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Hofstadter's book GEB talked about chess and intelligence a bit, and it mentioned some studies. There's one I most definitely remember. The study involved takin
by lmkg 17y ago
Hofstadter's book GEB talked about chess and intelligence a bit, and it mentioned some studies. There's one I most definitely remember. The study involved taking two groups of people, normal people and chess pros, showing them a chess board for like 5 seconds, and having them reconstruct as much of the board position as they could.
The normal people did exactly like you thought they would, placing a few pieces around, with a lot of off-by-one errors. The chess pros, on the other hand, got board positions comparatively "more wrong" than the beginners. Multiple pieces were radically moved across the board. However, when these board positions were looked at by other pros, the responses were almost universally along the lines of "well, the positions are different, but strategically they're actually kinda similar..."
It's qualitative feedback, to be sure, and difficult to verify and certainly not be trusted in a scientific sense. Nonetheless, it does reveal some of the "intuition" going on. Pro chess players are good at seeing high-level patterns in the positioning of the pieces, related to strategies and advantages and relative positioning. They see these things so well that they stop seeing the actual pieces, to an extent. It reminds me of that scene in the first Matrix movie where the one guy (Cypher?) is pointing to the screen with numbers trailing down, saying "I don't see the numbers anymore, it's just blonde, brunette, redhead, ..."
This seems to relate more to perception than to intuition as it's traditionally thought of, but I would argue that they two are more strongly coupled than most people realize. One type of intuition is perceiving emergent phenomena directly without noticing the underlying layers.
- jerf 17y agoMy memory isn't all that great, so I hate to go out on a limb here, but what I think was discussed in GEB was that if shown a sensible board layout that could be reached in real play, the pros could nail it in five seconds, whereas normal people could do only tolerably well in five seconds. Show the pros a nonsense board that could never come up in real play, and the normal people do the same as they did before, but the pros crash and burn. This is meant to show that the mental conception of a board is different between a pro and a novice.
- mquander 17y agoI would vouch for this being the correct interpretation, and the parent being quite wrong. It's originally from a study by W.G. Chase and H.A. Simon in 1973, but I can't find the full text free online.
- lmkg 17y agoAfter consulting GEB, I replied to parent with corrections, we're both largely right in point but got some details wrong. The text claims the study comes from Adriaan de Groot in the 1940's, the bibliography refers to a book published in 1965 by Mouton, under the title Thought and Choice in Chess. If you can summarize the other study, I'd love to hear it.
- mquander 17y agoIt's not the most scholarly thing in the world, but this Chessbase biography of de Groot suggests that where de Groot measured the distinction between novices and experts, Chase and Simon were the first to measure differences between random positions and game-like positions. http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=3290 http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=3290
- dutchflyboy 17y agoHmm, so this would mean that a normal player sees the game as just a bunch of pieces, whereas a pro looks at the position (strategy, advantages for one player, etc). Well, it would explain some things about pros, but what does this mean when you train with an AI? I mean, yes, you get more experience, but a typical game for a computer is not a typical game for a computer at all. It would be nice to know which AI Magnus Carlsen used to train and compare it's playstyle to that of pros. Maybe his strategy is just different enough to catch people with something they don't expect/know and give him a slight advantage.
- mquander 17y agoThis is not really accurate. The strongest chess programs (mostly Rybka, Shredder, and Fritz) are commercially available, and all top grandmasters are using more or less the same ones. The advantage of training with an AI is that the AI will happily play you for ten or twelve hours a day, from any position you please, without tiring; you can ask it for the evaluation of any position, and it will generally provide an extremely accurate one; it will immediately reveal errors in your calculations and suggest tactical possibilities that few humans would see; and it will play perfect (for small sets of pieces) and near-perfect endgames against you. Last, but not least, computer chess databases are like nothing available 20 years ago. Chess professionals (and amateurs) have access to all the games they have ever played, hundreds of games played by any potential rival, and hundreds or thousands of games played by IMs and GMs in any potential opening line.
- joe_the_user 17y agoI remember reading that study in GEB. It's kind of a big step from that to clarifying what "intuition" is, even, especially, if we feel we understand it easily.