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Comment by olooney | Hacker News Reader

That's true. Chess only teaches two general lessons about strategy: look more than one step ahead, and invent heuristics (abstractions that let you estimate if positions are good or bad) for yourself. Those are useful lessons, but you don't need to play thousands of games to grasp those ideas.

Other aspects of strategy, like shortening decision loops[1], forming alliances, or the exploration/exploitation tradeoff[3], are simply not represented by chess because it is a turn-based, zero-sum game with perfect information. That makes chess a poor model of real-world strategy.

Still, the things it does teach are real and useful, so as long as you don't think its the end-all, be-all of strategic thinking you can get something out of it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_game_theory

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration%E2%80%93exploitati...

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I think chess teaches a lot more. It teaches decision making and resource management. It's very important to consider your options and decide how much time you spend analyzing them. It teaches you things like elimination process (if you have 3 options, one complicated one and 2 simple ones then start analyzing simple ones because if they are bad you just saved a lot of time by not analyzing 3rd one).

It also teaches you to forget about the past and focus on the present. It teaches you long term plans usually don't work and relying on them is a bad idea and it's better to focus on execution here and now (this is what Soviet school got wrong although probably only officially, the players knew it all along - analogies to 5 years plans were just too tempting for book authors).

At human level it also teaches you to design strategy to exploit your opponents - play openings they hate, simplify vs players who like complicated positions, complicate vs players who like simple ones.

There is a lot of interesting things you learn about thought process and decision making as your level improve. It might not be the best game for that but it's pretty good considered how simple it is.

You (and others) should check out real time strategy games if your hope is to learn much of what you're sharing here!

RTS requires other computer-type skills that are pretty useless. APM (micro and macro management), changing screen focus quickly, etc.

Chess is a great game for removing all those external factors. It's just thinking

I'd argue that chess similarly has "useless skills". But learning "useless skills" is one of the most important things you can do for yourself to learn "useful skills".

Not everything has to be an absolute competition-or-not. For the same reason you can enjoy a casual game of chess with a friend, you can enjoy a casual game of some RTS. Helps that there are a lot of open source RTS communities that each have their own skills-emphasis.

> Chess only teaches two general lessons about strategy: look more than one step ahead, and invent heuristics

That is true for an engine.

Meta-games around studying your opponent, specific match preparation and all those game theoretic stuff are so pervasive people claim they are 'killing' chess at top levels. Anyway, for humans, chess at high levels of mastery is a striking display of bootstrapping some insane cognitive machinery around memory, processing speed, 'expanding' working memory via understanding:

[0] Alekhine blindfold simultaneous vs 32 opponents: https://www.blindfoldchess.net/assets/images/alekhine-excerp...

[1] Reingold, Charness, Pomplun & Stampe (2001), "Visual Span in Expert Chess Players": https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11294228/

[2] Connors, Burns & Campitelli (2011), "Expertise in Complex Decision Making: The Role of Search in Chess 70 Years After de Groot": https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1551-6709...

"Only teaches two useful lessons" seems a little certain.

Off the top of my head I can think of a number - the value of diversity and the contextual power of capabilities such as the power of weaker pieces used diligently, and the power of counterintuitive sacrifices.

Chess also makes no accommodation for your fantasies and ego. There is no luck, only skill.

There is also much to be garnered from the layered complexity of strategy, where some strategies will take you to a certain level of play that need to be completely replaced or expanded with nuance to reach a higher level.

There are many lessons to be learned from chess.

That said, I would not recommend anyone become good at chess to get good at life.

You can play Diplomacy for that.

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