Chess World Championship 2012: A First Win

You don't say if your kid was just playing in school tournaments, or if he was playing in tournaments open to all players. If the later, chess tournaments (and local chess clubs) are one of the few places kids can interact with adults and be treated as equals.

It's really a lot like sports. If your kid takes an interest in, say, basketball, will you stop him from getting on the school team because he has very little chance of becoming an NBA player?

Anyway, I agree with you. "To be a human database" is like saying that a musician is a "human sequencer". The joy of playing a good game or a difficult song has nothing to do with feeling like a machine. And you don't need to be a master to enjoy. In FICS there are enough players of my level so I can win... sometimes.

As for the discipline thing, there is something very important that chess teachs: the discipline of what works. It's following the rules that you win, not doing just what you would like. The frustration usually disappears when you accept that.

The sequential forced way of combinations is in particular a habit that helps me with my work.

The higher the level of competition, it's actually more than becoming a database, but continually studying and making innovations, especially in opening theory. The innovations, inventions, discoveries in opening theory make chess a dynamic game unlike many other games and sports. What was considered the best move in the past, can be proven to be inferior to today's innovation.

It is not fun to play against a database, but on another note, one of the enjoyable parts of the game is it's possible to have masterpieces of your own. You can get into some situations where your play is just how the best human or computer would play. Composing a masterpiece and executing these combinations is very satisfying.

I admire GM's at the levels seen in these championships. Good for them. It is their chosen profession and they excel at it. However, I am no-longer in awe of their mental abilities.

I don't know which parts you admire and which parts you don't. Apart from playing nearly 10K games online, I don't know if you've played through the annotations of some GM games. Through their commentary written after the game, you get a picture of what they were thinking: both breadth and depth. Some of these calculations are remarkable mental abilities, similar to say people who mentally compute large numbers or have perfect memories.

My impression is that the top players of today have deeper, amazing mental abilities than players years ago. In the past superior judgment and evaluation was the key. I classify this era Karpov and earlier. IMO, the latter half of Kasparov's era and beyond, has required players not only to have strong positional understanding, but deeper calculations mentally. I have this theory that Karpov faded in the mid 90s not so much because of what he did, but because of the deeper rigor the newer generation had on calculations. Their depth of calculations was equal to Karpov's. In his era, Karpov had an edge on calculations and could make defensive moves that others thought would not work. The newer generation could calculate deeper and really find attacks that would overcome the defense, and that's why Karpov lost more. Disregarding the computer annotations, the commentary of what a top player was thinking during the game, can still be an awe-inspiring display of mental abilities.

I realized this while playing Sudoku. During my college days I had become a super expert at solving Sudoku. So much so the I would just start writing number as I saw the puzzles. All my college buddies though I was a uber genius guy with special abilities to solve Sudoku puzzles. But internally I new I was just a 'Human Database' as you would put it. Soon Sudoku go boring and I stopped playing it altogether.

I find the same with programming. I have far too many code templates and patterns in my brain. For every problem you throw I know a bunch of code patterns that can be inter played to form a solution. So much so that coding has become typing now.

Its just not fun anymore!

Some sports are enjoyable for sheer thrill and excitement. They go outside the bounds of a hobby, they are more of experiences.