It's helpful playing against chess engines

HI, sometimes I play against chess engine, but some people say that playing against chess engine doesn't improve you chess skills, is that true? I play slow games, like 45 or 60 minutes.

Playing against chess engines do help, but (especially beginners) it needs to be mixed with playing human opponents too.

If it's a top level engine, playing it will probably only help with openings (seeing as you will likely be lost by move 30). I would recommend playing against engines from points in real games, especially in middle or endgames that are technically winning so you can learn how to convert an advantage.

Strong engines are really good, if you are playing a very sharp, (for example gambits like king's gambit or such) opening, because you can analyze what would the computer do in a certain case. So they are very good at tactics, and it can be very useful.
Otherwise, I would play against some weaker computers.(So I mean not fritz and such computers) For example here in chess.com. It is just a way of practice to play against computers.

Playing against engines is good but its important to analyse the game afterward or else you just repeat the same mistakes.

yes its interesting, sometimes very versatile but humans is probably better to broaden the horizon and get to know a different way to think about a position.

Chess engines seem to be most valuable when searching through tactical positions with a great deal of complexity.  It has been instructive to watch the Candidates tournament the past couple of days online where IM Trent and GM Short analyze positions during the match.  Occasionally they will go to the computer to check how the computer sees the board and quite often they do not agree with the assessment.  Also, in the post-game interviews with Magnus, Lev, "Chucky", Vladimir and the others, it is clear that they do not agree with the computer's assessment of the overall chances for black or white at times.  I don't know what computer is being accessed, but it should be a strong one at that level of analysis with an international audience.

The point is that computers may be very precise and reliable, but they do not always correctly evaluate the overall chances in a position.  They are used extensively by the top players for some analysis, but they are still viewed as fallible in many positions and situations by the "big boys."

Personally, I never play against the computer, and limit my use of chess engines to after-game analysis and study to provide alternative lines and variations that I may have missed.

I am pretty sure they are running Houdini 3 at the post game analysis.
At 3143 elo the players cannot disagree with it. Lol. Amazingly Houdini wanted Carlsen to sacrifice the bishop at h3 and Carlsen just laughed. Perhaps Houdini plays more like Morphy than Carlsen does....

I think there is a fallacy in thinking that a human-programmed chess engine is necessarily always "right" in a given position.  They beat human players on brute force and (effectively) a form of time pressure since the computer is so much faster.  But what move may be theoretically more "correct" after a 30-ply hash is of little value when the human opponent alters the "perfect" responses in that "perfect" thread.  In other words, a different move may be better, given imperfect responses.

If the game of chess is ever "solved" for the perfect solution (as we have done with tic-tac-toe), then it will have been relegated to a computerized curiosity.  As said before, games are won by weak opponent moves rather than by "perfect" play.  Computers are effectively stronger than humans because they make incredibly minor errors depending on the algorithms used and tablebases consulted.  And when we say the computer wanted a bishop "sac", the next question is - how much time and how many plies were used in the analysis, and would that have changed with one more ply or another ten minutes of hashing ... ?

I found it interesting to see the categories displayed on-screen by the ChessCaster software being used which broke analysis down into categories such as "king safety," "pawn structure", "mobility", etc.  Often it was clear to the IM and GM commentators that the opinion of the computer was a bit "off" and they spent surprisingly little time consulting it for its opinion of the position.  If a player rated at 2872 can disagree on a position, a computer at a theoretical 3143 is not necessarily right, either.  What is a perfect player rating, 5000?

It's entirely possible that a 3143 computer is worse at evaluating positions than a 2750 human, and still beats that human every time. Evaluation isn't the only thing that makes up chess strength, after all.

In the interview after the game, Carlsen admitted he didn't even see bxh3.  However, even if he had he might not have played it as he thought he had a safe won endgame with the line he played anyway.  Another move (Qa6) a few days ago was a very human move in a complex situation; Carlsen played it safe as he knew he had a winning advantage, rather than going for a sharp tactical line which the computer thought was "better".

Carlsen is a lucky guy, he will never need a lawyer he has plenty of defenders.

Top players make many such decisions that are based on conservative rather than sharp play.  It may be because they only need a draw to win a tournament, it may be because there is inadequate time to consider alternative moves or defense, and it may just be a matter of style rather than a programmers somewhat arbitrary assignment of accumulated "values" to subjective factors such as "mobility of pieces," "pawn structure", "king safety", etc. which are used in choosing variations.  Note that computers often use human-researched endgame play in tablebases rather than creating their own analysis.

As  mldavis617 says, the engines can change it´s mind over time, so, yes, you can disagree with the computer.

For example, some times it sees a winning advantage and suggest going to an endgame that it´s obviously drawn, and it will need a really LONG time to get to that conclusion.

There have been situations in which the computer sees a win in (for example) 85 moves in an endgame when tablebases find it much more quickly.  Computers continue to get better, so obviously they are far from perfect.

And also in complex middle games, I can think in KID for example, with so many pieces on the board, it would require a long thinking to get with a very good move.

This is what people thought when Deep Blue beat Kasparov; it didn't happen. Chess is a fun game, and too complex for humans to solve (without the help of hardware), so it sticks around.

Furthermore, computers are stronger than humans on any measure now. The only reason we saw mistakes by the computer in the CM game is because they limit its thinking time to a few seconds. In a Computer vs Human with long time controls, the computer will always win now. Engines are objectively and absolutely stronger.

I think most GMs would argue that engines are better because they don't have the same virtual time contraints that humans do.  They win by brute force by being able to analyze far beyond human capabilities of depth and speed and they do not generally make weak moves as all humans do.  It's like one of us playing an opponent of nearly equal strength, one of which is allowed several days per move, the other being forced to move in 2 seconds.

Many times, however, GM annotators have found computers to be incorrect or at least inefficient in certain positions.  That is why programmers continue to revise and update chess engines.  The real measure of strength would be to find an optimum time limit on an engine which approximates the computational speed of its human opponent.

I play againt Blitz=This computer has a memory of many moves beyond the capacity of a human player=I consdera it  imposible

When you played against chess engine (at full strength), there is one aspect of your game that would improve a lot. Defense! Chess engines are excellent attackers although you would lost every game. When you face human players of your level, you would no longer be intimidated by aggressive style and can defend well and win.