I've written a lot about some interesting features other programs have. I don't want CPT to be a duplicate of other training software, but it is nice to have all the features in one program so you don't have to go back and forth between programs. One thing cpt doesn't do to understand the opening is practicing calculation and ruling out candidate moves this way.
I remember reading the CPT manual and it said that we not only have to learn the vocabulary(memorizing), but also learn the grammar(understanding). CPT already accomplishes the vocabulary part of training. I'm still a bit puzzled if there is a way to understand moves in the chess opening efficiently. For instance, while you are preparing your opening repertoire, you are only putting in the moves that are supposedly the correct moves. The comments section provides you the opportunity to put in variations of moves that are incorrect, but you have to visually calculate this in your mind, which can be very difficult for the average player.
I think the issue is that calculating the wrong variations is difficult to do for the average club player before dismissing them as wrong. The average club player can only calculate about 3-4 moves ahead I think and sometimes misses variations in calculation. Would it be possible for CPT to act as some kind of coach to point out the variations that are incorrect tactically? I think you have to explore many other candidate moves before dismissing them. I realize that this is part of creating your repertoire before you enter training mode; you will dismiss certain candidate moves, but if you do that then you are going to be memorizing your repertoire.I think I already mentioned the importance of understanding the "wrong candidate moves" while in training mode because you probably forgot the "wrong candidate moves" while you were creating your repertoire.
I'm not sure how you would program a chess coach for visually understanding moves tactically. I think the current training mode needs an analysis mode where the engine will move the pieces for you if you play an incorrect variation that is not in your repertoire to visually show you why the move is incorrect a certain number of moves ahead.So in a way you would be playing out the position against the engine to figure out why the candidate move(s) are incorrect.
What CPT also doesn't do is to teach you how to understand your own mistakes. When playing the opening using CPT it is assumed that both players will play perhaps almost the best candidate moves and you will enter these into your opening repertoire. I guess you could enter candidate moves that are mistakes from your opponents side and try to memorize how to capitalize on them either tactically or positionally. However, if you play a move that is perhaps a "playable" candidate move from your own side that isn't the best then CPT just counts this as incorrect, and you have to add comments in the hints section to perhaps understand why you didn't play the candidate move in your repertoire. Basically, I think there are too many variations when creating your repertoire where you could make an incorrect move during training that you didn't consider while creating your opening repertoire, which can be quite annoying. This is because cpt counts certain "playable" moves as automatically incorrect even though they just may not be the best moves for the resulting position a certain number of moves ahead. Currently, there is no efficient way to rule out candidate moves as incorrect and I think this has to do with the understanding part. So you will have to exit training mode and analyze the variation with the engine perhaps each time you make a move that is not in your repertoire, which can be annoying. I don't know what the solution would be other than to perhaps implement an analysis mode during training where you input your incorrect playable move and analyze this with variations and cpt stores the incorrect variation as well so you understand why the playable move is incorrect. So basically, I think you need an incorrect variation repertoire added to your current repertoire of candidate moves if you want to understand why the moves are incorrect. Hope this makes sense, because it is quite a complicated topic.
I am wondering how an incorrect opening repertoire would work, however. I think that if you have an incorrect opening repertoire, that it needs to be stored separately from the correct candidate moves that include your repertoire.
The other problem is that sometimes you play moves that are not incorrect, but part of opening theory that are not included in your opening repertoire,and cpt will automatically count these moves as incorrect if you did not enter these moves manually into cpt; and of course if you are trying to remember a specific opening sometimes you may play other "reasonable" candidate moves. That is why I don't know if there is a way to understand chess for candidate moves in the opening. The only substitute that I would suggest for the other moves that are "reasonable" moves is to create a separate repertoire combined somehow to the original repertoire to understand the alternate moves. This becomes more of an issue when you are further deep into your opening repertoire.
That's why I earlier in the posts I suggested trying to create a new training feature to "correct and in repertoire", "playable but not in repertoire", and "incorrect". This would allow the rule out method of chess to possibly work. I think I have to explain this concept more than previously to clarify. This concept is based on manually creating your repertoire for training mode to work.
The "playable but not in repertoire" function would turn on only when cpt noticed that you didn't play the candidate moves in your repertoire that you are trying to memorize; you would have the option to add this "playable but not in repertoire" candidate move into your opening repertoire during training mode or out of training mode; you could mark the candidate move with the variations that follow as "playable but not in opening repertoire" for cpt to remember in the future that this is what its purpose is. All these "playable moves" need to be stored in cpt for your opening repertoire even if they are not part of your opening repertoire that you are trying to "memorize" in order to allow the "understanding part" of cpt, since you may play these playable moves during training mode. Then when you are training, cpt will show "playable, but not main repertoire move." After this, you could see the variations that follow with a separate analysis board during training mode. Hope this clarifies what I meant earlier.
For the "incorrect" moves, this could be done manually as well by inputting all the incorrect moves while creating your repertoire. This would be done similarly as above by marking the moves as incorrect with the variations that may follow and they are as well stored in your opening repertoire as incorrect moves.
Any moves that may be left over that you didn't consider while trying to create a repertoire would be automatically counted as incorrect until you manually explore the candidate moves with the variations and mark these moves as either "playable but not main repertoire move", or "incorrect."
To summarize, in order for the "understanding" part for a software to work you need to manually enter all the moves in while analyzing the positions. The candidate moves include, your own repertoire that you are trying to memorize, playable but not your repertoire that you are trying to memorize, and incorrect moves. All of this needs to be included in order for the rule out method to work in a chess software.
Anybody have any thoughts on these ideas? I'm not sure if I explained this very well since it's a bit complicated.
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