Yes this paragraph is indeed the crux of what I disagree with.
Two sentences later you have this gem: “What once seemed magical became calculable; where one could rely on intuition came to require rigorous memorization and training with a machine. Chess, once poetic and philosophical, was acquiring elements of a spelling bee: a battle of preparation, a measure of hours invested.”
Well, that’s patently untrue. Chess has always been a battle of preparation far before the advent of computer. The rosy paste described just doesn’t exist. High level play has always required memorising books of theory and going through decades of past games. That’s what chess is. It’s a game of pattern recognition and memorisation.
If I wanted to be provocative, I would say that the article seems to imply that computers have turned chess from an interesting game into a boring one while in actuality it has always been boring but with more mystic.
Two sentences later you have this gem: “What once seemed magical became calculable; where one could rely on intuition came to require rigorous memorization and training with a machine. Chess, once poetic and philosophical, was acquiring elements of a spelling bee: a battle of preparation, a measure of hours invested.”
Well, that’s patently untrue. Chess has always been a battle of preparation far before the advent of computer. The rosy paste described just doesn’t exist. High level play has always required memorising books of theory and going through decades of past games. That’s what chess is. It’s a game of pattern recognition and memorisation.
If I wanted to be provocative, I would say that the article seems to imply that computers have turned chess from an interesting game into a boring one while in actuality it has always been boring but with more mystic.