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How To Fool Fritz - Explorations in Man Assisted Machine Chess (MAMS) Reviewed by Andy Walker, School of MathSci., Univ. of Nott'm, UK.
This title has also been reviewed by Dr. Stephen B. Dowd
For a start, Albert "Happy" Alberts is not *the* Albert Alberts, the well-known Dutch author, who died in 1995. Secondly, the book is only loosely about Fritz; the author explains that he uses "Fritz" as a collective name for machine chess, that he uses a "whole bunch" of programs, and that his favourite is HIARCS. But perhaps "How to Hi-jack HIARCS" or "How to Mmmbop MChess" were considered as titles and discarded.
Further, the book is only loosely about how to
fool anything. Albert Square explains how he can assist "Fritz" to
beat Fritz. Well, yes, but it would be more impressive, and
interesting, to assist Fritz to beat More importantly, the book being reviewed here is not the one that the potential reader may rush out to buy. That one will have, apparently, an ISBN, a bar-code, figurine notation instead of letters for the pieces, and errors corrected. This last is, sadly, very necessary. When I first looked at my copy, it fell open at DIAGRAM -- as in "And this also deserves a DIAGRAM", AA is fond of EMPHASIS -- 6.20, where "The Knight on e7 [is] like a spider!". Indeed it is, but as it is fighting a queen and five pawns, White's advantage is not entirely clear. Luckily, it is soon apparent that there should be an extra queen on h6, which gives White a rather better attack.
Looking back to confirm the queen, we find that
this is a Sheshikov [sic] Sicilian, in which starting from DIAGRAM 6.19,
White plays 12 O-O instead of 12 Qh5. Unfortunately, in DIAGRAM 6.19, the
white
"[W]hite concedes his/her opening advantage to
-0.3"; but my copy of Fritz on my computer rates it at +0.09, which makes it
less likely than AA thinks that Black may have some winning mutes [sic].
Anyway, OK, that's quite a long line, and I've omitted some discussion, but it illustrates the good and bad points of the book. The number of typos is typical, making it quite hard to follow the game, and it's a bit frustrating that the game must have existed in computerized form and could have been listed from file with none of the transcription errors. The number of places where AA's computer deviates from mine is typical, so it's unlikely that you will get the chance to play the MAMS move 16 ... O-O-O, even if you have a defence to 24 Ba5+. You cannot expect to use any of this material for your own games, unless you do your own explorations using your own set-up; and even then the results will only be of value for playing against it. Fooling yourself? On the other hand, you *should* do your own explorations, and AA gives you lots of starting points for some fun lines; and if you don't want to do that, you can play through [with difficulty] some well-known games alongside a thoroughly racy companion -- Alberts writes like Nicolas ["Van der Valk"] Freeling on speed. You can also enjoy many interludes of physics, philosophy and chess history; a scientific Nicolas Freeling, to boot. You will be frustrated, annoyed, entertained, and swept along; but not bored. You will want to put the book down, even hurl it down; but you will pick it up again. You will also find plenty of advice about where to intervene when `helping' your computer, and other pro- and anti-computer ideas, such as when to castle. Just one example:
Oh, and another quote:
I have my suspicions about how this book came about. I think Albert "Happy" Alberts was sitting in one of the Amsterdam `Brown Cafes', sipping genever and absorbing the heady atmosphere, and in animated discussion about how to beat the pesky computers. And in the clear, sober light of the following morning, he found that he had pressed the "Send" button, and it was too late. If that's not what happened, it should have, like Galois feverishly writing up his life's work as a mathematician the night before being killed in a duel, or like the two-year old Capablanca telling his dad "No, the horsey moves like *that*" -- a deeper truth.
I wanted to dislike this book, I really did. I
still can't actually *read* it. But I've come to quite like it. My copy, if
not yours, desperately needs a serious edit. And Valium. The chess is
grandmasterly from an amateur perspective, and, unlike the editing, not to
be taken too seriously -- Alberts knows that, and doesn't take himself too
seriously either. Don't expect to learn much about how computers play chess.
Just grit your teeth and enjoy the ride.
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