here on cg.com there are numerous representatives of engine-ridden kibitzing, with little to no understanding of the non-played lines that may back up or complicate the truth regarding the "simple" engine line "they" advocate.

but it spreads everywhere. during the grand slam final we had the perfect example in the game vallejo-carlsen where carlsen eventually decided against 26... Rd3! which was winning in this position:

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now, even chessbase managed to give the following "analysis line" (which happens to be the engine's recommended line here): 26... Rxd3 27. Qxc7 Rxd1 (diagram) 28. Rxd1?? Qxd1

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i mean, which human player in their right mind exchanges on d1 here to reach a dead lost position a piece down? if carlsen could've known that white played "engine-perfect" and that the latter meant playing Rc1xd1, it would've taken carlsen about 10 seconds to decide on 26... Rxd3 - he knows how to win a piece up.

this is an example of the kind of rubbish "game commentary" that too strong engines might lead if used uncritically. the problem is that going sufficiently deep, the engines saw that white's only serious try (which carlsen failed to calculate to a clear position, which includes making sure there isn't a perpetual some 20 moves down the road), 28. Qb8+ Bf8 29. Rc8 leads to more material loss than the rook exchange eventually, even if it short term wins back the piece:

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this is the position that chessbase should've analyzed for its readers, if they had any objective of explaining why carlsen didn't go for Rxd3. i tried to take on the task on the carlsen page, see Magnus Carlsen for some lines and themes.

here i'll just show one line:

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this is from the critical line after white's 28. Qb8+ and it's black to reply to 36. Rxg6! in order to find a clear win, carlsen would've had to see 36... Re1!! here - or be able to see that 36... hxg6?! 37. Qh8 Kg5 38. Qd8+ Kf4 39. Qd6+ Kxe4 40. Qc6+ lets black escape the checks, but <only> by giving up the rook in the following position (a funny exercise is to set up this position and let houdini run until it shows more than +5 for black, without the use of tablebases - but remember to clear the hash table first, so that it hasn't stored knowledge of the right pawn ending):

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eventually this leads to this pawn ending with black to move:

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I may be naïve but don't see anything wrong in having more and more ordinary people being more critical of Super GM play as long as it's done in the proper context. People like myself who would probably lose to Super GMs even at queen odds have no recourse but to resort to engine analysis since otherwise our judgment and opinions would not be worth much, and rightly so. I am under no illusions about my chess playing capabilities and, whenever I post an engine's analysis, I make it clear that it is indeed an engine's analysis and not my own, and I cite the engine used and the search depth that it achieved in reaching its evaluation.

Sure, there are those who may have an overblown opinion of their "achievement" in analyzing a game using an engine and finding better moves than those played by a Super GM in a game, but these attempts at insight are easily seen and ignored if desired. I hope that this phenomena is a result of the relative newness of easily available strong engines and powerful computers and that these examples will disappear or at least will be greatly reduced as the novelty of the "achievement" wears off. Time will tell.

It's good to read a reasonable, balanced thought about this. Too much of what I see here and on pages like the daily puzzle smack of one upmanship more than anything. Just another variation of "mine's bigger than yours!"

<...I may be naïve but don't see anything wrong in having more and more ordinary people being more critical of Super GM play as long as it's done in the proper context. ..>

Because of all the commentaries which seem to have been driven by engines, I guess we ended up all being brainwashed that Carlsen missed something quite simple.

Maybe the only way to keep a connection with reality is for the players to be interviewed after their games like at the London Chess Classic which I enjoyed being at recently.

If kibitzers on Chessgames.com actually want to learn from Master games rather than the "search for ultimate truth" then I think one important thing may be the players being interviewed after games, or their own annotations.

The video on the end of Kramnik - Howell struck me as a little misguided. You talk about truth/empathy, but it's not a good example. People purely looking at engine evaluations wouldn't have noticed much that was amiss - after all, even with the Qf1 move the engine still gives a win for Kramnik. The second point is that the people who I saw point it out all noted it was a hard move to see - no lack of empathy there.

You also make a point about how moves like that pointed out by the computer mean people need to alter their style and be less emotional. There's a grain of truth in that, but it's nothing new. People have always discovered flaws in nice-looking games/ideas, and especially say in the second half of the 20th century it's been approached systematically and seriously. Of course computers massively accelerated the process and make it accessible to all.

Vallejo-Pons vs Carlsen, 2011

Francisco Vallejo-Pons vs Magnus Carlsen
4th Bilbao Masters 2011 · Zukertort Opening: Kingside Fianchetto (A04) · 1-0

I assumed most people still think Carlsen made a simple blunder. Thankfully when interviewed about the game he said he couldn't see a win and tried calculating very far down.

Yet most people's perception (lack of empathy it seems) is that Carlsen made a simple blunder.

Incidentally, it's ChessVibes not ChessBase that gives the line Frogbert mentions, though ChessBase is often the most guilty of shallow computer analysis, and gave the decent move 30...Qxe4 two question marks (!). In defence of chess journalists everywhere, though, writing sensible and almost immediate reports on chess as people do nowadays would be pretty much inconceivable without engines - as would a player of your (higher than my!) level producing instructional videos.

(i don't trust kasparov blindly - i feel he's become the biggest back seat driver in the chess world, trying to polish a flawless exterior; as coach he takes credit for wins but no responsibility for losses, and as commentator he can use engines but pretend it's all "his" original ideas and effort... where he is now, he's detached from the world of otb pressure and mistakes. ideal in many ways, right?)

actually, i don't think a kasparov looking independently on the position in that carlsen game would fail to see white's option of Qxc7 and Qb8+ and so on, while it's obvious that if he did, he wouldn't be able to analyze it to its conclusion in a flash or consider it trivial afterwards. as my computer-aided analysis shows: the position was a mouthful and then some; of course, it's possible to miss white's Rxg6 resource, thinking it's over after 35. Qe5+ f5 but anyway.

So it's a tradeoff. Engines such as Stockfish and Spike aggressively prune their search tree and reach deeper depths in a given amount of time. Engines such as Rybka apparently do not prune their search tree as aggressively and therefore do not reach as deep a search level, but they consider more moves. Houdini falls somewhere in the middle between those engines in terms of seach depth achievable in a given amount of time. Which search tree pruning strategy is superior usually depends on the position, and that is usually not known a priori, making definite conclusions difficult. And, given the relative performance of Houdini, Stockfish, Rybka, and Spike, determining which approach is clearly superior is inconclusive, particularly when you muddy the waters by factoring into the equation each engine's different evaluation function.

Here we are in similar situations with every GM game being put under engine scrutiny, except instead of taking millions of years, it takes seconds to come up with answers like 42 - which seem to show how apparently rubbish the GM's are. Instead of being "42" the answers involve these very strange lines of analysis that no human would often ever come up with even if given days to analyse the position.

The end result is a complete lack of sympathy being created even for GMs over 2700 - the "Super GM's" and the apparent silly blunders that Carlsen is capable of making as demonstrated below.

<Polarmis> makes a good point about the intelligent use of computer analysis, but actually I wonder if games need to actually be annotated by strong players without reference to engines - to have some clue first from a human perspective. Or for the players themselves to talk about the games a bit, like Kramnik did recently for his win vs Howell.

Alas, I'm still trying to throw myself to the ground and miss, with the resulting black and blue marks all over my body. ;-)

But, again, my point is that in chess we should be seeking "truth". If an engines' analysis is "inhuman" but better than the moves uncovered by a human analyst, isn't that objectively better? (sorry, but I couldn't resist using that word). And what I have found is that engine analysis more often than not reinforces the good judgment of the players, at least the strong players, so my admiration of them is increased, not lessened, particularly when I factor in the time factor and occasional time trouble that the GMs have to face. True, some (many?) mediocre players like myself use the engine analysis to gloat about the GMs mistakes, but I think that's more an indictment of these immature mediocre players than the use of chess engines or the engines themselves. And engines regularly come up with whoopers near the end of their search depth or when they find themselves in a difficult situation and try to push the "bad news" beyond their search horizon. Don't you have any empathy for the engines then?

You guys seem balanced engine analysts getting more benefit than any delusions from analysis.

Thanks to you both for your balanced arguments about the use of engines.

I think you guys will be forgiving of Naka's wins in complex positions more than the less balanced engine analysts out there.

i strive for objectivity, also in the meta-commentary to chess games. where i think some of the comments to anand-nakamura went off along a somewhat misunderstood tangent, was when it wasn't only claimed that a) "it was only a win in engine terms", and b) "winning the won position needed 'unhuman' play on white's behalf".

so, while i absolutely agree on your general crusade on dumbening use of engines, both by rank amateurs and gms doing commentary, i think it's important to choose the right examples in order to drive the point home. as such, i don't think the anand-naka game was ideal.

<what I have found is that engine analysis more often than not reinforces the good judgment of the players, at least the strong players, so my admiration of them is increased, not lessened, particularly when I factor in the time factor and occasional time trouble that the GMs have to face>

Adams may have have rejected this because it actually makes White's task of getting the queenside moving a little easier after 17.c4.

<...17...a5 disturbs the Queen side pawns. An alternative is 17...Bf5 clearing the e file so that on 18 Bb2 Black can play 18...Re3>

After 17...Bf5 18 Ne5 is the capture 19 Nxc6 then in fact a threat? On 17...Bf5 18 Ne5 suppose that Black ignores the attack on c6 and plays 18...f6 all the same. On 19 Nxc6 Qb6 20 d5 secures the N and on 20...Re4 21 b4 threatens 22 c5. On 17...Bf5 18 Ne5 Bxe5 20 dxe5 g5 21 e6! opens the long diagonal before Black can blockade the e5 pawn which obstructs the long diagonal.

- GM Anish Giri