Describing good play as “making few mistakes” seems like the wrong terminology to me. A mistake is not a thing, in and of itself, it’s just the entire space of possible games outside the very narrow subset that lead to victory. If you give me a list of 100 chess mistakes, you’ve actually told me a lot less about the game than if you’ve given me a list of 50 good strategies—identifying a point in the larger space of losing strategies encodes far less information than picking one in the smaller space of winning.
And the real reason I’m nitpicking here is because my advisor has always proceeded mostly by pointing out mistakes, but rarely by identifying helpful, effective strategies, and so I feel like I’ve failed to learn much from him for very solid information-theoretic reasons.
Have you discussed this with him? Perhaps he hasn’t noticed this and would be delighted to talk strategies. Perhaps he has a reason (good or bad) for doing as he does. (E.g., he may think that you’ll learn more effectively by finding effective strategies for yourself, and that pointing them out explicitly will stunt your development in the longer run.) Perhaps his understanding of effective strategies is all implicit and he can’t communicate it to you explicitly.
I’ve tried talking to him about it: he really does seem to possess only implicit understanding of what works and what doesn’t. Well, that, and it just doesn’t seem to occur to him, even upon my repeated requests, to lay out guidelines ahead of time.
it’s just the entire space of possible games outside the very narrow subset that lead to victory.
Actually, most chess players define a mistake as a move that falls outside the subset of moves that either maintains equality OR leads to victory. This classification significantly reduces the size of mistake-space in chess.
Anyway, my comment was merely an attempt to allay the philosophical worries expressed in the parent quote and so I used the same terms; it wasn’t meant as pedagogy.
A mistake is not a thing, in and of itself, it’s just the entire space of possible games outside the very narrow subset that lead to victory.
Minor nitpick, surely you mean possible moves, rather than possible games? The set of games that lead to defeat is necessarily symmetrical with the set that lead to victory, aside from the differences between black and white.
Luckily you only have to make fewer mistakes than your opponent to win.
Describing good play as “making few mistakes” seems like the wrong terminology to me. A mistake is not a thing, in and of itself, it’s just the entire space of possible games outside the very narrow subset that lead to victory. If you give me a list of 100 chess mistakes, you’ve actually told me a lot less about the game than if you’ve given me a list of 50 good strategies—identifying a point in the larger space of losing strategies encodes far less information than picking one in the smaller space of winning.
And the real reason I’m nitpicking here is because my advisor has always proceeded mostly by pointing out mistakes, but rarely by identifying helpful, effective strategies, and so I feel like I’ve failed to learn much from him for very solid information-theoretic reasons.
Have you discussed this with him? Perhaps he hasn’t noticed this and would be delighted to talk strategies. Perhaps he has a reason (good or bad) for doing as he does. (E.g., he may think that you’ll learn more effectively by finding effective strategies for yourself, and that pointing them out explicitly will stunt your development in the longer run.) Perhaps his understanding of effective strategies is all implicit and he can’t communicate it to you explicitly.
I’ve tried talking to him about it: he really does seem to possess only implicit understanding of what works and what doesn’t. Well, that, and it just doesn’t seem to occur to him, even upon my repeated requests, to lay out guidelines ahead of time.
Actually, most chess players define a mistake as a move that falls outside the subset of moves that either maintains equality OR leads to victory. This classification significantly reduces the size of mistake-space in chess.
True, but it still leaves mistake-space the much larger space.
My first downvote, yay! Didn’t feel that bad :)
Anyway, my comment was merely an attempt to allay the philosophical worries expressed in the parent quote and so I used the same terms; it wasn’t meant as pedagogy.
Minor nitpick, surely you mean possible moves, rather than possible games? The set of games that lead to defeat is necessarily symmetrical with the set that lead to victory, aside from the differences between black and white.