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Aberg variation of Capablanca's Chess. Different setup and castling rules. (10x8, Cells: 80) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

H.G.Muller wrote on Mon, Apr 21, 2008 02:37 PM UTC:

At the risk of being accused of serial posting: I happened to stumble on
the exact source of Larry Kaufman's piece values. They game from a
13-line posting he made off-hand in the Rybka forum, (
http://rybkaforum.net/cgi-bin/rybkaforum/topic_show.pl?tid=1986;pg=3 ,
near the bottom) when the topic of piece value of the Capablanca pieces
came up. So basically just educated guessing, done without any experience
in the game itself, just experience borrowed from normal Chess, without
any experimental input.

Does that make him 'incurably stupid'? Most certainly not! In fact,
given the virtual absense of any data to go on, and that he spend only a
few minutes on it, he did a magnificent job, displaying excellent
intuition. The fact that the result of an educated guess is off does not
make someone stupid. It is in the nature of guessing. Stupid would be to
claim that such a guess represents a 100% certain truth. As to the
'incurable', that is really an uncalled for reproach. Such an
accusation
could only be made to stick on a person that would persist in a guess
when
faced with EVIDENCE to the contrary. Larry Kaufman was never faced with
any evidence whatsoever, and I am pretty sure he would applaud it
enthousiastically if he was. I even put it to the test, by posting my
empirical piece values there. Let's hope he sees them and comments! 8-)