Garry Kasparov: evaluation

Transcript context

…It’s not intelligible, what’s happening, right? It’s no intelligence at all. It’s just pieces moving around. There’s a certain position with king, two rooks, a knight on one side, and king, two rooks on other side. It said mate in 490 moves, first mate. Now, I can tell you that — even being a very decent player — for the first 400 moves, I could hardly understand why these pieces moved around like a dance. It’s endless dance around the board. You don’t see any pattern, trust me. No pattern, because they move from one side to another. At certain points I saw, “Oh, but white position has deteriorated. It was better 50 moves before. ” The question is — and this is a big question — if there are certain positions in these endgames, like seven-piece endgames, that take, by the best play of both sides, 500 moves to win the game, what does it tell us about the quality of the game that we play, which is an average 50 moves? It means we’re clueless in the entire universe. [laughs]…

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