Chess Is the Killer App

I thought that was implied.

Abstract

Women remain significantly underrepresented in the science, engineering, and technology workforce. Some have argued that spatial ability differences, which represent the most persistent gender differences in the cognitive literature, are partly responsible for this gap. The underlying forces at work shaping the observed spatial ability differences revolve naturally around the relative roles of nature and nurture. Although these forces remain among the most hotly debated in all of the sciences, the evidence for nurture is tenuous, because it is difficult to compare gender differences among biologically similar groups with distinct nurture. In this study, we use a large-scale incentivized experiment with nearly 1,300 participants to show that the gender gap in spatial abilities, measured by time to solve a puzzle, disappears when we move from a patrilineal society to an adjoining matrilineal society. We also show that about one-third of the effect can be explained by differences in education. Given that none of our participants have experience with puzzle solving and that villagers from both societies have the same means of subsistence and shared genetic background, we argue that these results show the role of nurture in the gender gap in cognitive abilities.

Conclusion

Our paper shows that the gender gap in spatial abilities in the task that we study interacts with culture. In the matrilineal society, we observe no gender difference in this task. These results show that nurture plays an important role in the gender gap in spatial abilities. Our results also indicate that providing equal education and improving treatment of women at the family level may make a difference; however, this implication should be taken with a grain of salt, because causality cannot be ascertained. Nevertheless, the implications for both policymakers and ordinary people interested in reducing the gender gap cannot be overstated: reducing the gender gap in spatial abilities may reduce the gender gap in the science, engineering, and technology workforce. It is worth mentioning that our results do not provide evidence against the role of nature.

That's not necessarily a valid counterargument. Humans and bots may play similarly to some extent (both technically do ranking&searching through space of possible moves, aided by many heuristics), but for humans it's about using the same "mental pathways" that are required by other tasks in life. Bots are just playing chess.

It's like benchmarking a CPU vs. an ASIC. ASIC will be better for the task it's designed for, but absolutely useless for everything else.

What do "spatial patterns" have to do with genetics, in this context?

Anyway, judging from your comment you probably haven't heard of Judit Polgár:

Judit Polgár (born 23 July 1976) is a Hungarian chess grandmaster. She is generally considered the strongest female chess player of all time.[1] In 1991, Polgár achieved the title of Grandmaster at the age of 15 years and 4 months, at the time the youngest to have done so, breaking the record previously held by former World Champion Bobby Fischer.

Polgár was born on 23 July 1976 in Budapest, to a Hungarian Jewish family.[10] Polgár and her two older sisters, Grandmaster Susan and International Master Sofia, were part of an educational experiment carried out by their father László Polgár, in an attempt to prove that children could make exceptional achievements if trained in a specialist subject from a very early age.[11] "Geniuses are made, not born," was László's thesis. He and his wife Klára educated their three daughters at home, with chess as the specialist subject.[12] László also taught his three daughters the international language Esperanto. They received resistance from Hungarian authorities as home-schooling was not a "socialist" approach. They also received criticism at the time from some western commentators for depriving the sisters of a normal childhood.

Traditionally, chess had been a male-dominated activity, and women were often seen as weaker players, thus advancing the idea of a Women's World Champion.[13] However, from the beginning, László was against the idea that his daughters had to participate in female-only events. "Women are able to achieve results similar, in fields of intellectual activities, to that of men," he wrote. "Chess is a form of intellectual activity, so this applies to chess. Accordingly, we reject any kind of discrimination in this respect."[14] This put the Polgárs in conflict with the Hungarian Chess Federation of the day, whose policy was for women to play in women-only tournaments. Polgár's older sister, Susan, first fought the bureaucracy by playing in men's tournaments and refusing to play in women's tournaments. Susan Polgár, when she was a 15-year-old International Master, said in 1985 that it was due to this conflict that she had not been awarded the Grandmaster title despite having made the norm eleven times.[15]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r

So, of three women that were purposefully trained from an early age to play chess, two became grandmasters and the other an International Master. Either genetics has nothing to do with it, or the Polgárs are a very special family, genetically speaking. Which is the most likely?

You may find Gwern's comments on Advanced chess interesting: https://www.gwern.net/Notes#advanced-chess-obituary

[1] http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~regan/papers/pdf/RMH11b.pdf