Why are the Russians so good at chess?
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You'd have same approach with sports, ballet, or even high-school level contests in natural science. If there'd existed a world-renowned competition in crosswords, rest assured USSR would have had a nation-wide network of crosswording schools that would've enlisted talented kids at age of 5, three state-approved categories of crossword-manship (and one for juniors) and crossword solving discretely featured in every third motion picture.
But I digress. If you ever got to being a candidate for, say, a national senior-school physics competition, you'd be transferred to region's best teachers. They would train you like a circus dog, showing you the tricks and running you through hundreds of assignments encountered in previous years, with no focus on the essence of physics. Granted you'd know a lot about pulleys and levers and displacement, but it wouldn't make you any good physicist.
This is not a bad thing. It is completely the opposite to some Western ideals to ensure that everyone gets the same (bad) education. I think that the motto for a lot of guys on the left is that if everyone is kept behind no-one loses.
What is incredibly interesting to note is that Russia and several eastern bloc countries perform better than the USA in math (school age – according to OECD TIMMS test). Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trends_in_International_Mathema...
This is quite shocking since the USA spends a lot more on education and is a few times richer.
> Granted you'd know a lot about pulleys and levers and displacement, but it wouldn't make you any good physicist.
In all fairness, the USSR did produce quite a few excellent physicists. Per capita it probably outranks the USA for Nobel Prize winners in Physics.
School education is not a good predictor of future performance. I would venture to say that above some (fairly modest) threshold of quality, the difference in schooling is irrelevant.
> What is incredibly interesting to note is that Russia and several eastern bloc countries perform better than the USA in math (school age – according to OECD TIMMS test).
This is not what made the great Russian mathematicians though. You don't get feynmanns and turings by locking up kids to solve monotonous puzzles.
> In all fairness, the USSR did produce quite a few excellent physicists. Per capita it probably outranks the USA for Nobel Prize winners in Physics.
Of course it doesn't. Even the UK is way ahead of USSR on that metric.
There were plenty of great Soviet physicists and champions in other sciences, but bear in mind that at least half of them were product of pre-Soviet, imperial school system.
I beg to differ. School performance in mathematics and science directly impacts on the careers of people. A good example is engineering – it is pretty difficult for someone to study engineering without a good and solid mathematical foundation.
> Of course it doesn't. Even the UK is way ahead of USSR on that metric.
The UK and the USA is per capita twice to three times as rich as Russia/USSR. Britain also has the advantage of drawing out all of the brains out of the Commonwealth. A large percentage of American PhDs came from Europe (either Jews who fled or Germans who came afterwards). A lot of them were not educated in the USA.
I would venture that the Soviet Union/Russia’s scientific accomplishments is pretty spectacular for when all is taken into account.
Being one of such people, this is not entirely accurate.
For one thing, there is no practice of transferring students to best teachers, you have to want it get into the better schools. Another thing is that the best teachers are precisely the people who understand and will show you the essence of physics (or whatever your subject is).
Yes, a lot of time is devoted to competitions with repetitive problem set (the olympiads). But then, lots of time is devoted to non-competition topics. There are also competitions with open problems which require lots of imagination and original research on your part (e.g. ТЮФ, ТРИЗ and МАН for those who know). Some of the better schools require each student to complete a research project in his subject of choice.
My point here is that "circus dog training" is not at all correct.
Merim Bilalić's team did an extensive study that was published by the Royal Society to find out why there are so few strong female chess players. Their study concluded it was purely statistics, less female players overall meant that there were less female outliers (i.e great players).
I imagine something similar is at play here.
In the SU the chess players enjoyed privileges unavailable to the general population, e.g., they could travel abroad (at least as long as they were winning, I read that Taimanov had his passport confiscated after losing to Fischer in the Candidates Match.) They also were favored at the higher education institutions, i.e., as a successful chess player you didn't have to study much to pass and get a degree.
As an aside, I heard from a guy who knew David Bronstein personally that Bronstein could have easily won the World Championship from Botvinnik in 1951, but it was made clear to him that it was considered undesirable for a Jewish player to beat Botvinnik. Bronstein according to my friend was a broken man after that, became excessively extravagant and never played with the same strength again.
Also, terrible mistakes aren't unheard of in this level of play - I remember an account of the Karpov/Korchnoi match mentioning a few. The pressure in such a high level match is intense. Remember, no one has a day to analyze their next move. One player seals their move and it isn't revealed till the next day. True, they each get to think about the position in general but that's harder.
I actually met him in Toronto in 1977.
Further, a quick look at Wikipedia shows that modern Chess as such did not really even exist in the 1700s. Modern Chess theory, based on position and piece value, originated in Europe and the United States in the late 19th century. Chess strength of any sort before that is irrelevant.
So basically, the article is right.
Russia had a strong reputation because strong players from other countries played against Russian players and lost. Have a look at Murray's A History of Chess (1913) it mentions a few accounts of Russia's strong chess abilities significantly pre-dating positional/piece value theory.
In the documentary a guy decides he wants his daughter to become a chess grandmaster, and trains her from a very young age (4 years) for 6 hours a day. The combination of intelligence, aptitude and effort made her one of the first female grandmasters in chess.
If _that_ is the result of dedication, the statistics and genetic factors (if they even exist) must pale in comparison.
There are some people who have a substantial advantage when they start their training and others who could never be grandmasters with any amount of training. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3346580/What-makes-us-...
Blind ideology and little else could lead one to believe that genetic factors don't even exist.
Genetic differences are often overstated by comparing one extreme to another.
Instead, consider the personal limits of any given individual to be the best in strength/physique contests, chess competitions, programming contests, time to run a mile, or playing in the NFL.
The brain is still a physical object, and its development is a mix of genetics and upbringing, just as height and musculature are. The difference is that chess playing abilities isn't so readily visible as bulging muscles are.
Such limits are unknown until the given person puts many, many years of work into a particular goal (often at least five years.) That's because limits are not defined by where one starts, but where one plateaus for multiple years following some kind of improvement over the prior five, ten, fifteen years.
Genetics may help push somebody over a plateau they would otherwise have hit sooner (just as having a good coach, training regimen, knowing one's own body, etc, will help as well). But discovering that one is genetically superior (which, for somebody with a given gift, could simply mean that he or she is able to accomplish something one second faster than somebody else with the same training experience in the entire lives--something hard to duplicate) doesn't displace the years of work it took to reach a point where genetics start to be the limiting factor.
For every person a journalist might say has a gift, there are hundreds of other people with the same level of achievement nobody writes about. There are about 2,000 active NFL players. There are many grandmasters. There are many active runners, swimmers, etc who are comparable to the fastest people of 50 years ago, but are slower than the current world record holders. All of these people have to train hard to get to where they are.
For example: it's possible that somebody on Hacker News has the kind of muscle fibers that speed runners dream of. However, that person would never know they are athletically gifted because they never got to the point where this ability mattered; e.g., their cardiovascular system runs out of gas quickly and they never bothered to keep trying, to see how good they could actually be.
Recap: do genetics matter at differentiating the best from the best? Yes. Are people who are not the best in a particular arena missing those genes they need to be Gary Kasparov, Randy Moss, Wayne Gretzky? Very unlikely. It's more likely they are missing the 5, 10, 15 years of exerted effort at that particular mission.
The best in the world are better than those who have tried to do the same professionally for many years. However, there are hundreds of millions of people out there who could be close to the best, who have not even tried (often, for the sake of a career, family, education.) Genetics are really one of the least important differentiators when comparing a professional (anything) to somebody who is doing something else. Therefore, the genetic argument is very, very weak.
Upbringing differences are even more often overstated by comparing one extreme to another. In fact your entire comment was just that.
>Such limits are unknown until the given person puts many, many years of work into a particular goal (often at least five years.) That's because limits are not defined by where one starts, but where one plateaus for multiple years following some kind of improvement over the prior five, ten, fifteen years.
Genetics aren't some sort of magical limit that appear after pushing yourself hard at some pursuit for a decade. They're another variable, along with training, diet, etc. It's difficult to say what anybody's absolute limits are, but ball-park predictions are possible. And no microcephalic is ever going to be an excellent chess player, regardless of training.
In your example of sprinting, the best in the world was noticed and brought into the sport due to his talents. According to wikipedia, "Upon his entry to William Knibb Memorial High School, Bolt continued to focus on other sports, but his cricket coach noticed Bolt's speed on the pitch and urged him to try track and field events." And then, with less than a decade of serious training, he utterly demolished world records in three different events. Two other points that suggest a large genetic component in his success are that he had only recently started training for the 100 when he broke the world record, and that he was the fastest kid in his school while growing up, even before doing an track and field training.
>For example: it's possible that somebody on Hacker News has the kind of muscle fibers that speed runners dream of. However, that person would never know they are athletically gifted because they never got to the point where this ability mattered;
Muscle fibers are only the least of what goes into running talent. Paraplegics typically have a higher percentage of fast-twitch fibers than sprinters. That noted, the premise that someone on a relatively small site such as this might unknowingly have the same level of natural sprinting abilities as a freak of nature like Bolt is ridiculous. Only if one believed that all hereditary dormant was "dormant" until one trained for decades and that the bobcat's leaping power sprang from its upbringing would that be a sensible hypothesis.
There's a mountain of scientific data demonstrating natural differences in abilities between different people. In order to deny the existence of talent, you'd literally have to throw out the last fifty years of psychology, biology and related life sciences. Sadly, quite a few people are willing to do just that! The fact that there's an argument at all about nature and nurture both contributing greatly to life outcomes makes it clear that the influence of nature is severely underestimated. That Gladwell and others who lack any background in life sciences are getting so much play in the media on this topic only serve as further evidence. Here are some scientific findings on the subject of talent:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-gene-for-...
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/musical-talent-genes-16460.ht...
http://www.thepsychologist.org.uk/blog/11/blogpost.cfm?threa...
There is also something called the g-factor that is a measure of intelligence. A significant amount of research shows that the basis for the g-factor is innate (i.e. due to genetics). It also turns out that this has to do with the physiology of the brain.
A good starting point for papers on this subject is Haier et al. You can find some of his papers at :
http://www.pediatrics.uci.edu/faculty/neurology/haier/haier.... http://web.mac.com/rjhaier/iWeb/Haier/Welcome.html
It is somewhat shocking that intelligence may be an innate factor. This is a fairly controversial topic (even without bringing gender or race into the conversation). But have you thought about the repercussions if intelligence is proven to be innate? A good example would be to classify people with a low intelligence as disabled (with the employment equity and disability aid that comes along with it).
It's only become shocking to people in our culture in the last few decades, since it undermines the Truth that everyone is essentially of equivalent ability, and trying hard is the only reason some are better at some things than others.
With chess-playing aptitude we have indirect evidence of genetics gathered statistically. Can we measure a trait like seratonin to dopamine ratios? Can we measure a physical trait like the size of the brain or the pattern of the folds of the neocortex and statistically associate it with chess aptitude? Not to my knowledge.
So while there may be a statistical and indirect argument to make about chess aptitude and genetics, I think it should be made as such rather than making an argument comparing chess aptitude to something like running where (at this time) we know a lot more about the direct traits involved.
Postulating variations in the human brain is socially off the table, and perhaps this is the best way for it to be. The evidence people are willing accept as absolute proof that human brains are basically equal is weaker by several orders of magnitude than that which would convince them that there is any statistical difference in the brains of any populations.
One indication of this is that people who think that there is no significant statical pattern in variations of human brains never take that thought further toward interesting scientific questions. (For example, why have all groups of humans had the exact same evolutionary pressures on all kinds of intelligence, or why is intelligence seemingly unable to evolve in different directions, given that however you measure it it seems highly, highly heritable as shown by twin studies and other evidence?)
So basically, I'm just a mood to explore really politically incorrect and dangerous ideas, many of which may also be wrong. However, people who explore these ideas are not stupid, and reactions like "duh, it's the society" aren't really warranted. It may be socially irresponsible to think about ideas like this, and I'm agnostic about whether that's so. It quite possibly could be indicative of a very poor political sensibility too (see James Watson, Larry Summers.)
Isn't this like asking why US colleges north of, say, Virginia have so much trouble recruiting top-class college baseball players, such that the College World Series always seems to be "some team from Florida vs some team from Arizona"? Aspiring players of professional baseball prefer to play for teams whose home field thaws out before April.
Of course, the opposite is also true. Great hockey players are more likely to be hail from Russia, Canada, New York, or Massachusetts than from Brazil, Italy, London, or California.
Having said that, mathematics is also taught a lot more than in Europe or USA. When I moved from a Russian school to a European one, math teachers would give me homework that was 3 grades ahead of me. And even then it was English that caused issues more than anything =)
TRAGAC because they teach every kid the country chess in school - identify the gifted - send them to chess camp - identify the more gifted - send them to chess school - keep filtering - concentrate the best of the best into more and more intense training - Botvinnik ran a chess school at the very top that trained both Kasparov, Karpov and Krammnik.
Make sure the talented get their 10,000 hours in with no distractions, like having to have a job.
Easy, peasy.
Ayn Rand wrote an essay on WTRAGAC and she pointed out chess was a very CAPITALISTIC game. Why?
In chess, you own all your own pieces. Just about the only private property in the USSR. No Central Committee or Five Year Plan can tell you how to place your rook. At no time will your rook ever be nationalized by the state just when you need it the most.
Second, only you get to push your pieces. It is NOT collectivized.
Third, you are rewarded for being strong in a non socialist manner. You and the other guy start out with the same number of pieces, soon the stronger player has more. They don't NEED more, being stronger, but, as in life in the West, the rich get richer!
Rand argued that the TRAGAC because they used it to escape an unnatural Socialist system.
Exceptional Ability = Practice + Availability of Time
for Practice
+ Motivation"Traditionally, in grades 7–9 mathematics comprises 2 school subjects, geometry and algebra that are taught in parallel (e.g., 2 hours per week for geometry, and 3 hours for algebra). In the senior school [16-17 years old], also two subjects are taught, geometry and algebra and elements of calculus. In grades 5 and 6 (and in primary school) we have a united course of mathematics."
For comparison, the US high school math curriculum (for students 14-18 years old) is generally algebra, geometry, precalculus/trigonometry and calculus, although students can still graduate with just algebra and geometry.
That said, I don't doubt that there is a cultural and educational emphasis on math in Russia.
Where did you get that from? When I studied in Russia we'd skip grade 4 (don't ask me why!) and most students started 1st grade at the age of 7. Meaning grade 5 really corresponded to grade 4 in other countries.
Belonging to a subculture can be empowering for people who aren't world-class out of the gate like Bobby, but that's only available for a very small minority in cities. Elsewhere, there's little heavy competition or opportunity to evolve.
The US gets it's ass handed to it in international math competitions because math, as with most intellectual endeavors in the US, gets no respect. The news proves everyday that 2/3's of us are clueless about most things that developed in the 20th century.
Many American chess players switch to poker or a different profession.
Edit: it just occurred to me that, since we are talking about "average" and not "median", this may as well be true, if a handful of mathematicians make a gazillion dollars a year. Very senior faculty members in the top research universities in the US are likely to make only $200-500k per year.