Let me explain my point further by giving an example of what knowledge exactly are we talking about here, that engines and endgame tablebases possess, but in much more concrete form, which raises the question of software possibility to extract it from them in an abstract form, like I will present here, without using software.

Pawnless endgames with major pieces, are a good start because some of them are most elementary checkmates, simplest patterns to describe, such as K+Q vs K and K+R vs K.
In both cases, the lone king must be forced to the edge (or to the corner) of the board in order to get checkmated, due to a lack of other pieces (its own or its opponent’s) that could constrain its mobility additionally in sufficient way, if they were present.

This can always be achieved by squeezing it from the center, by placing our king in opposition (an even simpler concept which also requires explanation/description), and checking it from the side, with the major piece. Actually, this is needed only in the rook case, queen alone can squeeze the opponent’s king to the edge by itself, without a help of its own king, one should only watch out not to squeeze it too much, into the corner, where it would be stalemated. But as queen can be underused, ie used as a rook, we can explain the rook pattern as applicable for both major pieces, and get back to show how queen can be used better, according to its full potential.

In order to prepare opposition, major piece is placed to a line adjacent to opponent’s king (obviously not within its reach of one square to avoid capture), chosen opportunistically so that squeezing takes minimal number of moves/lines from the target edge.
If the opponent’s king is strictly in the center (d4, e4, d5 or e5), then this strategy requires more moves to accomplish the goal in comparison with cases when it is nearer the edge, and we can choose d or e file, or 4th or 5th rank, to cut the board in two parts, depending on where exactly is the opponent’s king, and where is our king, which should be on the other side of the board than opponent’s king, ie major piece is also supposed to be placed on the line that is between the two kings, and it should stay there until its own king approaches the line adjacent to that chosen for the major piece.

This is always possible because of two reasons, opponent’s king cannot approach our queen in order to squeeze it from the line it occupies, and rook is much faster piece than the king, so it can always maintain the safe distance from opponent’s king staying on the same line.
When the king arrives on the supposed line, next to the line occupied by its major piece, two lines far from the opponent’s king, it can force the opposition (position when it is standing on the same perpendicular line as the opponent’s king, two squares away from it) due to the fact that opponent’s king cannot run away from our king (assuming we take a stronger side for the purpose of this explanation) along the same line further than the edge of the board, and due to the fact that our major piece can easily “lose” a move if needed (staying on the same line, and on the same side of it, far from both kings) when opponent’s king changes direction, and starts moving towards our king, placing itself one square away from opposition. After that major piece move, lone king must either continue towards our king and step into opposition, or continue running away along the same line which may be not possible if it is already at the edge.

When it steps into opposition, our king covers all three squares in front of it, so when it gets checked from the side by the major piece, it must step back one line, as it cannot stay on the same line, and if there is no line to step back, then it is checkmated. Of course, it there is, our king advances one line following our major piece that already advanced, and the procedure continues. And if at any time the lone king steps back voluntarily one line without being forced by side check and opposition, the major piece first takes advantage of that by advancing one line, and only then our king follows.
It must be noticed that running away from our king towards our major piece does not make any problem, because rook can move along the same line to the other edge to avoid capture, transposing into previous case in which opponent’s king can either move toward the edge, or towards our king (which now stands again between our rook and opponent’s king, in terms of lines perpendicular to the chosen line along which the rook moved), while the queen does not even have to move, as it cannot be captured.

That explains how queen can be used better, to squeeze the lone king towards the edge without engagement of our own king, which joins forces with the queen only at the very end, by giving support for queen’s delivering kiss of death to opponent’s king at the edge of the board.
So, in the case of queen, major piece can not only stay on the line adjacent to opponent’s king, but it can also squeeze it along that line towards the edge, forming each time horse like L shape configuration between two pieces, ie one rank two files away, if moving along the rank, or one file two ranks away if moving along the file, if lone king tries to keep the position on the same line. In that case it will soon reach the edge, when it can be cut off by queen to stay permanently on that edge, until our own king arrives near, or, it will have to step back one line, and then queen will advance one line maintaining the L shape configuration, regardless of whether the king stepped back diagonally towards the center, which is the most resilient option, or in any other of two possible ways. Basically queen follows the lone king by making “king like”, one square moves. Eventually this will also squeeze the king to the edge.

Of course, if the king steps back into a corner, queen will not follow the same L pattern, instead of that it will move one square further on the penultimate line, leaving two squares free on the edge line for the king to be able to move, until its own king comes near to provide support for the final blow, which can be frontal contact of queen and lone king, diagonal contact if the lone king is in the corner, or contactless side check while its own king constrains the lone king in the manner of opposition.
Notice how the whole explanation is devoid of any concrete position, which makes it abstract, but not any less valid or precise than that what an engine or an endgame tablebase can present. Moreover, this is how human mind learns and memorizes these things.
OK, although these endgame concepts are basic, they may be not the simplest ones to describe, but others are either less basic and more complex to start with, like K+B+N vs K, or are built upon these (because they include pawns, which are promotable), so in the way they include the complexity of these presented, so I chose them.

But any abstract explanation of these two endings cannot be significantly different from this, although it can be surely more concise, simpler, precise and elegant. Probably if I could have expressed it in a not yet existing CCDL (Chess Concept Description Language), instead of in natural language, it would have been so. Although I made an effort to make it precise and concise, I did not achieve the result similar to what you get when you write in a domain specific strict language.
However, I cannot get that from DecodeChess either, which misses such patterns in its repository of human knowledge, and therefore cannot recognize them and present them, let alone create such explanations automatically as a result of machine learning and store it to knowledge repository, in order to be able to use them later in its explanations. This is a screenshot of what I got for such a position that clearly demontrates my point:
https://imgur.com/a/mP1EJWE

The fact that Decodea team knows too how chess engines which utilize NNs work, or what’s the difference between a Turing machine and a finite state machine, unfortunately does not seem to help them to solve this problem.

Humans built it, know what it does and how, hence no point in analyzing that. And that does not help at all to extract the knowledge it collected.

Initially I envisaged this discussion to be about explanations in the context of chess, and in the last minute I changed my mind about the title, which usually is not good. If we assume that we have a precise definition of information, can we define precisely what information counts as an explanation? For example, phenotype, which is seen, is explained in terms of genotype, which is unseen. Or at least it was unseen until it was discovered, and now it became totaly visible and seen as the DNA analysis is a routine procedure. Now if anything is still unclear about phenotype and genotype and their relation, it will have to be explained in terms of the next, so far unseen thing, like epigenotype. But, the theory that phenotype is caused by genotype, definitely counts as a scientific explanation, in accordance with Deutsch’s description. Now, as intelligence and ability to accumulate knowledge during the life of an individual, as well as over generations, are physical characteristics of species, they are result of their genes, both in case of a dog and in case of a human. So, a human is inherently much more intelligent than a dog, that is a difference that allows us to know much more than dogs do, but there is no difference with respect to genetic causality of that knowledge, or is there?

Thank you praxis.

I think this is more like necroposting than trolling.

OK, Paul S already answered that Mary does not refer to her own children as her nieces, and he even noticed the missing h in Marta, which I didn’t, so kudos to him for reading precision.

CM then, or even stronger? Do you do online tutoring?

Of course.

By the way, there are some unanswered questions in my thread over there, what do you think about that?

Yes, I usually play 5+5 or 10+0.

Yeah well, many awkward things are doable, but there really is no point in doing this that way. Now that I invited you, I think you can review all my games I ever played on that site, that is, if you have nothing better to do than that, because I am really an average player. But, that would include any potential game played against praxis there, too.

I play at Chess.com ! Download their free app:

… for Android - http://goo.gl/LZVzTV
… for iPhone & iPad - http://goo.gl/ZLci9
… or sign up online at https://www.chess.com/register?friend=14226792

Then challenge me! "hdjur_jcv" is my username!
https://www.chess.com/members/view/hdjur_jcv

====================================================================

So, this is what I got from my chess.com profile option Invite friends. It is not that I am very proud of my stats and current rating, I was at my peak over 1800 blitz time control, but then they speeded it up a bit for some reason, and I am not good at faster time controls.

In the same dialect, the question would be can anyone prove that claim about being true to yourself as a best life strategy? Because, proving a theorem and calculating something are both instances of the same activity, ie brain computation.

Or, in modern language, a good computation ability of ones brain is a fundamental virtue.

I think that rationality is a fundamental human virtue, especially when it allows you to calculate that the best life strategy is to always be true to yourself. — Hrvoje

Nobody objected to this, but if this is really true, that such conclusion can be a result of calculation, can anyone show the exact procedure? In mathematical examination, presenting a correct method is equally important as presenting a correct result. What I meant there is that a good calculation ability is a fundamental human virtue, despite of the fact that a calculated person is considered a negative attribute connotation.
And not be true to yourself may mean different things, intentional self deception, denial of truth, or unintentional bad self assessment. So, to calculate anything about it, one should first define precisely what is it exactly one is talking about.

G.K Chesterton, that glib, facile thinker, said something about insanity resulting from rationality, and I think may have pointed to chess and chess players as evidence of this claim. But I think to be rational is to be reasonable, and don't think one can be "overly reasonable." — Ciceronianus the White

What could have been known to Chesterton, Steinitz was the worst example of, not excessive rationality, but excessive mental activity and stress caused by chess, leading to insanity. However, there are other factors that may have affected Steinitz, such as syphilis and financial problems. Until today, I didn’t know who was Chesterton, so, thank you for this post.

The OP is quite clear on where he wants to take this discussion. The goal is to put rationality itself on trial and the expected/desired verdict is there are times when we're "overly" rational and, as far as I can tell, that's being painted as a downside to the all-time philosophical blue-eyed boy, rationality.

Apart from this being a paradoxical affirmation and negation of critical thinking - it seeks or asks for a good reason why reason is bad - it also relies on an analogy that exposes the OP's got it backwards. Chess imitates life not the other way round.

Too, Inter arma enim silent leges. The only law that people seem to possess a natural instinct to "obey" is the "law" of the jungle. Chess has unbreakable, inflexible rules - do anything whacky with your pieces and you're out of the game, literally and figuratively. In life, rules are changed, bent and broken to suit the needs of the day - this happens most often and as anticipated when the stakes are high and when are stakes not high, right? — TheMadFool

This I don’t like. There is no such goal, and not participating much in philosophical discussions, I did not know that rationality is “all-time philosophical blue-eyed boy”, otherwise I probably would not raise this question at all. Although, in that case I would also still not know who is Jane Elliott.
I can only wonder how you came to such conclusions, I am certainly not apologetic about using arms to bend or break rules, and install the law of jungle instead of civilization, I don’t think I could thrive in such circumstances. Probably this was caused by my mentioning of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry
I also don’t understand fixation on the title that was supposed to be witty, joke, funny. How many times one has to repeat it?
I think that rationality is a fundamental human virtue, especially when it allows you to calculate that the best life strategy is to always be true to yourself. The fact that it can be unnecessary or even excessive in certain aspects of life, does not undermine the fact that it is irreplaceable in others, such as science, math, technology, engineering, economy, ...

The OP asks whether one can be overly rational in chess, just as one can be overly rational in many aspects in life, according to the op. the answer in chess is, no, one cannot be overly rational, due to the characteristic features of chess. It is always, I repeat always handy to know the best move in the position. One might resort to playing an objectively less strong move though, because one knows it will put your opponent of guard. Than that is still a rational consideration to opt for second best. However that does not imply one can calculate too much or one would be actually a better player when not calculating and just trusting instinct.

In a social setting that might be different. The one not calculating a lot and acting spontaneous might actually have an advantage in building bridges to other people. Calculation in a social setting might be seen as cold while in chess with its win or lose parameters it is always virtuous. So sure, chess and life can be usefully compared but there are fundamental differences, this being one of them. — Tobias

This is a decent summary of the discussion. Plus, convincing oneself that suboptimal play is intentional, is rationalization. Every now and then it may be, the rest of the time it is a result of incapability to find a better move.

And where do you think Jesus stands on the issue? In this time of year it is proper to ask our selves about it. He wasn’t concerned with game theory, but he said that "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God", he spoke about “The Birds of Heaven” and “The Flowers of the Field” (or “The Lilies of the Field”), this alegory reveals his social teaching and philosophy: one should not worry too much about its prospects, for God will provide what is most important. That is not as rational as: “Help your self, and God will help you”, but is there a real conflict between these two views? Maybe there are two areas in life, one in which we are supposed to rely on God’s providence, and the other in which we are supposed to make a rational effort, to work, to struggle and fight?

And information asymmetry present in life, is not the source of pure luck, which is an important factor in games such as lottery and life. It is the source of unfair advantage, unequal opportunity, or maybe not?

There is another distinction between life and bridge, and that is information symmetry, which is present in bridge, giving equal opportunity to players to show their skill and determination. Visible and hidden part of information is equally distributed between players. I guess in poker one could say the same, if one player better reads the poker tells than the other, such information asymmetry is considered part of the player’s skill, right? I am guessing now, I don’t have a slightest clue about that game.

I think that pun was intended, at least that was my impression when I read that book.

It doesn’t mean that their thought process is not impressive when they manage to defeat 50 average players hardly ever pausing to think, but not every simultaneous exhibition is of that format. In one of them organizers even expected from GM to guess who is the strongest opposition, and allocate more time to these players, or to be cool with losing against them. None of that happened.
Even more impressive to me are blind simultaneous games, and in one of them Magnus received moves out of order (along with the table number), whenever the opponent had one, which must be yet another level harder, than playing in normal sequence, I guess. I never learned how to play blind, whenever I tried, I would soon be lost after a few moves, and I can’t imagine how they manage to do any of that. Although each chess player has to have certain visualization capabilities in order to be able to analyze a few moves ahead, without actually moving pieces on the board, that is immensely harder when you cannot look at the board.

Reasonably decent is a relative term, which can sometimes obstruct strolling around:
https://youtu.be/uoJFnuJv60c
https://youtu.be/1lXeygPM5CY

One instance of that might be Karpov’s reluctance to give up a pawn if not entirely sure it leads to a win?

And as Tobias said, besides zero sum character, chess is also a game of perfect information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_information , that feature distinguishes chess from bridge, which is regardless of that fact still a game in which player’s skill is a critical factor (ie not luck). Life is also not the game of perfect information, but it is not a game in which pure luck is not a factor, but what is most important, is it a game in which we are supposed to be fiercely focused on our goals all the time in order to succeed?

I am not looking for any particular kind of answer, and the question is equally about life and chess, so feel free to contribute whatever you find you are more familiar with. True, chess engines are superior to human players, and in their context emotion is not defined, and they are the result of human ratio, more than human emotions, so, looking at it that way, ratio should prevail in chess. However, as others pointed out, when humans play chess, it is not the only factor.
This can be also about the Kasparov’s book. Namely, here at wikipedia are mentioned only two reviews, none of them is very favourable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Life_Imitates_Chess
Unlike this one: https://blas.com/how-life-imitates-chess/

I believe he wanted to say that the objective world is not independent of subject’s conciousness...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_d%27Espagnat

Quote: "The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment."

Is he talking only about the “human world”, or the world in general? Do human beings play some special role in the world, or did he mean consciousness in general? Or is there no such thing as “the world in general”, or is there no other consciousness but human?

Trust me, you are not helping your case with these posts, neither in proving your great sense of humour, nor politeness. Shouting around that you have it, and delivering it, are two very different things. And yeah, you managed to fool me, when you said that people harshly criticized you for telling jokes, I didn’t know they were laughing at them at the same time, I thought it was because of their poor quality, sorry about that. Although, I wouldn’t call my conclusions insults, it is a given, either you have it, or you don’t, sense of humour I mean, nothing to be offended about.

Yeah, well, if people don’t laugh at your jokes there are two possible explanations, either they don’t have a sense of humour, or you don’t. And it seems that you love humour, you are just unable to produce it. Insulting people also doesn’t help.

Exactly, nice analogy. I was just emphasizing cancers as the main example of fragility and underminer of robustness, because for multicellular organisms subordination of all cells to the well being of organism is critical.

There are other advantages of single-celled organisms over multi-ones.

1. They never get a cold.
2. They don't have to go to work; in the least they are exempt of punching a time-card.
3. Their debt-to-equity ratio remains stable.
4. They can get into the pants of really beautiful people much easier than you and I put together.
5. Addiction is a strange concept to them. Thus, they can bet on the horses till they are blue in the face, they won't get hooked and cause them to put their families through incredible financial and social hardships. — god must be atheist

The essence of the difference is that multicellular ones are more complex. The relative simplicity of single celled ones is at the same time their limitation, since they cannot differentiate cells and develop some complex functions, such as for example neural networks, so, this is a disadvantage, and on the other hand they are not vulnerable to cancers which seems to be an inherent limitation of multicellular ones, so in that sense this simplicity is an advantage.

I have a clear conscience, as I was merely answering the question the best way I could, without trying to be clever or wit, or to ridicule someone, because such things backfire at you.

I think the main advantage of a single cell organism over a multi cell organism may be obvious, it cannot develop a tumor?

It is questionable that directed evolution necessarily implies a role of an external intelligence, as a director. I don't think however that existence of intelligence external to living beings on our planet, is entirely irrational idea. It is a matter of belief, or speculation, depending on someone's point of view, but nothing I can exclude for sure.

OK, although this may look like an attempt to extort compliments for the original poster, that is a program called Hrvoje, I assure you it was not. I already complimented Frotunes and 420mindfulness, and I would add now that I think that Doug1943 is an excellent poster too (be they all real persons or just fine computer programs that cannot be distinguished from real persons).
Besides the question of comparison of these powers:

explanatory power (ability to cause understanding in other intelligent agents through communication)
descriptive power (how exactly is it different from explanatory power?)
learning power (ability to gain knowledge)
memory power (ability to store information)
constructive power (ability to perform a task based on stored information or received via some communication channel)
working power (based on energy)

here were tackled some questions I thought a lot about by myself too, but didn't manage to comment on yet:

Does information exist in a non-animate world, besides the artificial devices in which it is implemented by humans?
Is knowledge and free will and intellect and cognitive power only a human attribute?
If some animals may process information only through reflex-responses, where exactly is a dividing line between these and those who can do more than just that??
Is anthropocentrism luring as again here to think we are something special, without much justification?
What about plants in the same context?
Determinism in a macro world vs quantum indeterminacy, predictability of living entities and their decisions based on determinism or randomness, is there a link between these facts?

OK, that would not be entirely possible here, as there is no liking here, just flagging, even views are not registered or visible, the number of replies is the only (vague) indicator of successfulness of the original poster, but I like this forum in spite of that, much more than some others where such things exist.

Is it possible to write a program, like a Watson, that would be able to pass a Turing test for an interesting philosopher on thephilosophyforum.com ? So, after it creates an account (by itself of course, if it is so smart that it can produce interesting questions, it should be smart enough to be able to perform such a trivial task too), it starts posting and receives many likes, because its questions and discussions are entertaining, thought provoking, but, it is actually just a computer program that analyzes internet searching for a material to discuss, processes that information and posts?

First of all because I said "without much input given to it by a skilled person". This is not how Deep Mind A.I. composes, I guess...

So, logical summation of my last two posts should be this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8UawLT4it0

that is Alpha Zero composing its own music, after just hearing a lot of human composed beautiful music, using the same algorithm that was capable of learning chess, shogi and go, but I am not entirely sure if that really answers the question. At least what I could hear from that link, it doesn't.

I came up with the third interesting case, and that is know how versus explain how to compose a beautiful, but I mean really exceptionally beautiful music. I usually judge about that fact, if this is clear or not to a musical composer, by listening his/her music. If I was bored after hearing 9 out of 10 pieces, and remotely interested in hearing again the 10th, I would say that is not entirely clear to that person, if on the other hand I am very interested in hearing again at least 9 out of 10 pieces, I would say that person knows how to write a good music. So, it is basically a pure statistics.
However, if that person is able to write a computer program that is able to produce at least 9 very interesting pieces out of 10, without much input given to it by a skilled person, that would show another level of understanding of the art of musical composition (that would also show a computer programming capability as a bonus). The question is however, is something like that possible at all?
Although, there is a problem of objective evaluation of how pleasing certain music is, my subjective judgment about computer generated music is that I am not impressed with what I heard so far, although I know for a fact that much of what I heard recently, and was pleased with, was composed with the aid of computers. As I am not musically educated, although I listen to music all my life, and have a developed musical interest, I am not clear is the art of musical composition objectively explainable and describable by a computer program? I am divided in half with respect to that question.