Comment on Unlike in movies, most smart people aren't good in chess.

Geetnerd@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• floo@retrolemmy.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Much of the game of chess, particularly becoming an expert or a master, relies on memorizing every possible move and, then, every possible counter move. Mastery of chess is almost always reliant upon that memorization.

  The game itself is not that complex, and most people can learn how to play chess fairly quickly. Much of the apparent wizardry of chest mastery is actually just a sign of excellent memorization of every possible move and it’s possible counter moves.

  There’s not a lot of creativity and interest

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  • TempermentalAnomaly@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I think DeGroots work in the 30s and 40s shows otherwise. Grandmasters know rather quickly what they were going to do in general as they orient to the board state. Then they explore a small set of moves and explode them into a few moves into the future and pick the best candidate. Finally, they spend time verifying their selection.

    They have good memories, for sure, but for real game states. This is a quote from Herb Simon, an important early researcher in psychology and computer science:

    The most extensive work to date on perception in chess is that done by De Groot. In his search for differences between masters and weaker players, de Groot was unable to find any gross differences in the statistics of their thought processes: the number of moves considered, search heuristics, depth of search, and so on. Masters search through about the same number of possibilities as weaker players-perhaps even fewer, almost certainly not more-but they are very good at coming up with the “right” moves for further consideration, whereas weaker players spend considerable time analyzing the consequences of bad moves.

    De Groot did, however, find an intriguing difference between masters and weaker players in his short-term memory experiments. Masters showed a remarkable ability to reconstruct a chess position almost perfectly after viewing it for only 5 sec. There was a sharp drop off in this ability for players below the master level. This result could not be attributed to the masters’ generally superior memory ability, for when chess positions were constructed by placing the same numbers of pieces randomly on the board, the masters could then do no better in reconstructing them than weaker players, Hence, the masters appear to be constrained by the same severe short-term memory limits as everyone else, and their superior performance with “meaningful’ positions must lie in their ability to perceive structure in such positions and encode them in chunks.

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    • gt5@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      That makes sense. Here’s a video of Magnus Carlson identifying famous chess positions without seeing that actual pieces in the board and usually knowing what happens next. It’s incredible

      youtu.be/J5BnJvhSryc

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      • TempermentalAnomaly@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Apparently Carlson loses his keys regularly as well. So this type of memory is domain specific.

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  • SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I’d argue that there is a certain kind of creativity in coming up with those moves. But since it’s mostly a solved game now, modern players probably don’t experience it anymore.

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    • floo@retrolemmy.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I’m certainly happy to hear that climate change is “solved” now, but that doesn’t really address the problems I raised. Particularly, what is the OP’s opinion on the advancements and green initiative that Apple is made?

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      • SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Huh?

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      • brrt@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Sir, this is a Wendy’s

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      • SuDmit@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Do you understand this is discussion about chess?

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  • expr@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    This couldn’t be further from the truth, and it’s pretty clear you don’t actually play the game. I had no idea this misconception was so common.

    Chess is ALL ABOUT creativity and figuring out how to outplay your opponent and secure a win. It’s a game of strategy and tactics, of timing and technique. The way “memorization” works is that players tend to have some number of moves in their opening(s) memorized (typically 5-10, though top players can go to greater depth), at which point they are “out of book” and into the middlegame, which is where the game is actually played using some combination of positional ideas, tactics, and calculation. Many players opt to play less theoretically viable openings (that is, variations that are not quite as good with best play), because it gets their opponent out of book faster. “Novelties” (a move in a variation not previously played by a master/grandmaster in a tournament) are played all of the time, even by grandmasters.

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• SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  You also need a sharp memory. I’m good in math, but terrible in remembering things. I forget names of terms that I’m actively doing research on, and constantly need to look at notes.

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