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).
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
There is also the The Theory of Steinitz, that says that one can only win in chess as a result of opponent's mistakes.