A Quote by Nigel Short

Chess is, in essence, a game for children. Computers have exacerbated the trends towards youth because they now have an immensely powerful tool at their disposal and can absorb vast amounts of information extremely quickly.
I don't know whether computers are improving the style of play, I know they are changing it. Chess has become a different game, one could say that computers have changed the world of chess. That is pretty clear.
When you look at things like social media, that's an immensely powerful tool that I'm all in favor of. I think it's amazing. It's a powerful tool, and it's one that we're, as a species, still grappling with learning to use. It's like we've grown an extra tail and we inadvertently lash out and knock over all of the furniture.
I started playing chess when I was about 4 or 5 years old. It is very good for children to learn to play chess, because it helps them to develop their mental abilities. It also helps to consolidate a person's character, because as it happens both in life and in a chess game we have to make decisions constantly. In chess there is no luck and no excuses: everything is in your hands.
I mean, the paradox is that whereas the screen, it seems to me - the cinema can absorb endless amounts of music, it cannot really with comfort absorb large amounts of words. Not nearly as many words, that is to say, as a stage can.
You discover your brain is a powerful tool, something that is so powerful that sometimes you are surprised by the outcomes, how quickly it adapts to situations and how quickly you learn.
Withholding information is the essence of tyranny. Control of the flow of information is the tool of the dictatorship.
There are two ways to have educational chess in schools, either through after school programs or using chess as a tool in classrooms to improve children's thinking.
When I was a kid, I really liked playing chess, which is pretty geeky; I just enjoyed it - thinking, exercising my mind. And I found computers to be like an eight-hour day chess game.
If chess is a vast jungle, computers are the chainsaws in a giant environmentally insensitive logging company.
But the thing that was great about Capablanca was that he really spoke his mind, he said what he believed was true, he said what he felt. He [Capablanca] wanted to change the rules [of chess] already, back in the twenties, because he said chess was getting played out. He was right. Now chess is completely dead. It is all just memorisation and prearrangement. It's a terrible game now. Very uncreative.
It's a very special generation, because during our careers the computer entered chess. So we know how to play without computers, which is also important. We can analyse without computers. I am not saying that younger players cannot do this, but we are more in the habit of doing this. That's important to improve your chess understanding.
With both people and computers on the job, computer error can be more quickly tracked down and corrected by people and, conversely, human error can be more quickly corrected by computers. What it amounts to is that nothing serious can happen unless human error and computer error take place simultaneously. And that hardly ever happens.
Distilling truth from overwhelming amounts of information is the essence of leadership.
What's happened with society is that we have created these devices, computers, which already can register and process huge amounts of information, which is a significant fraction of the amount of information that human beings themselves, as a species, can process.
Companies are accumulating vast amounts of information about your likes and dislikes. But they are doing this not only because you're interesting. The more they know, the more money they can make.
Right up till the 1980s, SF envisioned giant mainframe computers that ran everything remotely, that ingested huge amounts of information and regurgitated it in startling ways, and that behaved (or were programmed to behave) very much like human beings... Now we have 14-year-olds with more computing power on their desktops than existed in the entire world in 1960. But computers in fiction are still behaving in much the same way as they did in the Sixties. That's because in fiction [artificial intelligence] has to follow the laws of dramatic logic, just like human characters.
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