Too Smart to Become the Chess World Champion? | Hacker News Reader

Too Smart to Become the Chess World Champion?

volokh.com

25 pointstortilla12 comments

Playing chess is not so much about reasoning. It's more about pattern recognition and assessment. To play chess really well you need to have embedded awesome heuristics in your brain that shows you what the good move is.

I played with two people. One about same IQ as me, maybe slightly lower but having extensive experience (at least in comparison to mine) in chess (he played a lot as a kid, I played maybe 100 games total, never with significantly better opponent).

Second guy I played was more intelligent then me but had almost no experience in chess (he was incredible mathematician, transition between two lines of his proof that he saw obvious, required whole page of my reasoning for me to be understood, he represented my country in International Mathematical Olympics, he got master degree one year ahead of time).

With the first guy I won exactly once. Before that I lost about 20-30 games with him. When I played the other guy I was astonished how dumb moves he made. I won with him effortlessly first time.

I used to play under-16 tournaments before I gave up the game, and I found that there were two stages:

- Experience. This would take you up to a certain level and you would beat less experienced players. At some point, however, the experience curve would just flatten out

- Study. Once your experience benefit stopped growing, then studying past games and the theory from books would kickstart your growth again, and then that would flatten also

- After those two had been exhausted, then the differences in people was up to that intangible that you could call talent, intelligence, focus or whatever

So someone incredibly intelligent but without that initial experience would usually be beat by someone with some experience. And similar, experienced players would be beat by those that made the transition to studying.

Chess is a different game when you get to a highly-competitive level. At a casual level, like most people who play, it's mostly about experience. I know how all the pieces move and the victory conditions, but I would get burned by anyone who has played more than 10 games. At a highly competitive level, it becomes what you say: pattern recognition and heuristics. At that point, the way your particular brain works is crucial, as is making absolutely zero mistakes.

Basically any competition is like this: the game completely changes at higher levels. For example: Scrabble goes from a vocabulary contest to board control and defensive strategy.

I think that if you argue so, you must also admit that mathematical prowess isn't related to intelligence (and such, that your mathematician adversary being faster than you at symbolic logic didn't prove him or her smarter) or you would be on contradiction.

Another discussion is IQ correlation with chess prowess or mathematics ability. I would argue that chess and mathematics are two separated skills which are applications of intelligence; so there's definitely a correlation between both, but entirely determined by experience.

I didn't say that I thought that this mathematician was intelligent because he was incredible with math. I just stated that he was he was more intelligent than me (which I base on all experiences I shared with him, same as with my "chess-master" friend). Then I just gave some additional trivia about him to show what things he was capable of.

My personal feeling is that having high IQ can help you raise your skill in something up to a certain point fast. After that if you are not genuinely obsessive about this subject you flatten out. People who are more interested than you (but are less intelligent) can catch up and surpass your skill. IQ doesn't determine how good you can be but only how fast can you reach your max.

Sorry, but that's a really bad example. Of course a complete beginner is going to be worse than someone with experience. They don't know what to look for in the game.

I'm starting to be more and more convinced that "overspecialization" is a non-existent beast. I've never met a specialist that was unable to pick up necessary knowledge and skills because they were too specialized. In fact being a specialist would allow them to use analogies and metaphors from their own discipline to get a much better understanding of new topics.

when you study topics deeply enough they start to converge with other topics. at their heart a lot of subjects use similar abstractions and methodologies.

but I think chess is actually an exception. chess requires chess knowledge.

Yep, that's why I'm not world-class at any one thing ... I'm just too intelligent.

Deleted comment

It doesn't say that he's the current world champion. It says that he's currently ranked number 1.

http://ratings.fide.com/top.phtml?list=men

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Carlsen

I think the tendency to "underspecialize" is universal and not limited to the extremely intelligent. Most people, left to their own devices, would prefer to be a dabbler for a while, until choosing later on an area in which to specialize. (Then, the question is: in that field, will they specialize? There are general mathematicians who tend not to publish cutting-edge results but know the field very well, and then there are those who identify solely as algebraic topologists.)

However, my suspicion is that people who hyperspecialize are (and always were) most successful in their time, while the more general-minded will be the ones who are remembered in 100 years. Eratosthenes had the derisive nickname "beta" because he was second-best in a lot of fields, but he's the first (as far as we know) to have proved the round earth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com