even a poor plan is better than no plan at all.
• Max Euwe: Strategy requires thought, tactics require observation.
• Emanuel Lasker: A bad plan is better than no plan at all.
• Aron Nimzowitsch: First restrain, next blockade, lastly destroy.

Steinitz's Four Rules of Strategy

Wilhelm Steinitz, the first undisputed world chess champion from 1886 to 1894, was a main chess correspondent to present his ideas about chess strategy :

1. The right to attack belongs to the side that has a positional advantage, which not only has the right to attack, but the obligation to do so, else the advantage will evaporate. The attack should be concentrated on the weakest square in the opponent's position.
2. If in an inferior position, the defender should be ready to defend and make compromises, or take other measures, such as a desperate counterattack.
3. In an equal position, the opponents should maneuver, trying to achieve a position in which they have an advantage. If both sides play correctly, an equal position will remain equal.
4. The advantage may be a big, indivisible one, or it may be a whole series of small advantages. The goal of the stronger side is to store up the advantages, and then to convert temporary advantages into permanent ones.

Search Strategy

Search strategy refers to search techniques and algorithms:

• Best-First Strategy
• Brute-Force Strategy
• Depth-First Strategy
• Type A Strategy
• Type B Strategy

See also

• Anti-Computerchess
• Bobby's Strategic Quiescence Search
• Center Control
• Danny Kopec - How to ... Video
• Evaluation
• Knowledge
• Minority Attack
• Oracle
• Pawn Structure
• Planning
• Pre-processing
• Psychology
• Space
• Strategic Test Suite
• Tactics

Publications

1970 ...

• Mikhail Botvinnik (1970). Computers, Chess and Long-Range Planning. Springer-Verlag, New York.
• Peter W. Frey, Larry Atkin (1979). Creating a Chess-Player, Part 4: Thoughts on Strategy. In Blaise W. Liffick (ed.), The Byte Book of Pascal, pp. 143-155. Byte Publications, also BYTE, Vol. 4, No. 1
• David Wilkins (1979). Using Patterns and Plans to Solve Problems and Control Search. Ph.D. thesis, Computer Science Dept, Stanford University, Stanford, California, AI Lab Memo AIM-329
• David Wilkins (1979). Using plans in chess. In Proceedings of the 1979 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, (Tokyo, Japan), pp. 960-967.

1980 ...

• David Wilkins (1980). Using patterns and plans in chess. Artificial Intelligence, vol. 14, pp. 165-203. Reprinted (1988) in Computer Chess Compendium
• Jacques Pitrat (1980). The Behaviour of a Chess Combination Program using Plans. Advances in Computer Chess 2
• Jonathan Schaeffer (1980). Long-Range Planning in Computer Chess. Master's thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Waterloo
• Hermann Kaindl (1982). Positional Long-Range Planning in Computer Chess. Advances in Computer Chess 3, also published as Hermann Kaindl (1983). Positional Long-Range Planning in Computer Chess. Vienna University of Technology, Austria.
• Jonathan Schaeffer (1983). Long-Range Planning in Computer Chess. Proceedings of the Annual ACM Conference (Computers: Extending the Human Resources), pp. 170-179.
• Alexander Szabo (1984). Computer-Chess Tactics and Strategy. M.Sc. Thesis, University of British Columbia
• Hans Berliner (1985). Goals, Plans, and Mechanisms: Non-symbolically in an Evaluation Surface. Presentation at Evolution, Games, and Learning, Center for Nonlinear Studies, Los Alamos National Laboratory, May 21.
• Richard Korf (1987). Planning as Search: A Quantitative Approach. Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 33, pp. 65-88.
• David Wilkins (1988). Practical Planning: Extending the Classical AI Planning Paradigm. (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Representation and Reasoning), amazon.com
• Stephen Muggleton (1988). Inductive Acquisition of Chess Strategies. Machine Intelligence 11 (eds. Jean Hayes Michie, Donald Michie, and J. Richards), pp. 375-389. Clarendon Press, Oxford, U.K. ISBN 0-19-853718-2.
• Bruce Abramson (1989). Control Strategies for Two-Player Games. ACM Computing Surveys 21(2): 137-161

1990 ...

• Chrilly Donninger (1992). The Relation of Mobility, Strategy and the Mean Dead Rabbit in Chess. Heuristic Programming in AI 3
• Steven Walczak and Douglas D. Dankel II (1993). Acquiring Tactical and Strategic Knowledge with a Generalized Method for Chunking of Game Pieces. International Journal of Intelligent Systems, Vol. 8, No. 2
• Alexis Drogoul (1993, 1995). When Ants Play Chess (Or Can Strategies Emerge From Tactical Behaviors?) MAAMAW ’93, CiteSeerX pdf
• Andreas L. Opdahl, Bjørnar Tessem (1994). Long-Term Planning in Computer Chess. Advances in Computer Chess 7
• Xinbo Gao, Hiroyuki Iida, Jos Uiterwijk, Jaap van den Herik (1998). A Speculative Strategy. CG 1998
• Jan van Reek, Jos Uiterwijk, Jaap van den Herik (1998). Planning a Strategy in Chess. ICCA Journal, Vol. 21, No. 3, pdf
• Jan van Reek, Jos Uiterwijk, Jaap van den Herik (1999). Two Strategic Shortcomings in Chess Programs. ICCA Journal, Vol. 22, No. 4, pdf

2000 ...

• John L. Jerz (2009, 2012). A Concept of Strategy Useful for Computer Game Playing.

2010 ...

• Cheng-Wei Chou, Ping-Chiang Chou, Chang-Shing Lee, David L. Saint-Pierre, Olivier Teytaud, Mei-Hui Wang, Li-Wen Wu, Shi-Jim Yen (2013). Strategic Choices: Small Budgets and Simple Regret. TAAI 2012, Excellent Paper Award, pdf

Forum Posts

• Some Computer Chess Questions by MWells, rgcc, September 1, 1996
• Positional and Tactical by Ferdinand Mosca, CCC, April 11, 2019 » Tactics

External Links

• Chess strategy from Wikipedia
• School of chess from Wikipedia
• Strategy from Wikipedia
• Strategy (disambiguation) from Wikipedia
• Chess Strategy from Wikibooks
• Positional Play : Piece Placement and Chess Strategy by Mark Weeks
• Game Theory - The Mathematics of Strategy by Erica Klarreich
• Strategic Test Suite by Dann Corbit and Swaminathan » Test-Positions

References

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