Hello All,

I stand by the claims in my 2018 book - "Kinetic Patterns in Reactive Chess" (KPiRC, pronounced KAY-perk).
During your turn, the preceding 1 or 2 half-moves DO have concrete relationships to the best candidate moves, and those relationships DO contain clues helpful for efficiently finding the best candidate moves, especially for weak class players who lack strong calculation skills.


[A]
Atomic Effects are Easy but Numerous:
Every move in chess causes numerous "atomic" changes in the position (such as a diagonal line becoming open, plus a rook gaining more vertical mobility, plus some squares having less or more pressure on them, and so on).
Each atom is trivially easy to comprehend, but there are so many atoms that noting them all requires an intentional effort that game analysis proves weak players are failing to apply consistently.


[B]
Repeatable Simple Logical Process:
KPiRC offers a simple repeatable thought process to increase the thoroughness and consistency in noting or cataloging all the atoms of the latest move.


[C]
Relationship Thus Clue:
KPiRC is crammed with data that utterly proves there is almost always a direct relationship between the strongest candidate moves -and- the latest move of your opponent (slight over-simplification here).
When a player notes a simple atomic effect of the opponent's latest move, he is greatly increasing the chance of detecting any strong candidate move that would exploit that atom.


[D]
Reactive Chess is Strong Chess:
Next, when the player chooses the candidate move, after detecting the candidate by noting a given atom, the player is thereby making a directly "reactive" move.
Most chess moves are "factually" reactive, at least in the sense that post-game analysis can see the relationship between a given move -and- the immediately prior move of the opponent.
Show me any "proactive" chess move, and I can almost always show you that the move is also a move that is reactive to the opponent's latest move (or to the player's own previous move).
The reverse perspective, the idea that maybe every reactive move is also a proactive move, is found to be weaker. Not uncommonly, perceiving a particular move as proactive seems more like an illusion.
Proactive Chess is Often an Illusion.


[E]
Deliberately Reactive:
In an additional sense of reactivity, a chess move is also "deliberately" reactive if the player's thought process bothered to note the atomic effects of his opponent's latest move.
But is there even such a thing as a player who ignores his opponent's latest move, and who instead only reassess the entire position to start each of his turns?


[F]
Total Re-Scans are Inefficient for Humans:
Charles Hertan, and Cecil Purdy before him, urged weak players to re-scan anew the entire position at the start of every turn, looking just for "forcing moves", and to ignore the opponent's latest move and its helpful clues (at least until after then entire position was re-scanned).
These re-scans mimic how computer chess engines proceed, as engines pay no attention to any previous moves (except for the right to castle etc). But computer-style analytical processes are a poor fit for humans, who would be inefficient at executing such processes.


[G]
Kinetic Clues:
Computers treat chess as merely a series of static positions on the 64 squares.
But by intentionally utilizing the latest moves at the start of our turn, we leverage the guiding "kinetic" information available to us.


[H]
Kinetic Patterns:
KPiRC catalogs 56 atomic effects that recur endlessly throughout each entire chess game.
Their dimensions include:
* Your opponent's latest completed move ("move-1" or "m-1") versus your own latest completed move (m-2).
* The origin-square versus the destination-square atomic effects of the recent move.
* The nature of the atomic effect, there being 7 (thus the 7-letter acronym "timbals").
Thus 2*4*7 = 56.
For the weak player, improving his ability to easily recognize the 7 atomically simple patterns, in the 8 different contexts, is far more plausible than improving his ability to recognize a couple thousand "positional chunks", which several psychology experiments suggest is the true source of chess experise.


[I]
Calculation Impossible Without Atomics:
KPiRC argues that no player can calculate to any useful depth, or with any accuracy and reliability, until after the player is able to perform atomic analyses on the kinetics or chess moves (including moves foreseen during calculation).
Chess masters perform atomic analyses automatically. They learn these skills much as they learn to play chess blindfolded, meaning not by direct practice on these exact skills, but rather indirectly by deeply understanding all facets of chess.
Weak weekend chess players do not possess these mental automations, and so can benefit more from deliberate conscious steps to assess each atomic effect.



*** With the Kinetic Atomics perspective explained above,
*** these next five sections J,K,L,M,N are among my favorites in KPiRC.


[J]
"Asequential Calulation":
KPiRC explains how strong atomic skills give a player the option of simplifying the calculation task.
They key idea is that calculation can be performed without the heavy burden of the usual strict sequence, which piles ever more changes onto an unmanageable heap which soon topples in our minds.
By incorporating atomic analysis into the overall calculation process, we can simplify the heap, and visit certain atoms, in almost any sequence, to finalize the safety and effectiveness assessments of our calculated line of move.


[K]
True Definition of the Initiative in Chess:
KPiRC examines three games that chess masters analyzed as demonstrating the "initiative" in chess.
Only one of those three games is found to convincingly demonstrate a true initiative, according the kinetic atomic analysis, and we display the evidence visually.
Maintaining a "better position" than your opponent's for several moves is not enough to warrant the label "initiative".


[L]
Kinetics Reveals Playing Style - Tal vs Petrosian:
KPiRC uses kinetic atomic analyses to generate hard data about the style of moves that Tal and Petrosian tended to play.
Then visual graphics are presented to display the hard data.
The graphics do match the commonly accepted descriptions of how the playing styles of M.Tal and T.Petrosian differed.
This matching would not have occurred unless kinetic atomics do capture important truths about chess.


[M]
Memorize a Chess Game:
Perceiving moves as reactions to the latest kinetic atomic clues give the average mid-level class player a surprisingly effective tool should he want to memorize some chess games.
KPiRC shows that chess games are largely chains of reactive moves, and these provide a structure for our memory to grasp onto.
In this particular type of chain, each link provides a clue to remembering the next move.


[N.1]
Refutation of One de la Maza Claim:
Jacob Aagaard, in his 2001 book Excelling At Chess, lamented what he perceived as a trend toward over-emphasizing what calculation alone can do for you during your chess games. Aagaard wrote (page 9)...
"They have a belief that they should calculate better, but ... it would not do you that much good anyway, unless you really know what to calculate."
Then in his 2002 book Rapid Chess Improvement (pages 14-15), Michael de la Maza wrote...
"This is a key lesson: all of the positional knowledge in the world is worth less than the ability to see one [more] move ahead."
[N.2]
I devised a way to rigorously test de la Maza's claim.
From the resulting hard data, I generated a visual graph that casts strong doubt on de la Maza's claim.



*** Closing comments


[O]
Obviously KPiRC does not claim that the Kinetic Atomic perspective on chess is the only "right" perspective. There are handfuls of delightfully varied perspectives described in books by Aron Nimzovitch, John Watson, Cecil Purdy, Arthur van de Oudeweetering, Ian Anderson, Jonathan Rowson, Jeremy Silman, Michael de la Maza, and many others.
The perspectives of Jeremy Silman versus Michael de la Maza famously clashed, but mostly the various perspectives do not contradict each other, and Kinetic Atomics do not contradict any other perspective.
KPiRC is as much a book about Chess Philosophy as it is a provider of practical advice for winning a chess game.
Yet, if your opponent reliably performs the kinetic atomic analysis turn after turn (consciously or subconsciously/automatically), and you do not perform it, then you will lose.


[P]
Even a half-hearted effort at post-game analysis of chess games between middling class-level players reveals proof that these players lack reliable skills in simple kinetic atomics.



Thanks.
Gene Milener

CastleLong.com

.

Can't comment on the French, but I see the German and English phrases as somewhat different.

'Having said A, you must say B' implies there's a logical progression that must be followed in order to make sense of the situation - the logic of the position etc.

'In for a penny, in for a pound' implies that once you have committed to an undertaking, one is determined to see it through regardless of the (escalating) stakes.

cathexis wrote on 01/27/23 at 14:17:36:

Fixed that for you.

I see. Why bother with your opponent's future move(s) when all the answers are in the move(s) already played?
We're on a road to knowhere.

@AOC yes, I agree with your points. If GeneM sees the process as largely reactive, then surely future reactions can be anticipated, just as with an insult.

@DinkHeckler I also agree with nearly everything you said. In fact, I really love it. My problem with the proposed idea is that "psychology" and "analysis" are much better ways to think about the human fight that is chess than "kinetics" and "statics." Those sound like different kinds of physics, as in static and kinetic coefficients of friction, and put an pseudo-scientific gloss on the human elements of chess. I felt, "this is what can be analyzed like physics; no more." 

The psychological (or say non-mathematical) field of phenomena in the human struggle that is chess comprises much more than just the history of the positions. The player's self-concepts and concepts of each other, the perceived strengths of each player in different types of positions, their actual strengths as opposed to their perceived strengths, their body language, the intensity and nature of their motivation, their reserves of energy, time management, the tournament situation, actual and suspected opening preparation, recovery from surprises and setbacks, the tendency to feel and ability to tolerate tension, etc., etc., all enter into the struggle. As Yogi Berra said, "90% of baseball is mental. The other half is physical."

I'm also not sure the author understands how much of a decent player's time is spent analyzing the demands of the position in depth, or even what it is like to do so. I trust Botvinnik about that (unlike Kotov, Botvinnik wrote in his notebooks "check everything three times!"). And it makes sense that a weak player will think of chess as primarily reacting to moves, simply because he very frequently, even usually, faces moves he just didn't consider.

Here is another modest proposition by GeneM, from a review of ForwardChess:

GeneM wrote on 08/22/14 at 04:04:07:

My expanding bookshelf is doing just fine.

If we're looking at things statistically, it matters what our sample is. When we actually play (and also when we solve puzzles from games of strong players), our positions are drawn from a set of games between competent players that last for dozens of consecutive moves. Given that, the best move is more likely to be a reaction to an opportunity just created by our opponent than it would be if someone just created a random position with a random last move; otherwise, the move likely would have been played earlier (of course this isn't an ironclad rule, I'm talking probabilities).

"Always look at how your opponent's last move changed the position" is pretty uncontroversial advice, I thought. Of course if you pretend the previous move was different it doesn't change the current best move (except for en passant blah blah). But that doesn't mean that the previous move can't be a good clue or that you should ignore it when playing a game.

For the Smullyan problem, castling rights can be allowed or not into the FEN. Clearly the position can be reached with or without castling rights. If one solution is not valid (still not sure why), it's in view of chess problem conventions, not chess rules.
Of course, chess is essentially stateless, and the basis for evaluation is positions, not moves (think of a graph where positions are vertices and moves are edges). I guess GeneM - who is welcome to elaborate here - infers that move history is a factor of its own in human decision making. This can be a thing (e.g. some positions reached by transposition from opening A or B tend to develop differently according to said opening), but it's not that relevant for chess. Reacting to moves (e.g. words said) is more of a feature in human relations.