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Comment by tomcam | Hacker News Reader

We nerd types have made this mistake for the last 75 years or so. This mystique about chess has been completely misplaced in my humble opinion. At first the claim was that Smart people played chess, therefore if you made a computer that played chess well it would be Smart. That turned out to be hilariously untrue, but durable: nerds were finally relieved of their arrogance after about 5 decades only when it became clear even to them that the game-winning systems required brute force methods.

Thoughtful people absorb life lessons from almost everything they care to study deeply. You can make virtually all of his claims about martial arts, child rearing, studying and playing music, competitive video gaming, gardening, playing golf, meditation, religious study, farming, marksmanship, other board games, programming—the list is endless.

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The author doesn't dispute this at all. He's a chess grandmaster who is not mystifying chess, but pointing out how a lifetime of rigorous chess playing has taught him the value of concentration. He acknowledges that the very same thing occurs in people in other disciplines, athletes for example.

It's not an article about the virtue of nerds but about the combination of attention, flow experience and concentration, in the face of a culture that neglects all three but the latter in particular.

And I think he is very right and chess can teach us important lessons here, as can programming, or craftsmanship, or participation in the arts among other things.

Particularly important is the point about autonomy. Making concentration and understanding of our own mind through games like chess a priority is liberating. Through things like chess it is possible to move from being distracted by external rewards towards understanding one's own cognition the focus of life, without which no genuine thinking is possible.

What you are saying is true. You can get life lessons from everything. Nevertheless, in some cases implicitly we talk not about the average or best case but the minimum. A university degree means you meet some minimum requirements. Being a doctor means you meet some minimum requirements. Of course, you can diversify well above the minimum.

Here, also, we are talking about the minimum. Sure, you can do gardening and think deeply about something, or you can feel very tired and the years just flow by.

In chess, if you play a bit, you need patience, you need to imagine next possible moves, you need to manage your time and perhaps also your emotions.

It is this minimum (or perceived minimum) that makes the difference. Not the expected and not the max as in other stories we tell ourselves.

"In chess, if you play a bit, you need patience, you need to imagine next possible moves, you need to manage your time and perhaps also your emotions.

It is this minimum (or perceived minimum) that makes the difference."

UNLIKE the work of doctors and lawyers (at least in good standing here in the US), there is no clear "minimum" in chess (or other sports), you are free to not think and lose as much as you desire. Plenty of people do not take games seriously. I concede that in order to have a elo/fide/uscf rating above something I consider competitive, say 90% percentile, you likely need those qualities.

Also sad blitz chess noises

> In chess, if you play a bit, you need patience, you need to imagine next possible moves, you need to manage your time and perhaps also your emotions.

someone passionate about gardening can put it the exactly same way you did.

AlphaZero, formerly the strongest chess playing program/player, searches the game tree via Monte Carlo tree search, which really isn't brute force.

But more to the point of your comment, it makes sense to make these claims about chess in particular because chess more or less is exclusively about pure concentration. There is no physical ability you must develop like you would usually have to for sports or music or gaming.

If Monte Carlo tree search is not brute force , what would you consider brute force?

Well, I'd say it's an approximation of brute force. I'd say traditional minimax (with or without branch-and-bound improvements e.g. alpha-beta pruning), is brute force.

A nerd should have understood that for a game with finite search space, a sufficiently fast brute-force solution will always beat (or not lose to) a smart person. It's the nature of brute-force solution.

All search spaces are finite for a sufficiently fast brute force solution.

75 years? It's had a mystique for over 1000 years (going back to the Islamic golden age).

I meant in the programming world.

The first claim is a strawman and deserves no further refuting.

The second is...true. Everything we do is something we can learn life lessons from. And chess is a lesson in concentration and focused mental activity, which remarkably few things are.

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