Personal Blogs

2011–06–29

analysing my analysis

It’s activity week at my school this week. Half the school is abroad, somewhere, others are concentrating on a single activity—golf, cooking, film-making…whatever.

Then there are those on the, ‘daily activity programme’. One of these activities is chess. I can’t/won’t ever walk past a room where people are playing chess without at least a wee peek. My look revealed that there were those there that couldn’t play chess at all. [Why?] I picked upon one wee girl to teach.

You teach chess by showing people how each of the pieces moves and set up the start position, right? Wrong. Here’s what you do:

1. Set up four pawns each side, the winner is the one who gets a pawn to the eighth rank first
2. Make sure they are comfortable with the pawns; and make sure that en passant comes up somewhere
3. Keep adding pawns to their side until they can beat you, when you are trying
4. Introduce the King, the idea of check and play the same game
5. Three above
6. Introduce the Queen, the concept of promotion and checkmate
7. Three above et al…

I’ve, probably, taught hundreds kids to play chess, or about it, and I can assure you that this is the best way for their future progress. Chess from the start-position is just a nightmare, if you haven’t grasped what it is you are trying to do. First introduce the patterns, “if I’m here, I can get there by doing that, and I can win from there…”

Anyhoo, I was going through my usual routine, the wee girl was doing well, she showed some flair [she grasped the concept of a passed-pawn and an outside-passed-pawn in a way that some quite-good players don’t]. But she had a distressing tendency to push her King up the board when she should have been gobbling pawns. Why? Because she was doing exactly what I’d told her to do—get a piece to the other side! I hadn’t made it clear that the game-rules hadn’t changed [1 above].

She was right, I was wrong, and that’s my problem when it comes to analysis.

Spot the other dodgy assumptions for yourselves.

My faultz

I got my latest TMA back today, my tutor said, something along the lines of…

Accuracy is everything in analysis…you [me—neil] often miss out parts of the argument.

Exactly what I’d done with the wee girl and the chess. I assume; you can’t do that with analysis. Or with maths in general, but particularly with analysis.

My wife was in heaven when I read this out to her. Once, I drew her a map, a map which sent her astray. I missed out a couple of streets, shouldn’t have mattered—it was obvious. She got lost, asked for help, displayed the map, the map was rubbished by a stranger. My wife has a keen intelligence, especially when it comes to my failings, she’s never ceased to bring this up.

So, I have a problem.

What to do?

I suppose I could just ignore it and carry on. We’ve another analysis block—I could catch up there? Catch up in what sense? Stopping being sloppy? More of the same won’t help there methinks.

To stick with the chess metaphor, where we started—you can be aware of the positions that you don’t like and try to avoid them, but in the end you are better fixing your flaws. Otherwise others will head for your weakness. So we must master the basics, like I teach chess.

I’m going to go back to analysis, to teach myself a discipline that I don’t have.