Computers, Chess and Long-Range Planning. (Heidelberg Science Library) [Paperback]

Michail M. Botvinnik (Author), Arthur Brown (Translator)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Springer; 1 edition (July 8, 1970)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0387900128
• ISBN-13: 978-0387900124
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,968,930 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Finally it makes sense!!! ;), November 19, 2003

By 

Hoa H (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Computers, Chess and Long-Range Planning. (Heidelberg Science Library) (Paperback)

I first read the book in 1985. The topic is interesting, the book title is impressive. After the first two chapters, the rest looked like Greek to me. The next three chapters are the "meat" of the book. Finally last week, after 18 years of "soul-searching", it begins to make sense to me. Between then and now, I revisited the book at least 5-6 more times. Difficult book! There are two reasons that this book threw me off. Dr. Botvinnik used lots of Greek letters to represent his formulars: alpha, beta, psi, theta, sigma, tau, rho, phi, delta, pi, sigma, etc. (See what I meant.) If that was not enough, he added in the "complex number representation" as a "bonus." That was the first reason. The second was the way he wrote those expressions, I thought they were "well-known continuous functions" in math or science. Most of them are NOT. They are binary functions, either have values of 1 or 0; which now can be represented as Boolean math in standard programming language.
The main way to use his evaluation expressions is with the assumption there is always an "attack" provided an material exchange. This was applicable for tactical chess; while for state-of-the-art program, the positional evaluation is more involved.
The first is about the historical match between the USA-USSR programs, which resulted in favor of the USSR's. The second, a lot of theories and background which are useful in chess-playing technique, computer programming, management decision-making, human-reasoning, etc. Chapter 3 has: the confussing math expressions with those beautiful Greek letters. Chapter 4: using bit-map to represent attack-defense paths that the decisions and evaluations in chapter 3 will compute. Chapter 5: using the his famous win over Capablanca as experiment to illustrate his math expression. Chapter 6: a useless one; he spent 7 pages to list some of his own games as excercise. (Why? If we want examples, Alekhine's, Capa's, Lasker's, Tal's or Fischer's are more typical.) In addition, many diagrams are so large, while the whole book is only about 90 pages. More than 10% of the pages goes wasted, killing at least 3 trees. Chapter 7: the future of computer chess. There are four chapters for the Appendices.
In summary, it is good book at the time, too confussing (at least to a literacy-challenged reader like me), and some minuses mentioned above. Four stars for your book, GM and many-time world chess champion Botvinnik!!!! (****)