Does playing chess make you smarter? A look at the evidence
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
Speaking only for myself, I am a competitive person and generally play to win any board game (as opposed to say golf which I suck at and play for pure leisure)
A couple notable things Chess did for me:
1) taught me to think about multi-layered cause and effect (something I use daily in my life as a manager) - ie how to create and execute a strategy
2) boosted my Confidence in making a decision and owning the outcome (something I believe a lot of people struggle with).
3) Taught me to be aware of my state of mind. I lost countless games I “should not have” for endless reasons I felt were preventable. Today I am hyper aware of my state of mind and will deploy fixes to get me to a better state depending on the issue (need more rest, stop the distractions, white board it out)
4) inspired me. Nothing like playing against a great player and seeing the beauty of a strategy unfold all the while your pieces and strategy slowly disintegrate into a blazing flame of glory. I saw the possibilities of what I could accomplish with study and practice
5) I could add a lot to this list...
Now did any of the above improve my GPA or SAT scores? Not directly but I do think it’s undoubtedly helped my career. No question in my mind that I am teaching my son chess just like my father did for me.
What is that?
As the rulers had all power, it was incredibly very easy for them to get mad at someone and engage in destructive activities. Chess helped the new princes learn emotional management and act better when met with situation like, strategy failing, loss of your resources etc...
Later the game was brought to middle East by Arab traders from where it went to Europe and new world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx3h70GoaoM
I guess if you accept IQ as a proxy for general cognitive ability, this would suggest the article is right. On the other hand, I still find it very counter intuitive. The ability to plan ahead and the spatial thinking are things I though would transfer well to other domains (arguably both are not things that an IQ test, or the academic tests from the article, would measure well though).
If you start playing chess too late in your life, it doesn't matter what innate talents you have, you're never going to be very good.
Picking out the effects of nature vs nurture in a random chess playing kid is not easy, and I wouldn't be so quick to attribute to innate talent that which could be explained by environment.
What is clear, however, and something which you did not seem to deny in your own response, is that playing a lot of chess when you're young is critical to overall chess performance. Without that even "intelligent" and very capable adults who started playing too late are just not going to catch up to capable kids who played a lot of chess early.
Also, I have no confidence in a 10,000 hour (or any other fixed number of hours) figure. The hours it takes to attain a certain skill in chess will vary from person to person, depending on all sorts of intrinsic and extrinsic factors, including their training regimen, the skill of their teachers, and many of the factors I listed in my earlier post.
So you can look up how well it correlates with what things, and what it doesn't, and get an idea of what it is predictive of.
It isn't anywhere near perfect of course, you can't capture the whole of a person's cognitive ability in one number, but then it is only a "proxy" as you said.
Mensa is an association of moderately high-IQ people, and IQ correlates positively [0] with education and income, among other things.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Social...
Specifically, when looking at people with IQ above 110, it seems like the correlations are still there at least for PhD level science. Most fields have average IQs above 130: http://www.religjournal.com/pdf/ijrr10001.pdf
One thing I didn't know initially is that IQ tests are normalized so the mean is 100 and the standard deviation is 10. If we assume IQ is normally distributed (not exactly true, but roughly accurate), then IQ of 110 puts you in the top 33% of the population. IQ of 130 puts you in the top 0.3%.
No, the standard deviation is 15 IQ points, not 10. 130 puts you in the top 2%. I know this because my kid scored in the < 0.02%.
On the other hand, IQ tests are highly correlated to how much you prepare for them, which is why rich families score higher. There was a tutor on Reddit for private schools admissions who said she had never had a student who didn’t surpass the entrance qualifications for a standardized test. It’s very easily gameable.
Guess the rest of us are potted plants.
Somebody better tell the "IQ measures innate intelligence" people.
I wouldn’t put too much weight on a low score for someone who is demonstrably intelligent.
Edit: He was doing it while on stream (multitasking) while being watched (probably increased stress), while talking out his answers. For most folks who tried to do the same, the results would be much lower a score taken under typical conditions.
What all great chess players have in common is an amazing memory and the will to think and work on chess all day long (which is more astonishing to me than the memory side).
Professional chess, you mean; I think that's worth mentioning.
Thar description would put me off entirely: whilst it's a game I've enjoyed and taught to several others (I've helped at a school chess club, for example). My memory is terrible - I play by analysing a tree of possible outcomes, or more casually by strategic feel (positional play) which is far less intense and still enjoyable for me.
Their proficiency is like any game that you might practice to extreme: whether speed-cubing or competitive video games. Getting really good (fast), even for simple games like Tetris, Solitaire or Minesweeper is just training your brain to quickly recognise some very specific patterns.
LeBron James is famous for being able to remember every shot he makes. There are cricketers who can tell you ball-by-ball plays from memory. Roger Federer remembers most of his matches. I have seen technical founders have an uncanny ability to 'remember' their code bases and figure out what to change. Boxers remember fights and sparring sessions in crazy detail. Mathematicians can do the same with papers they read ages ago.
I feel that memory and understanding co-evolve. The more you understand something, the better you remember it. The more knowledge you are able to memorize, the better you are able to understand and assimilate and create new ideas.
I am commenting because I have seen several smart people give this line about chess being about memory without realizing their professional expertise involves a great deal of memory too. In my experience, this is probably because when kids play chess, there is always this one kid trying to memorize opening and dazzle other people. Ultimately, those kids do not go on to become grandmasters. But yet, the people who lose to them think they lost because they did not memorize an opening.
Why did DeepMind pick Go as a challenge rather than Chess?
Because with Chess you can store the entire search space in memory. With Go you can't.
That is incorrect.
Quoting from [0] > Chess has approximately 10^120 game paths. These positions comprise the problem search space. Typically, AI problems will have a very large space, too large to search or enumerate exhaustively.
But as Go has an even larger search space, it makes sense that DeepMind sees it as a bigger challenge.
[0] - http://www.cse.uaa.alaska.edu/~afkjm/cs405/handouts/search.p...
"The system could search to a depth of between six and eight pairs of moves—one white, one black—to a maximum of 20 or even more pairs in some situations" - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/20-years-after-de...
Then wouldn't we expect to see evidence of that in studies like the OP? What's the evidence for this?
> which should translate to improved performance in other tasks like coding.
Same issue.
No he isn't, and no he can't. This is total hyperbole and he has never said he can remember "every shot" he has made. He can identify games from short sections of video, and he can remember certain memorable dunks, etc. But he can't (and no one else can either) remember every shot (including failed shots).
My point should have been that he can remember plays when triggered just like a high level chess player can remember positions when triggered. The expert's memory is way better than what ordinary people remember in almost any domain that requires human expertise and judgement.
There is also the The Theory of Steinitz, that says that one can only win in chess as a result of opponent's mistakes.
Although this might seem like stating the obvious, I don't think it necessarily can be taken for granted that everyone is equally strong at this kind of thinking.
Maybe it's just due to impatience, or maybe there are actually differences in people's ability to keep these details straight so that they don't lose track of what they have and haven't considered, or maybe it's something else. Even if it's just impatience, conquering that impatience might be one of the factors in intelligence. And there might even be differences in brains (perhaps anxiety) that could affect how much patience one has for this kind of mental effort.
Eh? I read the introduction/summary of the linked article, it appears to say not that there's a failure to transfer, but that it depends on the game:
> Enhancing perceptual and attentional skills requires common demands between the action video games and transfer tasks Adam C. Oei and Michael D. Patterson* Division of Psychology, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore Despite increasing evidence that shows action video game play improves perceptual and cognitive skills, the mechanisms of transfer are not well-understood. In line with previous work, we suggest that transfer is dependent upon common demands between the game and transfer task. In the current study, participants played one of four action games with varying speed, visual, and attentional demands for 20 h. We examined whether training enhanced performance for attentional blink, selective attention, attending to multiple items, visual search and auditory detection. Non-gamers who played the game (Modern Combat) with the highest demands showed transfer to tasks of attentional blink and attending to multiple items. The game (MGS Touch) with fewer attentional demands also decreased attentional blink, but to a lesser degree. Other games failed to show transfer, despite having many action game characteristics but at a reduced intensity. The results support the common demands hypothesis.
Given that this linkage appears to be misleading, it's hard to take the conclusions of the article seriously; what else are they misleading the reader about?
"The Attentional blink (AB) is a phenomenon that reflects temporal limitations in the ability to deploy visual attention. When people must identify two visual stimuli in quick succession, accuracy for the second stimulus is poor if it occurs within 200 to 500 ms of the first."
> In line with previous work, we suggest that transfer is dependent upon common demands between the game and transfer task.
Which is, I mean, duh? Was someone else suggesting that playing a game would improve a completely random skill? Obviously there'd had to be something in common.
Maybe I'm misreading this though.
The article is talking about how those things won't improve your general intelligence, as many people did think playing chess would randomly make you smarter.
For example, there was a study indicating that playing Starcraft improved multi-tasking ability:
> Using a meta-analytic Bayes factor approach, we found that the gaming condition that emphasized maintenance and rapid switching between multiple information and action sources led to a large increase in cognitive flexibility as measured by a wide array of non-video gaming tasks.
I suppose here the rub would be, exactly how specific or different from the video game were these "non-video gaming tasks"? If they're broad enough that we consider them reasonable measurements of overall multi-tasking ability, then yes, playing Starcraft maybe made you smarter in one particular dimension. If they're all very similar to the game itself, and broader measurements found no change, then no.
> To determine changes in cognitive flexibility that occurred as a result of video gaming, participants completed a battery of psychological tasks at pre-test and post-test (at 40 hours of gaming). The battery included measures that address cognitive flexibility as well as measures of unrelated constructs. Measures of flexibility included the Attention Network Test (ANT) [28], Stroop task [29], task switching [30], a novel multi-location memory task, and test of Operating Span (Ospan; distinct from simple counting memory span) [31], [32]. These are classic measures of cognitive flexibility in that they require the switching or coordination of cognitive processes in order to successfully navigate the task at hand. For example, the task switching paradigm involves switching between two different stimulus identification tasks. All the measures in the cognitive flexibility task group assess the ability to coordinate attentional processes between two or more concurrent or alternating operations. Measures of predicted unrelated constructs included the balloon analogue risk task (BART) [33], visual search task [14], information filtering task [34], and WAIS-IV digit span memory task [35], [36]. These tasks were chosen to help delineate the specific hypothesis that RTS training would lead specifically to cognitive flexibility enhancements given that RTS game play stresses fast-paced switching and coordination of decisional processing. The visual search task and the information filtering task were chosen due to their use in previous action video game research [12], in order to differentiate RTS training from action video game training. BART and the digit span memory task were chosen due to further delineate cognitive flexibility from the broad domains of risk sensitivity and general memory. Participant groups were equated on the Multimedia Multitasking Index (MMI), a measure of the amount of time an individual spends simultaneously engaged in more than one form of media [37]. Consistent with best scientific practices and openness, the task grouping and analysis strategy were determined and publically disclosed [38] prior to data collection.
Gonna be honest here, that all sounds rather impressive to me but I have no idea what those tests actually entail.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
You're missing the point of the research paper. From the beginning, they supported the common demands theory being discussed. They were trying to determine what aspect of a game led to the transfer of the skills to the common demand task, and found that demanding games that required you to use that skill the most led to the best transfer of those skills to the common task.
Meanwhile, the article is using the common demands theory to support their claim,
>The fact that skills learned by training do not transfer across different domains seems to be a universal in human cognition. In other words, you get better, at best, at what you train in – which may just sound just like good old fashioned common sense.
Improving your ability to attend to multiple items may have some benefit outside of video games, but it's not going to help your grades much. You'd be far better off spending that time studying.
edit sorry, I did not notice that was a different study. My broad point doesn't change though, using StarCraft to train your multitasking is just going to benefit your multitasking.
> The failure of generalisation of a particular skill, in fact, happens to occur in many other areas beyond chess – such as music training, which has been shown to have no effect on non-music cognitive or academic abilities. The same applies to video game training, brain training, and working memory training, among others.
But then, the article they linked to doesn't support that, and you yourself agree that you can train a particular skill through games that will apply to other, non-gaming tasks that use the same skill. Yes, it won't affect other cognitive skills (duh), but it does generalize to other domains that use the same skill.
The rest of the article makes it clear they realize these skills can be helpful in other areas, they mention chess helps with geometry and math at the end. And you seem to agree with the article as you think it's obvious that they won't affect other cognitive skills.
Lol. "Music-related skills have no benefit for skills that don't benefit from music skills". Very convenient to make your supported outcome a tautology.
Providing a minor improvement to common tasks is nothing like the boost to overall general intelligence and academic ability that people say activities like music or chess cause. Aggressive parents don't force their kids to play an instrument to improve their sense of time.
what does this sentence mean?
There are definitely activities that have been shown to increase IQ, even when attempting to correct for confounders, although not by a dramatic amount.
For example, spending an additional year in school increases IQ by 1-5 points, depending on which study you believe. [0] Similarly, having a healthy diet as a child "increases" IQ, although you could equivalently phrase it as malnutrition decreasing IQ.
[0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brainstorm/201806/ho...
The three study types respectively yielded estimated IQ increases of approximately one point, two points, and five points per additional year of schooling.
And what were the three study types?
Cognitive tests were taken before participants differed in their degree of education (e.g., before some dropped out of high school) and again afterward, sometimes decades later.
A policy change, such as an increase in the mandatory education level, resulted in some students staying in school for longer.
Students who made an age cutoff to begin schooling were compared with students who had not.
So the best study, which tested IQ scores before and after, showed the least improvement, at 1 IQ point. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of education for boosting IQ. I would conclude the opposite of this article. When better studies show smaller and smaller effect sizes that’s a good indicator that there’s probably nothing going on.
It contradicts this basic premise.
"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."
I suck at it, but by being less afraid to lose, by realizing you have to sacrifice pieces intentionally to win, I have enjoyed the game more.
It is definitely a game I would promote to my future children.
Owning the results and preparing for the next game taught me a life outlook: Win or lose, there's always a new game waiting if you still want to play.
It is an addiction.
Seems obvious to me if you play a game that makes you use your brain, it will help you in the long run.
If you just use your brain to consume trash it will become trash.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Nice guy, played blitz against him online after he already had left professional chess.
Bet seriously, I have seen famous programmers in person. And famous sportsmen. A disproportionate number of them are dull IRL.
So, do play chess. Just do not build your life around. And do let your parents lock you up to reach world-best results.
>This is why so many parents around the world are keen to get their children playing chess //
Did they study this or is it assumed. I taught my kids to play because it's fun and I hoped they'd enjoy playing.
Is there a name for that strategy or maybe it will backfire against better players.
All of that leads into my recommendation for getting good at Chess as a beginner: Don't waste any time with opening preparation. Pick two openings you like (one for white, one for black) and stick with them. All your time and effort should go into tactics.
Is that going to help bad/beginner/average players? Not at all, in many ways they're not even playing the same game. Jumping to conclusions based on what Grandmasters do is therefore apt to mislead.
Compared to a list of actual domain generalizable skills, it is clear that chess would be the odd one out. For example, some domain generalizable skills include self-control, leadership, time management, etc.
This is not a placebo effect. Doing a variety of things does make you smarter. If I learn to play chess, there is a very real effect. From there, you have diminishing returns on investment. If I play chess for 4 hours per day, then it crowds out other, more productive activities.
There is a perceived mystique to chess, but it's no different then checkers, contemporary German game geek games, or any of a range of other strategic games. People who play such games a lot will be better players when placed in a novel game (or a real-life situation which requires the same type of strategic thinking).
And such games are no different than a broader set of other cognitively-engaging activities, be that logic puzzles, editing Youtube videos, or STEM/maker activities.
In most activities, there's an initial surge of growth (so long as I do it for long enough to learn something -- not a one-hour thing I forget after a few months), followed by rapidly diminishing returns, but that's far from universal. In programming, for example, that surge comes when people start to think algorithmically (e.g. in terms of big-O notation), not when learning to order operations. In reading/writing, that comes when people start to really think through audiences, structure of text, etc.
Placebo doesn't mean fake, or the subject imagined it up, or pretended.
In science you have to control for things to make sure effects can not be just a temporary effect.
The duration doesn't have anything to do with whether something is scientific. It has to do with a statistical correlation of cause and effect.
https://theconversation.com/does-playing-chess-make-you-smar...
There is huge selection bias. Playing chess for a long time select people who are very different from general public and from people who just decided to play but will drop it soon. People also play chess in a different way: some people play just to kill time while some play really competitively.
I think that regardless of whether chess in itself doesn't do much (I would be surprised if that was so), people who can stick to playing chess competitively are more likely to also exercise their minds in other ways.
I also believe that playing chess is one of those exercises that have other beneficial results (like training focus). Other example might be running which I think of the beneficial effects one that people forget to mention is training ones willpower (assuming you do more than just light jog).