[verbify]

Interesting, I never knew that. Engine does give +0.6 to Spassky, so the move slightly made Fischer's position worse (https://lichess.org/study/Eyl4uwTZ/TUx5RZIk) and the engine thinks f4 (on move 40) was the blunder.

I'm not qualified to analyse this, I read into it a bit more and apparently he was trying to complicate the game, the 1973 tournament book only marks it as ?!.

[mlyle]

> the engine thinks f4 (on move 40) was the blunder.

The engine knows what move would be a blunder for computer play.

It doesn't know what move made the position impossibly tricky for a human to maintain for black.

Every game that I analyze, there's possible moves where the computer will trade endless complexity for one's side for a couple centipawn advantage. These are moves that a human should not play.

[DiogenesKynikos]

It's difficult to convey why computer evaluations are not always a good measure for whether a move made by a human is good.

I think the main point is that computers are so much better than humans at playing chess that what might be a reasonable move for them is effectively a terrible blunder for a human. It's like comparing a student driver with an F1 pro, and saying, "It's totally reasonable for the student driver to yank the wheel to the right when driving at 300 km/h, because an F1 driver would be able to recover from that." The point is that the student driver won't be able to follow up with near-superhuman ability to save the situation.

[mlyle]

Yes-- this is well put.

Of course, in this case, the engine doesn't think this is a particularly reasonable move; the evaluation just fails to show how bad it would be for a human-- even a near-superhuman chess player like prime Fischer-- to play.