An Idea to Learn

I've come up with a new idea to learn and improve. Maybe some of you know about this but it may help others who don't know.

I have two programs - one is Crafty and the other engine is Arena. Arena comes packed with many built in engines like SOS, Ruffian, Rybka etc -  So what I do is set up a new game on Arena with a 20/20 time limit. I play a few moves on my own and then I start Crafty. I feed all the moves of the game with Arena and then on Crafty I select Human vs Crafty. The move that Crafty plays, I play on Arena and Arena's reply I play on Crafty. So effectively, these two engines are playing against each other! 

This method has taught me a lot and there were some concepts in Queen pawn games which were not clear to me but playing like above gave me some insight. 

Whaever happen to the days when people used to study Capablanca, Kerpov, Alekin, Murphy...

Wanna share one of those games with us?

Murphy is pretty inspirational:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Murphy_%28chess_player%29

@ htdavidht, agreed, these are supreme masters and have made an immense contribution to chess theory. But watching two engines play is an interesting way to learn apart from learning from the masters. Thank you 

I hate to ruin the party, but you could install Crafty on Arena and run an engine tournament. Everything would be automated. To quote from this link http://www.playwitharena.com/?Features, "Unique tournament features - Find out how the chess engines compete against each other."

As long as you're looking at quality games, that's good.  It would be an error though to think that this is helping you any more than playing over any kind of master game.

Not to mention the fact that you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a game with two 3000 level computers vs a game with two 2000 FIDE level players. 

Thanks, yes we can do that. Thanks. But I don't want to watch 2 engines playing from start. I select the opening of my choice, make a few moves - say 15 or so and then I fire the engines and watch!  

Anyway, thanks! 

You still can do all this within Arena. First you go into Edit mode - than you enter moves for both white and black manually. Then you switch to Demo mode and engine is playing against himself or another engine. If you don't want it to be fully automatic instead of Demo mode you can click MoveNow button (or Ctrl-Z or space bar) each time you want an engine to make a move.

Ahh, ok. Very good and thanks! I will try it. 

 well that would be incredibly stupid thing to do.. you do the opening moves and then let crafty a few minutes per move?? you know that in such short time those engines have flaws... also if you study grandmaster games, those gms usually let their much better engine search much longer for every move.. actually you get much worth quality than watching top gm games

 yes you could.. the 3000 level computers game would be much more interesting and look more human.. while the 2000 level players you probably fall to sleep and think how can a human even play like that, that must be rigged