Chess player memory is a myth | Hacker News Reader

Chess player memory is a myth

theprint.in

4 pointstmalsburg25 comments

The article is definitely not saying “it’s a myth that chess masters have great chess memory”. Anand is pushing back on a common layman perception, that the chess master’s excellent memory for chess positions is just an instance of their excellent memory for everything. He tries to show that ‘chess master memory’ is quite narrowly limited (when there is no logic to the position, masters perform no better than amateurs) and also quite effortful (many hours of preparation and revising required to keep that information in their mind).

More broadly, I’ve always found it interesting how chess tests very specific mental faculties. Memory of course, but the other big one is visualization. For most of the great players, when they are calculating many moves ahead, I believe they are visualizing the board in their mind and literally moving the pieces around so they can “look” at the resulting position and analyze it just as if it were laid out on the board in front of them. Those “blindfold simultaneous” games where a master plays against several people at once without looking at the board, they are holding the state of multiple full boards in their minds eye throughout the game.

I'm not trying to hate on Anand but this has big '200 IQ research mathematician says it's a myth that you have to be a genius to become a successful research mathematician' energy.

It reads more like "I don't have a photographic memory, instead, I build relations and add contextual cues that help remember details of situations".

There is no claim about the IQ at all, it's all focused on how memory works. And even if the tricks to improve our memorization are the same, everyone will still have different abilities and capacity with a focus on specific things (like remembering chess positions vs chess "non-positions", as referenced from that study with random placement). Some people will do these tricks intuitively, yet others need to train, but being explicit seems important especially as the pressure on the memory grows ("revise, revise, revise").

This has nothing to do with the IQ, which is more like CPU power instead of L1/L2 cache or RAM (books and notes would be floppy or hard drives ;)).

> "There is no claim about the IQ at all"

> "This has nothing to do with the IQ"

sorry i forgot that people on the internet don't understand analogies

Maybe it would have been clearer if I would have said something more like "this has big 'guy with half meter arm circumference says it's a myth that you have to have big arms to be good at arm wrestling' energy." Who knows though. Maybe then I would have got schooled on Anand's arm circumference.

I hear you on your analogies, but memory and intelligence are tightly coupled, which makes yours a bad one in this context. There is no need for a generalization ("people on the internet" have a hard time communicating precisely, right?).

If you used your second one, I'd make it clear that I still disagree with the analogy: yes, someone great at something can be aware of limits others face in comparison. Humans do learn without direct experience too!

You similarly continue with making a bad analogy about getting "schooled on ... arm circumference": other than side remarks that you quoted, I do not "school you on IQ" (which would be analogous), but rather on the "memory", which was the original article topic.

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