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

Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org⁩ to ⁨showerthoughts@lemmy.world⁩

Sure, playing chess needs intelligence, dedication, and good chess players are smarter than an average person. But it’s waaaay exaggerated in movies. I’m a mathematics researcher, and in any movie, my department will be full of chess geniuses. But in reality, only about 10% of them even play chess.

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Zizzy@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
People need to stop putting chess on a pedestal. Its a game. General intelligence has no bearing. Its a specific skillset you can hone by practice and research, just like any other game.

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- slaneesh_is_right@lemmy.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  It is a super deep game for how simple it is, i think that’s the “genius” part. But remembering openings in chess and their names doesn’t make you a genius, it makes you a genius in chess.
  
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  - Natanael@infosec.pub ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Almost anything where memorization is the primary skill is going to be dominated by people with specific interest, rather than general high intelligence (certainly doesn’t exclude it, but it’s just statistics). Gotta look for something frequently requiring novel problem solving and adaption to filter for high probability of high general intelligence.
    
    Then there’s also a lot of games requiring very narrow intellectual ability. Being able to parse a specific ruleset, or doing a specific kind of math fast, without needing to be able to handle anything novel. You’ll certainly find some “interesting individuals” around those kinds of games.
    
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  - MimicJar@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Exactly, Chess is Mario Kart.
    
    Anyone can learn how to play Chess. Anyone can learn how to play Mario Kart.
    
    You slap a controller in someone’s hand tell them “A” is go and they can play Mario Kart. Sure they have to learn the track, where to collect power ups, where the shortcuts are, and eventually they have to learn about and master drifting.
    
    But being a genius in Mario Kart doesn’t make you a genius. No heist movie ever said, “And this genius over here? They scored first place in 200cc Special Cup.”
    
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  - ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    It’s that to be good you have to think several moves ahead. Being able to predict and plan out you and the opponents next 5 moves takes intelligence.
    
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- jballs@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Would be hilarious if Hollywood moved away from chess to show someone being smart and instead showed the yelling at teammates in League of Legends.
  
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fartsparkles@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Chess is mostly a memorisation game for gambits / openers and subsequent sets of follow-on moves.

After that, it’s mentally simulating the board state a few moves ahead, varying pieces and guesstimating probability of what move the opponent will make. A lot of that you start to memorise, especially since other chess enthusiasts will often play well-known gambits / strategies.

Intelligence often correlates with memory but they’re not one and the same. I grew up knowing a competitive chess player and remember the time they referred to their “hambag” (handbag). English was their mother tongue…

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- Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  “Ah ha! I see you’ve played the Frenchman’s Cumsock. I will have checkmate in 4 moves!”
  
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  - andallthat@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Wait, my hand is still on the piece… I… have … not… completed… my… move
    
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  - sixty@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    KOLANAKI
    
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  - xavier666@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    “I understood that reference”
    
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- makyo@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Yeah I was sorta interested in pursuing Chess more at least as a hobby a few years ago. Learning about the ‘meta’ strategy was kind of intimidating and discouraging. The basic strategy is interesting to me but learning and memorizing different games just sounds awful to me. I guess it’s like most things - the more you learn about it the more you realize there is a lot more to it than what you initially thought it was.
  
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  - Shiggles@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I’ll gladly eat shit for a controversial opinion, but I mentally put chess pros in the same basket as those guys that would queue solely for Office in counterstrike and reach global elite. Like sure, it’s still an impressive time commitment, I just feel like there were better things to put that into. I hate MOBAs and yet I’d respect a professional DOTA player more? But I’m more than familiar with the fanbase of Chess and how defensive they get.
    
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- TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  The person who taught me chess was constantly perplexed by my bizarre tactics. He found it refreshing and interesting. Obviously, I had no idea what I was doing, and I got nuked to oblivion on a regular basis. Maybe he was expecting to see some popular moves, but was only faced with whatever sketchy tactics I could come up with.
  
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- corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I have a mishmash dialect as we moved around a lot when I was a child; very rural, too. I’ll say “hambag” and “ain’t” and “me an’ this guy” and my sister says “ambliance”, but we spell it all correctly.
  
  Did your chess expert know the spelling and say it wrongly, or was there confusion about the spelling too?
  
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  - fartsparkles@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    They thought it was because the leather was from a pig…
    
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  - GoodLuckToFriends@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Ain’t ain’t a non-word. I’ll fight anybody who says otherwise.
    
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- expr@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  This is not at all what chess is. This reads to me like you don’t really play chess?
  
  Like sure, good chess players have studied opening theory for the openings they play (and top players know at least some theory about most competitive openings), but there’s so much more to the game than simple memorization. Memorizing a bunch of lines and doing nothing else will get you nowhere with the game. Chess is about principles, concepts, ideas, strategies. It’s about tactics and positional ideas and how the two intersect. It’s about tempo and conducting the initiative. There’s a reason it’s the game with the most number of books written about it by a large margin. It’s an incredibly deep game that rewards investment and fine-tuning your own learning process (and, in fact, a great deal of unlearning bad ideas you learned earlier).
  
  It is decidedly not a game about memorization, even if there is some amount of it involved. At high level of play, memorization (or what we simply call “prep”) is table stakes for playing the actual game. At lower levels, many players don’t know a lot of opening theory and simply rely on some combination of positional ideas, tactics, and calculation.
  
  Do you know what rating your friend was at? In my experience, the super strong players I’ve met (including a Senior Master that occasionally visits our chess club who’s 2450 USCF or so) are incredibly intelligent and sharp. Anecdotally in my own chess career (only ~1134 USCF atm, though I think I’m a bit underrated due to my last tournament being in 2023), I’ve definitely noticed a difference in my own thinking since I started studying chess. Progressing in chess involves a lot of meta-cognitive thinking, and that kind of thing translates to all kinds of things in life.
  
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- TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  this is inaccurate. edit tbd
  
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Takumidesh@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
If you want to beat all of your friends at chess:

learn how to mate in endgames with a few different combinations of pieces.

Castle early and on the same side of your opponent.

Learn to defend scholars mate.

Focus on piece development early on, get you back rank pieces out (bishops knights)

Fight for the center

When attacking a square, just count how many other pieces are attacking and defending that square and see if you have more than your opponent, this is a great way to quickly analyze an attacks value.

Trade when you have a piece advantage, this is like taking a math question and simplyifing the terms. It greatly simplifies the game and brings it in to the the end game with an advantage.

Learn any one opening system just a few branches that can consistently bring you into tactics (static analysis of the board state) even or with a slight advantage.

These tips can be accomplished in a week and will dominate anyone who ‘just knows the rules’

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- MrFinnbean@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Got it. To beat my friends at chess i just need to learn to play chess.
  
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  - Takumidesh@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Funny, but really, those things are marginally more effort than learning the rules and are a far cry from the level of effort it takes to actually be considered broadly ‘good’ at chess.
    
    Learning one opening system can be done in about an hour and most of the tactics advice is just things to think about as you play.
    
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Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I also think it’s a generational thing.

Back then, since chess was associated with intelligence, a lot of academic types tried to play it and get good at it.

I would say once we had computers, there was another much more practical thing you could get good at.

But seriously, chess sets used to be part of the house decor.

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exasperation@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Paul Morphy, chess genius and sometimes described as best in the world in the mid-1800s:

“The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.”

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- stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Why play chess with Moriarty when you can just bash him in the head with a chessboard?
  
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dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
ITT: I don’t play chess. I don’t like chess. Friend play chess, he dumb, I am smart. I agree. You hear of Rubik’s cube?

Your skill at chess is indeed very good at predicting one thing: your chess rating. I have been playing every day for almost 2 years and I take lessons, but I started as an adult after finishing my PhD in actual rocket science and supervising a research lab in that area for 10 years. I have met exactly one good player through my connections to that lab I 17 years. So here are some perspectives on chess if you played in high school or you “learned how to play in 30 mins and think it’s boring”:

It’s a game with layers. The first layer is knowing how the pieces move, the second layer is memorizing openings, and the third layer is some basic knowledge of tactics (I.e., forks, skewers, pins, removing the defense, etc etc) and THEN you learn the game. Most people never learn the game unless you went out of your way to do so.

For reason 1, “good at chess” is a hugely subjective statement. You knew a few people who can beat all your friends? Cool. I was that guy and it took me MONTHS to get to what the chess world calls “intermediate”: 1200-1400 ELO. Your friend is probably rated 700 to 750. You have probably never met more than a handful of good chess players in your life unless you were in a university club.

You do not have to be typically smart to be good at chess, but it doesn’t hurt. Top GMs are sometimes impressively smart or impressively… Uh… susceptible to misinformation cough Kramnik cough. But what they CAN do is master the shit out of board positions, visualization, and prediction.

Case in point, Hikaru Nakamura, arguably world #2

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WsEQuoOz-c&t=490

Or you can watch him play blindfolded chess against actual good players, or speedrun 1 minute games winning hundreds in a row while talking about his pineapple shirt. He’s alternatingly pretty entertaining and kind of annoying to listen to.

If you are that kind of smart, the visualization and memory kind, yeah you’re probably going to also be a good chess player. Otherwise, there’s not a lot of traceability that I’ve seen research on.

All that said, this thread is absolutely annoying to see the whole world show up and talk out of their asses about it.

/end rant
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- expr@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Completely agree. Just a bunch of people who clearly don’t play the game and know nothing about it talking out of their asses.
  
  IMO you can’t have a serious opinion about the game without having actually played it competitively. If you’re just somebody that’s casually played a couple games with friends and family, your opinion about the game isn’t really relevant.
  
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  - dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    “show me your non-provisional rating and then we can talk”. Yeah I agree. But then this is the internet and everyone is an expert at being an expert lol
    
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Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I know someone who is pretty good at chess but also thinks vaccines are fake, Musk is a genius, and Ukraine belongs to Russia.

So not all chess players are smart.

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- Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pub ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I don’t think a minority of rightwingers are dumb. I think they’re invested in their idea of their team, and any insult to their team is an insult to them. They root for Trump. It’s like that one guy you know who owns a lot of Lakers memorabilia despite living in Texas. The media, expectations, their own investment, the threat of being wrong or misguided, “Me? Never!”, vastly outweigh any sort of critical thinking. Its straight denial to the core.
  
  But a vast majority? Yeah, dumb as an absorbent trash bag.
  
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- expr@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Do you know their rating? Tbh most people’s idea of being “pretty good at chess” is actually not very good at all (I don’t mean that as an insult, more lack of familiarity with the game).
  
  That’s not to say that it’s impossible for someone to think those things and be a strong chess player, but it’s probably not super common. I’ve actually ran into a couple people at a local chess club with “interesting” ideas about vaccines and uh… let’s just say they were not hard to beat (I think I mated one guy in like 12 moves). And btw, I’m not even a super strong chess player myself (~1134 USCF). But like, they probably would seem really strong to someone that just occasionally plays chess at family gatherings or whatnot. Chess is a game with a low skill floor and very high skill ceiling, so you have a huge range in ability.
  
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  - Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    2000 ish, apparently.
    
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- kyle@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  The only famous douche I know that’s very good at chess is Andrew Tate lol
  
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Geetnerd@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Chess requires dedication, conviction, and patience. Anyone with average intelligence can learn the game to the point of competence in 30 minutes.

It requires much more time to become an expert, or master.

And most people don’t have that much time to expend on it. That’s not something to be ashamed of.

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- floo@retrolemmy.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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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  - SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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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  - expr@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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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latenightnoir@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Disclaimer: not calling myself smart or anything.

I always found chess boring, for some reason. Like, not because it is too complex, but because it isn’t complex enough, in a way. As an example, the first time I tried my had at Medieval II: Total War, I fell in love with all things strategy.

I still can’t do chess, though… It’s like my mind goes to its happy place halfway through a match and I start making moves just to progress the game. Gimme a 4X game, and I’d need reminders to pee every 12 hours.

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- gigachad@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Well there is not a lot of action going on in a chess game and you are a lot of patience, I guess that makes it feel boring for you.
  
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  - latenightnoir@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Honestly, I don’t think the action’s the problem, I enjoyed creating interlinked databases with tens of thousands of entries in Spreadsheets. I think it’s strictly to do with the complexity itself, I need more. I like the concept of every piece having a specific move set, I’d just need more of them. And add more complexity to them, but at that point may as well just play grand scale combat games, like 40k.
    
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- Thorry84@feddit.nl ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Yeah I always laugh when movies or TV portrait a character being good at strategy by depicting them being good at chess. Those two have zero relation. Total war on the other hand, get good at that and you’re cracked at strategy
  
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- idriss@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  In my teenage years I really tried to master it well. I score relatively high in chess.com and lichess but I share your sentiment. If you are a chess master it doesnt mean you are super smart it means you are super good at chess.
  
  Science confirms this in a way. Prof Andrew Huberman has a podcast episode about games in general and their effect the brain development and the takeaways:
  
  Games can help the brain development according to publications because of the different experiences that you will never have irl
  
  The positive impact was only noticed when you play a variety of games under different setups and not when you master a single game and play it a lot
  
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Yermaw@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
One of the daftest people I ever met managed to beat 3 of us at once at chess. Would routinely kick my ass every time and it wasn’t even close.

The kind of person who absolutely would have injected bleach to cure covid.

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RowRowRowYourBot@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
That’s because playing chess doesn’t make you smart it just makes you better at playing chess

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- sxan@midwest.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Good chess players, though, exhibit some common traits which are shared with “smart people”: the ability to think in abstract terms, and a good memory.
  
  Your success at chess is often based on how far in advance you can plan a game at any point on the board, greatly supplemented by your ability to remember entire games of famous matches. These skills are frequently exhibited by people considered smart. However, as you and OP point out, you have to play, practice, and memorize to get good; merely knowing the rules and being smart doesn’t get you there.
  
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Dagwood222@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
[odd topic?]

This is from an essay about writers. The author said that you see a lot of architects in movies because it’s a fast and easy way to convey that someone is ‘artistic’ and a bit of a dreamer. It doesn’t matter that real life architects are much more about engineering that artistry; it works for a character.

The same thing with chess, it’s a fast and easy way to present a ‘smart’ character.

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- captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Architects or advertising executives. Sometimes lead male is one and lead female is the other.
  
  I think it was one of the writers on Cracked that opined it’s because those are the only jobs screenwriters partially understand. They’re people who pitch ideas to customers, kind of like screenwriters do with scripts. So you get a lot of main characters that have a weirdly large amount of down time, a looming deadline to present an idea for an ad campaign or building to your boss and the three executives your boss is kissing up to. Is it the moment of triumph for our main character, has our main character had a change of heart that he can’t run a greenwashing campaign for ExxonMobile anymore because hippy dippy love interest got to him, and now his previous life is going to fall apart and he’s going to start over as a shop owner in a small town or something…
  
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  - Dagwood222@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I’ve noticed that a lot of the women in rom-coms are bakers.
    
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IndustryStandard@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Learning a few chess pro tips will make you better than anyone trying to figure that game out.

The top levels of chess are skill but the bottom is people doing pre-learned openers.

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- GoodLuckToFriends@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  That checks out. I think I beat most of my friends simply because I remember a chess aficionado mentioning the center as being important to hold.
  
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  - IndustryStandard@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    As a child I attended a chess club. There were no lessons. People simply played chess against each other.
    
    I learned less in my entire years there than I did later in life in reading chess tips such as this page.
    
    lichess.org/study/y14Z6s3N/A9uqbWxr
    
    Looking back at those games I could recognize ways in which I was beaten by two moves in hindsight. But I had no idea about macro such as controlling the center or moving out the knights early were generally advantageous moves.
    
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- Dagwood222@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I recall some top player saying that he’d deliberately do a really ‘bad’ move at the start of a game and watch his opponents head explode because they’d never seen any top level player do that.
  
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accideath@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
„The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.“

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peto@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Folk always seem to underestimate the effect of training and experience. In a match between two unpracticed players, sure, the more analytically inclined of the two will have an edge. This is true of any game with a strategic component. General intelligence helps but specialist knowledge is better.

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zlatiah@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
So… disclaimer first! I have played chess but only a year or so; I got into chess during the pandemic and had a peak ELO of ~1600+ on chess.com and 1900+ on Lichess; probably translates to a classical ELO of ~1200 (competition is tough in classical…). Obviously I’m not remotely a good player, but I can hold my ground. I also had to do a neuropsych evaluation recently for mental health reasons, so I spent the last month of my free time looking into research of intelligence (g factor, IQ tests, the disturbing history, etc…) for my own curiosity. So I might have a bit of knowledge on this… but:

For the most part chess is its own unique skills and is unrelated to “smartness”. Nevertheless, I think chess might be related to probably just one or two specific narrow fields of intelligence. Being good at chess requires one to be knowledgeable of various chess openings (memorization, working memory), extremely strong pattern recognition (Magnus Carlsen is really good at this; AlphaZero was literally all pattern recognition due to the way it works), and being able to see 5, 10, or even 15 steps ahead and consider all the rational options (again, working memory)

I just took the WAIS-V test two weeks ago for my psych eval, and they do indeed test for working memory and pattern recognition in specific sub-tasks. However the difference is… IQ tests are meant to be practiced as they measure a type of “potential” if you may, but chess is all about what you actually play on the board. Sure maybe if ppl were literally just given the rules and had no prior exposure then a smarter person might spot a forced checkmate faster, but ppl do pratice for the game… In fact, the advice people used to give to get better at chess is… to do more puzzles

Sooo… methinks an intelligent person might have a slight edge training themselves to do the above, but there is probably otherwise very little association. After a certain point intelligence itself probably has no influence on chess performance whatsoever, and realistically it’s more about “grit”, or how much time/effort someone puts into the game

Aaand… case in point. Apparently Kasparov went through a 3-day intensive test, but had a really “spiky” profile that is more commonly seen in neurodivergent individuals; scored really high on some categories and abysmally low on others. I saw this random Reddit post which says that Carlsen scored 115(+1SD) on AGCT (a fairly quick and accurate online test). Nakamura allegedly got 102 on Mensa Norway’s trial test, which is not as accurate as AGCT but should be fairly good too

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BugBu@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Same with rubiks cube

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- pineapplelover@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Some of the smartest people I know, do the cube
  
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De_Narm@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Guess I’ll start with the same disclaimer: I don’t think I’m too smart for chess or amything.

I always thought chess is kinda boring. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fun enough as a novice. It’s probably also fun for people who mastered it, I’m not denying that.

However, for everything inbetween, it’s mostly about memorizing stuff. You just learn hundreds of openings and how to counter them. From what I’ve seen, a lot of intermediate players fall apart once they go off-script. It takes years until you’re good enough to strategize properly on your own, like a novice would, without some going “That’s the ‘double helix chin twister’” and beating you.

It’s kinda like the problem multiplayer games often have for me. There’s a set meta and you either learn it or lose. To experiment yourself successfully, you have to invest a massive amount of time. Experimenting myself is the fun part. I’m don’t want to invest hundreds if not thousands of hours before I get to have fun.

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- Wildfire0Straggler3@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I largely don’t agree with this, I played chess (Battle Chess) as a kid, I wasnt the best at chess but I had fun. I hadn’t played it in over 15+ years.
  
  My coworker plays chess on a regular basis, against other players and against the computer at 1,700. He knows quite a few strategies that I never bothered to ask what they entailed, which is a part of your point, but I just play off of the moves I see on the board, I don’t know any technical moves or strategies other than checkmate the king, castling, and en passant.
  
  I literally wing it every time and my opponent is always thinking about future moves to try and destroy me. Our matches include blunders and typically end up with only a couple pieces left on the board. Its such a fun experience when it’s played without expectation and youre relying on pure strategy in real time.
  
  I’ve won twice In a row now.
  
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curiousaur@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Chess takes lots of time to get very good. Any actual scientist, professor or engineer doesn’t have the time.

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HubertManne@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
From my experience most smart people learned and played chess at some point but few get the point of memorizing stuff. Especially if they are not good memorizes. Its a great game to teach and play with kids as it does stimulate the mind with the way the pieces move and having to think about the changing board and next move. That being said I was not even aware of en passant until I met a guy in college who actually went to competitions. Heck I rarely could remember how to castle due to how rare it was to get into a position to do so. Really though any type of stimulating activity is helpful. Someone mentioned rubicks cubes and like suduko and crosswords and really any gaming. They all have limitations. I often say crosswords is more about knowing the crossword author than anything else. They all have favorites and biases in their puzzles.

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drmoose@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Chess is a solved game which is not a fit tool for evaluating intelligence.

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- JPAKx4@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  It’s definitely not solved. Even stockfish has been beaten by more advanced AIs, and there is always the possibility of making even better ones.
  
  Also, humans can’t solve it on their own. With time constraints a human player is unable to make a “perfect” move every time.
  
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  - drmoose@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Nah in game terms chess is absolutely a solved game. Some meme edge cases do not invalidate that.
    
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- Speculater@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Caveat: Solved if you have access to massive compute power and a finely tuned algorithm.
  
  It’s not solved for the average player.
  
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  - Miaou@jlai.lu ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    It’s arguably not solved at all. If it were, we would know whether white can always win or whether black can always draw, and that’s still unknown.
    
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  - drmoose@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Thats not what solved means in this context but chess people are so offended that’s its impossible to ever discuss this so sure whatever.
    
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AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Aha. That’s because they all play go!

Right?

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Enzy@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
More about interest than intelligence, honestly.

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OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Can confirm, my brothers are both very good at chess. One is smart, the other is dumb as rocks

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dan00@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Im gonna say it… i dont care, im gonna say it!

CHESS 👏 IS 👏 FUCKING 👏 DUMB

The best you can do is losing to a robot. Good job 👍

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- dan00@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  You know what is not stupid? Hot dog competition. Try to alphazero this wrustel now robot. 🥖
  
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  - IndiBrony@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Robot can’t win hot dog competition 💪
    
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- Diddlydee@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  The best you can do is apparently lose to a robot.
  
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  - dan00@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Oh yea? We do chess shaming now? Did you know that many people have a proper disease and can’t play chess too well? Do you think it’s fair to mock them like this? Look it up on google, it’s called “having a life”, very debilitating.
    
    /s
    
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billwashere@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I consider myself reasonably intelligent but I also have ADHD so … I completely suck at chess.

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Flamekebab@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
The pared-down nature of chess really puts me off. I'm sure there's some elegant simplicity in it but I mostly find it dull. I like an element of randomness in my games.

Chess doesn't feel like a gateway to other, more fun games, and if it's not a fun game for me, why would I pursue it? I'm fairly sure it doesn't build skills that translate to anything else.

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- seven_phone@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Elon is that you.
  
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  - Flamekebab@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    If you're going to throw around an insult like that I'd like to see some working. I find chess boring, I'm not a fucking fascist.
    
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- warbond@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Chess is a logic puzzle that changes as you play it, with the randomness coming from player interaction. If you’re not into solving those kinds of puzzles, you’re probably not going to have fun.
  
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  - Flamekebab@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Pretty much the problem. It's very pure but I find that puts me off rather than draws me in. I kind of have the same problem with Quake 3!
    
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Acidbath@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Yeah… everytime I see it in movies I kinda cringe. However it still is an effective narrative tool to say that the person is a stategist or is in a higher tax bracket ( or honestly any quality that the common viewer doesn’t have). Even so, I wish writers would stop doing this.

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entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Being skilled at a game has little bearing on your intelligence beyond maybe “above average”. Intelligence is often best reflected in learning speed.

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