M2M Day 343: Does this even count as “Learning Chess”?
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For October, my goal is to defeat world champion Magnus Carlsen at a game of chess.
For the past four days, I’ve been working on a new way to master chess: Constructing and learning a chess algorithm that can be mentally executed (like a computer) to numerically evaluate chess positions.
I still have a lot more work to do on this and a lot more to share.
But, today, I took a break from this work to play some normal games of chess on Chess.com. After all, the better I can evaluate positions without the algorithm, the more effective I will be at using it.
Despite my break, I’m fully committed to my algorithmic approach to chess mastery, as it is the clearest path to rapid chess improvement.
Nevertheless, in the past few days, some of my friends have questioned whether or not I’m actually “learning chess”. And in the traditional sense, I’m not.
But, that’s only in the traditional sense.
The goal, at the end of the day, is to play a competitive game of chess. The path there shouldn’t and doesn’t matter.
Just because everyone else takes one particular path doesn’t mean that this path is the only path or the best path. Sometimes, it’s worth questioning why the standard path is standard and if it’s the only way to a particular destination.
Of course, it’s still unclear whether or not my algorithmic approach will work, but it’s definitely the path most worth exploring.
Tomorrow, I’ll continue working on and writing about this new approach to learning chess. I’m excited to see how far I can take it…
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