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| autumnbreeze 10/17/2004 21:23:13 [ report this post ] |
 Subject: Are you a Mozart or a Beethoven or....?Message: Mozart could write an entire opera within a week without going back to revise or correct his manuscripts. Whereas Beethoven would come up with an idea and, over the course of time, review it and develop it into a full-blown symphony. When playing chess or creating something, do you suddenly grasp the concepts at some point of time and keep a sound plan in mind so that the standard of your play is kept level or relatively level, if not improved? Like Mozart? Or do you zig and zag alot, like Beethoven? I have noted that many (not all) Gameknot players have a Beethoven like pattern over the first 12 months of playing on Gameknot, then their ratings graphs, over comparable periods of time, changes to either a Mozart style, i.e. a great leap forward after which progress steadies out or has further big fluctuations while increasing, OR do not have a great leap but rather shows a more or less positive linear relationship OR a gently rounded curve with a positive trend. A positive linear relationship means steady or constant improvement whereas a switch to a Mozart style after 12 months (maybe fewer months if one's rate of play is high) indicates that "suddenly the penny has dropped" or "a light bulb has been switched on". Some players have a rounded curve with an upward trend rather than tending toward being linear, which shows fast growth and a plateau being reached. I know that I shouldn't get "hung up" over my rating or graph, but the graphs are interesting I think. If you click on the graph you can view the line from the day the player joined GK. I studied a Biology degree and a Postgraduate Diploma in Social Research, involving hypotheses, experiments and statistical analyses and I hypothesize that a Mozart style (which I define as a sudden leap, after the first or every 6 - 12 months of play, of at least 100 points in one or two months or a better "exponential" type change than this) indicates a very creative type person, while a Beethoven style (i.e. ups and downs which over a long period of time may form a positive linear relationship) indicates a more logical type person. (Ideas and concepts often come in leaps and bounds to creative people.) The graphs can be copied into an image editing program and lines drawn to obtain the data points, and a graphing calculator used to obtain the slope, the constant and the correlation coefficient. The closer the data points are to a straight line, the stronger the linear correlation. I have looked at the graphs of the very great on GK, and to my mind, Cyrano is a Moazart and Mateintwo is a very good Beethoven. I understand that the graphs can be fiddled, and that time-outs affect ratings, but let's hope that such is in the minority in the name of being good sports. Better, I suppose, that over time, however long it takes, that one's graph is positively linear, but my question remains: do you think that overall you are a Mozart (improve by leaps and bounds) or a Beethoven (improve with minor fluctuations)? Here are some websites which may be of interest: www.intermath-uga.gatech.edu/dictnary/de www.krysstal.com/graphs.html |
| autumnbreeze 10/17/2004 22:57:30 [ report this post ] | New link for a website I mentioned Message: Sorry, the first link in the above post doesn't seem to work, but you can go to the site below, then click on the letter L then search Line of Best Fit. www.intermath-uga.gatech.edu/dictnary/ Also, I noticed a typo, I should have said Mozart not Moazart for Cyrano. Please forgive (and I notice one can't modify a post!) |
| fmgaijin 10/17/2004 23:14:36 [ report this post ] | Umm . . . Look at Graphs Again Message: While your overall point may be valid, your chosen examples do not fit for several reasons. One is simply that a quick "visual" of these players' graph misses the fact that the SCALE is not the same for the two. Cyrano's graph is more jagged because the scale is finer (his rating rose a bit more than 100 points during the period displayed) than mateintwo's (his rating rose well over 200 points during the period displayed). If projected on identical graph ranges, they do not differ much. That relates back to reason #2: these are established master-level players, not developing players. The "growth" shown for both reflects more the "adjustment" of the two players' ratings seeking their correct level after the GK rating system changeover to Elo ratings rather than sustained periods of growth. |
| tag1153 10/17/2004 23:21:22 [ report this post ] | I'm more of a Sid Vicious........ Message: .....you know, occassionally brilliant but more often spiraling downward into a quagmire of genuinely depressing chess........... Mozartwannabe |
| roland_l 10/18/2004 01:31:19 [ report this post ] | I don't know ... Message: ... interesting theory, but couldn't it simply be that a person you call a 'Beethoven' is actually just more inconsistent in his play/studies than the one you call a 'Mozart'? |
| brobishkin 10/18/2004 01:53:48 [ report this post ] | Hmmm... Message: I like to think of myself as a Mozart... But I refuse to die at an early age... |
| philaretus 10/18/2004 04:08:49 [ report this post ] | Message: I would characterise myself as a Florence Foster Jenkins --- occasionally and unintentionally I hit the right note, but mostly I'm singing out of tune. :( |
| autumnbreeze 10/18/2004 04:35:05 [ report this post ] | Press release: Revised theory Message: It could very well be so, Roland. Of course, BOTH Beethoven and Mozart were extremely creative. I claim to be creative myself, having written poetry, short stories, and a novel (unpublished), and I like to think that I am a budding Mozart. My analogy is based upon being shown visual representations of the origination of ideas during my studies of creative writing techniques. Beethoven type ideas or creative manufacturing/production is zig-zag in nature, or as you rightly point out, inconsistent as far as consistent ideas are concerned. Mozart type ideas are flashes of brilliance or perfection. Mozart's reputation and emotions had alot of ups and downs, and his story is sad, with an early death at age 35, perhaps hastened by stress caused by his forceful father and a society which somewhat disagreed with some of his ideas (Archbishop of Salzburg) and also did not pay him well. In hindsight, I agree with your refinement of my descriptions of the styles. Mozart did not zig and zag with great leaps or bounds now and then, but was consistently a genuis! So, a Mozart style chess player is perhaps one whom in the first place at some and one point of time makes a leap forward and then plateaus in her/his play, while a Beethoven style chess player has many ups and downs, but is nevertheless also one of the greats (which I define as having a rating of 1300 and above). I could be entirely wrong, and I haven't even mentioned other possible mathematically modelled styles reflected by the graphs based upon identical time scales (see the websites in my first post), but it is food for thought anyway! soontobegreat |
| autumnbreeze 10/24/2004 06:26:07 [ report this post ] | Capablanca was a Mozart and... Message: Alekhine is a Rachmaninoff, according to GM Mark Taimanov. However, unlike my proposition that the origination of ideas can be likened to how many steps there are in a great composer's production, Taimanov looks at the styles of the players, as shown in this page (scroll down to the part about an interview with Lev Khariton) : www.chessville.com/Editorials/Interviews Susan Polger, according to Chessville, whom is ranked number 1 in the world and number 2 in the USA, thinks herself that she is a Beethoven. See the website below, Susan's answer to question 3, in a very interesting interview with Susan (e.g. she virtually says practice makes progress, which is why I have a while to go, LOL): www.chessville.com/Editorials/Interviews Go, Susan, Go ! |
| autumnbreeze 10/24/2004 07:40:27 [ report this post ] | Use the urls without the <WBR> Message: Please copy the urls and paste them into your browser window. The <WBR> has happened before (when I posted on the Chess Principles thread) and it is happened again. Why, oh why? :( |
| mormel12 10/31/2004 12:55:44 [ report this post ] | autumnbreeze Message: I'm not that experienced with html, but thanks for that <wbr> tip. If you remove it from the adresbar and hit enter it indeed comes up with what you wanna have:) But i've no clue about the why:( Maybe Mike knows (he's the webmaster here) maybe it's something in Gk, but i've really no idea. Greetings |
| autumnbreeze 11/02/2004 06:42:13 [ report this post ] | Greetings Mormel12 :) Message: Thankyou, that's a good tip to contact Mike/Gameknot. Some interesting info for you. I did a search on <wbr> on Google and found that it is a Netscape code for word break. Apparently it used to tell Netscape browsers that, within the <nobr> tags, that a particular word could start on the next line. So it was a defacto line breaking mechanism within the <nobr> tags. But it fell by the wayside and Netscape 6.x onward (2001+) no longer supports it. I will contact GK and ask about it. :) It's not a big issue, but perhaps Mike would like to arrange for this item to be actioned some time. For anybody who likes looking up things on the Internet, the two websites below cover the <wbr> issue. www.utoronto.ca/webdocs/HTMLdocs/NewHTML www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/tagpages Over and out.....Autumn |
| sly_lonewolf 11/02/2004 22:48:33 [ report this post ] | Good finding... Message: ...that would help explain to a lot of forum poster why the wbr tag appear. Btw autumnbreeze, so are you a Beethoven type then? Rgds, Sly...who is definately not in any of the above classification, probably just a lazy chess-lover! :-) |
| mormel12 11/04/2004 00:54:45 [ report this post ] | lol Message: Trying to follow the links, the above one does have that <wbr>thing in it and the beneath one redirects to something completely else:) But since i know how to work around these things, i still found it:) Very informative. Thanks. Greetings |
| autumnbreeze 11/04/2004 20:20:40 [ report this post ] | Thanks for your thanks Message: Yes, mormel12, the second website on my last post leads to a page with a funny description of a "closed file" which I like. Deleted or altered files are often the case where the Internet is used. I myself often use a workaround to access certain online pages, by copying an url which I have been referred to, and pasting it into the search window of my search engine, clicking on the SEARCH button, then looking for similiar pages, or if it helps, modifying the url before another search. Sometimes I go to the index page,and try to track the wanted url from there. I'm glad you find the links useful. :) As for your question, sly, I am neither more like a Beethoven or a Mozart at the moment, more like a lady-in-waiting to one of these, LOL. |
| wulebgr 11/13/2004 09:13:16 [ report this post ] | Message: When your improvements have been a series of plateaus--often years apart--over 37 years of play, and you've been on GameKnot for a little more than two months, but have played at similar sites for a while, and have logged more than 20,000 internet games since 1998, what should you expect from a graph that will, at most, represent a few hundred games? (and that, likely a year off yet!) I certainly improved by leaps and bounds in 1975 when I learned the rudiments of tactics, but the blood, sweat, and tears devoted to increasing positional understanding (a few years before I became addicted to internet chess) leads to improvement that is less dramatic, although I believe more certain. |
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