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Comment by gpm | Hacker News Reader

I strongly disagree with this statement. A good player can usually walk you through the portion of the game tree that they expanded in their head, but the moves they had to think about (expand their mental game tree to include the resulting position) versus the moves they instinctively ruled out is basically inexplicable, and where a lot of the skill lies.

(I'm thinking more chess than othello, since I'm much better at the former, but I assume the thought process is similar)

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Strongly agree. I'm NOT good at chess, but I still like watching it on YouTube. The explanations that top players give for their moves sound like magic a lot of the time. If they sat down with me for an hour could they explain every step of how they got to their conclusion? I think they could, but I don't think that they'd explain the exact same process they actually went through, which is based on inexplicable heuristic as parent mentioned. Often times at complex decision points in chess players will just say that a move feels better. That feeling can't be explained.

I have to admit you're right there, now thinking about how I would explain games I play, approaches to tasks, etc.

That's not correct. It doesn't matter whether they can explain their moves to you. What matters is if they can explain their moves to another grand master and they always can unless they moved a random piece to break up a position to make a boring game more interesting (this rarely happens, but it is an interesting way to play, but not to win contests).

They are not explaining their internal processes (neurobiology, brain chemistry, neuron firing patterns etc.) that caused them to arrive at given moves. They just provide proofs that their moves were good.

Works for me. Just like you won't be able to explain to a lay person what a computer program does doesn't mean that the logic is sound without going all the way to the atomic level. But if you really wanted to you could because a computer is a deterministic and relatively simple system, small enough to explain in principle from which we can extrapolate. Wetware doesn't have that luxury so you have the choice to believe the explainer, or not. But when dealing with such a vast gap in experience the best way is to try to learn as much as possible from such an explanation in the hope that you'll be able to capture more of it in the future. This isn't always possible, for instance due to time constraints or interest levels but in principle it could be done.

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