Sure, playing chess needs intelligence, dedication, and good chess players are smarter than an average person. But it’s waaaay exaggerated in movies. I’m a math researcher, and in any movie, my department will be full of chess geniuses. But in reality, only about 10% of them even play chess.
Chess is a solved game which is not a fit tool for evaluating intelligence.
Caveat: Solved if you have access to massive compute power and a finely tuned algorithm.
It’s not solved for the average player.
It’s arguably not solved at all. If it were, we would know whether white can always win or whether black can always draw, and that’s still unknown.
Thats not what solved means in this context but chess people are so offended that’s its impossible to ever discuss this so sure whatever.
It’s definitely not solved. Even stockfish has been beaten by more advanced AIs, and there is always the possibility of making even better ones.
Also, humans can’t solve it on their own. With time constraints a human player is unable to make a “perfect” move every time.
Nah in game terms chess is absolutely a solved game. Some meme edge cases do not invalidate that.
[citation needed]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endgame_tablebase#Lomonosov_tablebases
The only argument for “chess is not solved” is because of sheer math number but its a flawed argument as any game with sufficient amount of positions would be considered unsolved.
So for all practical intents and purposes - chess is a solved game but people are too attached to admit it.
I mean, yes. Any game with only a small number of possible moves can be solved with brute force trial and error.
All unsolved games must have a “sufficient amount of positions” that brute force isn’t an option, and enough complexity that there’s not a cute maths trick to solve it despite the number of moves.
Chess is one of these unsolved games.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solving_chess
No, the argument for “chess is not solved” is that unless you can tell me whether or not it is possible for white to force a win, then it is - by definition - not solved.
Again “unsolvable” through sheer amount of positions at the beginning of the game (at its literally solved at 7 pieces) so this is just a cop out because thats boring as fuck. It’s not an interesting game where computational power is the only challenge and not even that much towards the last steps of the game.
This got me wondering about lionising Go in films. I think I need to start a such a movement amongst directors or screen writers.
I’m hilariously bad at chess. I learned the fools gambit and never progressed.
So… disclaimer first! I have played chess but only a year or so; I got into chess during the pandemic and had a peak ELO of ~1600+ on chess.com and 1900+ on Lichess; probably translates to a classical ELO of ~1200 (competition is tough in classical…). Obviously I’m not remotely a good player, but I can hold my ground. I also had to do a neuropsych evaluation recently for mental health reasons, so I spent the last month of my free time looking into research of intelligence (g factor, IQ tests, the disturbing history, etc…) for my own curiosity. So I might have a bit of knowledge on this… but:
For the most part chess is its own unique skills and is unrelated to “smartness”. Nevertheless, I think chess might be related to probably just one or two specific narrow fields of intelligence. Being good at chess requires one to be knowledgeable of various chess openings (memorization, working memory), extremely strong pattern recognition (Magnus Carlsen is really good at this; AlphaZero was literally all pattern recognition due to the way it works), and being able to see 5, 10, or even 15 steps ahead and consider all the rational options (again, working memory)
I just took the WAIS-V test two weeks ago for my psych eval, and they do indeed test for working memory and pattern recognition in specific sub-tasks. However the difference is… IQ tests are never meant to be practiced as they measure a type of “potential” if you may, but chess is all about what you actually play on the board. Sure maybe if ppl were literally just given the rules and had no prior exposure then a smarter person might spot a forced checkmate faster, but ppl do pratice for the game… In fact, the advice people used to give to get better at chess is… to do more puzzles
Sooo… methinks an intelligent person might have a slight edge training themselves to do the above, but there is probably otherwise very little association. After a certain point intelligence itself probably has no influence on chess performance whatsoever, and realistically it’s more about “grit”, or how much time/effort someone puts into the game
Aaand… case in point. Apparently Kasparov went through a 3-day intensive intelligence test, but had a really “spiky” profile that is more commonly seen in neurodivergent individuals; scored really high on some categories and abysmally low on others. I saw this random Reddit post which says that Carlsen scored 115(+1SD) on AGCT (a fairly quick and accurate online test), which is not low but not impressive by any means either. Nakamura allegedly got 102 on Mensa Norway’s trial test, which is not as accurate as AGCT but should be fairly good too; 102 is like dead-average
[odd topic?]
This is from an essay about writers. The author said that you see a lot of architects in movies because it’s a fast and easy way to convey that someone is ‘artistic’ and a bit of a dreamer. It doesn’t matter that real life architects are much more about engineering that artistry; it works for a character.
The same thing with chess, it’s a fast and easy way to present a ‘smart’ character.
Architects or advertising executives. Sometimes lead male is one and lead female is the other.
I think it was one of the writers on Cracked that opined it’s because those are the only jobs screenwriters partially understand. They’re people who pitch ideas to customers, kind of like screenwriters do with scripts. So you get a lot of main characters that have a weirdly large amount of down time, a looming deadline to present an idea for an ad campaign or building to your boss and the three executives your boss is kissing up to. Is it the moment of triumph for our main character, has our main character had a change of heart that he can’t run a greenwashing campaign for ExxonMobile anymore because hippy dippy love interest got to him, and now his previous life is going to fall apart and he’s going to start over as a shop owner in a small town or something…
I’ve noticed that a lot of the women in rom-coms are bakers.
Then you’ve got the Hallmark movie they’ve remade 90,000 times now, where the women are usually some kind of lawyer or executive or something, who travels to a small town likely where she was raised for some contrived reason only to find what she really needs: Some stuffed flannel with designer stubble.
I want that in the next satire. A business card with
Angelina Jolie
Some kind of executive
Or lawyer
on it
I think my top favorite business card simply said
John Doe
Legitimate Businessman
From my experience most smart people learned and played chess at some point but few get the point of memorizing stuff. Especially if they are not good memorizes. Its a great game to teach and play with kids as it does stimulate the mind with the way the pieces move and having to think about the changing board and next move. That being said I was not even aware of en passant until I met a guy in college who actually went to competitions. Heck I rarely could remember how to castle due to how rare it was to get into a position to do so. Really though any type of stimulating activity is helpful. Someone mentioned rubicks cubes and like suduko and crosswords and really any gaming. They all have limitations. I often say crosswords is more about knowing the crossword author than anything else. They all have favorites and biases in their puzzles.
That’s because playing chess doesn’t make you smart it just makes you better at playing chess
Good chess players, though, exhibit some common traits which are shared with “smart people”: the ability to think in abstract terms, and a good memory.
Your success at chess is often based on how far in advance you can plan a game at any point on the board, greatly supplemented by your ability to remember entire games of famous matches. These skills are frequently exhibited by people considered smart. However, as you and OP point out, you have to play, practice, and memorize to get good; merely knowing the rules and being smart doesn’t get you there.
„The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.“
The pared-down nature of chess really puts me off. I’m sure there’s some elegant simplicity in it but I mostly find it dull. I like an element of randomness in my games.
Chess doesn’t feel like a gateway to other, more fun games, and if it’s not a fun game for me, why would I pursue it? I’m fairly sure it doesn’t build skills that translate to anything else.
I also get that there are layers to it, although I’m adding that as apparently that’s not so self-evident as to be taken as read. I can see where the path leads and find it no more appealing than the obnoxiously boring gambling machines in casinos, or Dota2, or athletics. Learn the meta, build an understanding of the underlying concepts in order to be able to build more complex strategies based on a combination of instinctive statistical analysis and assessment of your opponent, etc. etc… I get it, I’m just not interested.
Chess is a logic puzzle that changes as you play it, with the randomness coming from player interaction. If you’re not into solving those kinds of puzzles, you’re probably not going to have fun.
Pretty much the problem. It’s very pure but I find that puts me off rather than draws me in. I kind of have the same problem with Quake 3!
I find that I don’t like full games of chess, but chess.com has these little chess puzzles that highlight the surprising deviousness of the rules that can turn a sure defeat into a swift victory.
They also have an algorithmic engine that will calculate the general effectiveness of each move so you can get instant feedback, which I like.
I guess I need more focus in the things I play, and chess is just too broad as a game.
I’m sure there’s some elegant simplicity in
There is! It can get REALLY cool once you get just a bit inro it.
Chess doesn’t feel like a gateway to other, more fun games, and if it’s not a fun game for me, why would I pursue it? I’m fairly sure it doesn’t build skills that translate to anything else.
If you’ve never learned how to read, then while you’re learning it’s difficult to imagine reading books for fun.
If I don’t enjoy stumbling on pronunciations and having to look up the meaning of words, then how will I ever enjoy books?
Well books aren’t about getting stuck in the pronunciation, you can only really start enjoying reading after you’ve already learned how and the built in rules and patterns are things you understand and can play with.
It’s up to you whether to put in the effort to learn to read, but for someone who hasn’t yet learned to say they “don’t like reading”. Sorry but you havent actually experienced what reading for fun actually is yet.
I really don’t buy this comparison at all. I think a better comparison would be to JRPGs - “it gets fun after 30 hours!” There’s also the presumption that a game like chess must be fun and everyone will definitely enjoy it. I’m really glad you enjoy it, I find it irritating that I don’t. However if the basics of it don’t draw me in, and I see no ancillary value in learning how to play it to a higher level, why would I continue? The world is full of enjoyable diversions and not everything is for everyone. I enjoy playing football (as in soccer) but find watching it to be awful. If I invested enough time I could perhaps find myself engaged enough in the bigger picture, care about the minutia, but why? There’s so many other things I found enjoyable from the outset. Reading included.
I think that’s a much worse comparison tbh.
There’s no presumption that a game like chess must be fun, all I said is that we are unable to objectively judge whether chess is fun or not before we’ve learned the rules and memorized common openings.
However if the basics of it don’t draw me in, and I see no ancillary value in learning how to play it to a higher level, why would I continue?
You shouldn’t. No one’s telling you to do things you don’t like. I’m just saying don’t accuse reading of being “unfun” because you hate learning grammer and punctuation.
If you say “i don’t see the value in chess so it’s not worth it struggling through the unfun part of learning the basics” then we have no issue. See the difference?
It’s the basics you hate. You have no clue how you feel about chess cause you haven’t really played it yet.
If I invested enough time I could perhaps find myself engaged enough in the bigger picture, care about the minutia, but why?
You’re focusing on the wrong question.
If it is possible to invest enough time that it becomes fun, then why are you trying to insist that thing is inherently just unfun.
It’s unfun at the level you’re at, but the next level is a completely different game.
I’m not saying you have to go to the next level, just stop judging it based on the current level.
all I said is that we are unable to objectively judge whether chess is fun or not before we’ve learned the rules and memorized common openings.
At no point did I seek to judge it objectively.
I have played some chess at various points throughout my life. My subjective judgement is that it didn’t grab me, unlike many, many other games. It might well have some divine beauty to it but the subjective barrier to entry is far too high. I also don’t bother with TV shows that “get good in the second season” or endure multiple chapters of tedium before bailing on a book.
I’m just saying don’t accuse reading of being “unfun” because you hate learning grammer and punctuation.
You’re now putting words in my mouth.
At what point did I state anything other than a subjective opinion?
In fact I went out of my way to make it abundantly clear that these are my opinions and not a judgement on the game as a whole.
It’s unfun at the level you’re at, but the next level is a completely different game. I’m not saying you have to go to the next level, just stop judging it based on the current level.
If this thread is anything to go by, I wish I’d played even less chess than I already have. Sorry that I’m enjoying my hobbies wrong?
I have not enjoyed my limited experiences with chess. They have turned me off pursuing it further. The same is not true of many other games I’ve played. To me that makes chess subjectively worse than those other games.
At no point did I seek to judge it objectively.
That was exactly the reason for my response. :)
Your subjective opinion that “chess is unfun for you” ignores the objective lack of knowledge of what chess even is. I believe something is unfun for you, I just disagree that it’s the game of chess you’re describing.
What you are calling “chess” here is the basics. It’s not the game Magnus Carlson plays.
I have played some chess at various points throughout my life. My subjective judgement is that it didn’t grab me, unlike many, many other games. It might well have some divine beauty to it but the subjective barrier to entry is far too high. I also don’t bother with TV shows that “get good in the second season” or endure multiple chapters of tedium before bailing on a book.
Fair!
Once again I’m not here to convince you to play it or that it even would be fun if you did. Watch and play what you want. Just also recognize everything has a learning curve and that it is an error to misattribute frustrations in general along the learning curve with frustrstion towards the actual thing once it’s been learnt.
You’re now putting words in my mouth.
At what point did I state anything other than a subjective opinion?
“Chess doesn’t feel like a gateway to other, more fun games, and if it’s not a fun game for me, why would I pursue it?”
Right in here. You don’t actually know if it’s a fun game for you or not. You just know it’s unfun to learn at your current level and don’t see it getting more fun any time soon to he worth sticking with.
Happens to me with countless games and hobbies. I used the book analogy to explain how someone learning to pronounce and sound out words complaining that “reading isn’t fun for me” isn’t actually complaining about reading, they’re complaining about learning to read. Those are different things.
In fact I went out of my way to make it abundantly clear that these are my opinions and not a judgement on the game as a whole.
You did. But there’s an objectiveness hidden in the subjective opinion.
As an analogy, if I saw a child in a burning building I could say as a subjective opinion “I will save that child”.
The problem is under pressure and actual flames of a fire, I can’t know how I would act. Maybe I’d panic and wouldn’t actually be able to do it, or maybe some switch would go off and I’d rush in.
The point is I don’t know because I’ve never been in that emergency situation. I’m unqualified to make subjective statements about how I’d react to completely unfamiliar states of mind.
Maybe chess is unfun for you, maybe it’s not. Insert ANY hobby in that statement, it’s not about chess specifically.
Until you’ve learned the thing you can’t even make subjective statements about yourself and how you’d act with knowledge you DONT HAVE.
If this thread is anything to go by, I wish I’d played even less chess than I already have. Sorry that I’m enjoying my hobbies wrong?
Why are apologizing lol?
You aren’t enjoying your hobbies wrong, I just think you’re thinking about them in the wrong way.
I think you mean “X is unfun to learn” instead of “X is unfun”.
I think you admitted you don’t know enough about X to say if it’s fun one way or the other.
I have not enjoyed my limited experiences with chess. They have turned me off pursuing it further. The same is not true of many other games I’ve played. To me that makes chess subjectively worse than those other games.
That’s okay I guess.
I could spend a few hours with no tutorial failing to learn Dwarf Fortress and just conclude the game is unfun and live my life that way perfectly fine.
Does it actually mean the games unfun for me? No, of course. It just means I’m preventing myself from giving a chance to things I misjudged.
What I played was called chess, followed the rules of chess, and seemed to be chess. I didn’t like it.
Building an opinion around the game I actually played rather than some hypothetical higher level game feels like an extremely reasonable approach to me. I’m sorry that you feel it’s not, I guess.
I understand you didnt like it haha. That was never unclear.
But why do you keep feeling the need to apologize to me? Don’t self flagellate, just state what you believe without worrying about upsetting me, this is just about understanding a concept. Theres no emotion here. I think you are almost there and actually nailed the point you’re just missing the nuance.
This is perfectly on the money here
Building an opinion around the game I actually played rather than some hypothetical higher level game feels like an extremely reasonable approach to me.
Fully correct. Build your opinion around the game you actually played, which unspoken but importantly in that implies you should leave room for potential different opinions on the game you haven’t gotten to yet.
When a little kid says “I hate math” we don’t want to take that as inate truth about them, it probably has more to do with their boring math teacher.
Get them into Minecraft, if they’re into sports get them into learning stats for their favorite players.
I am super passionate about learning and what I’ve learned about the human brain is all it takes is for the right mindset and sometimes a thing just clicks. Not always, but trying to leave room for the myself I could grow into is a huge part of growth in general as a human.
You at 40 is not you at 30 which isn’t you at 20. Accept my advice or not, you’ll look back one day and I guarantee you won’t recognize the person you once were.
I’m really at a lose about how what you wrote addresses their analogy. You just say that you don’t buy it and that the basics should draw you in.
Don’t get me wrong. You don’t have to like chess. I don’t particularly like chess, but I know the basics and know that I have to play a lot of games to get to the enjoyable part. In that way, their analogy is apt.
I’m not the guy you’re replying to, but it is a bad analogy since learning to read a language leads to more exciting things, even if you don’t enjoy reading books. You can communicate, do science, watch movies with subs etc. But learning chess does not make you good at anything else. (Tbh, I’m speaking out of my ass here, and will stand corrected if presented with research showing otherwise.)
That’s part of my point. If we were talking about painting then the skills might well be useful for other stuff, but everything I’ve read says that it’s just a game. It doesn’t build other useful skills.
Elon is that you.
If you’re going to throw around an insult like that I’d like to see some working. I find chess boring, I’m not a fucking fascist.
He was ref this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi5ypuLXnVs
Regardless it’s an insult I wouldn’t throw at anyone other than a fascist.
ITT: I don’t play chess. I don’t like chess. Friend play chess, he dumb, I am smart. I agree. You hear of Rubik’s cube?
Your skill at chess is indeed very good at predicting one thing: your chess rating. I have been playing every day for almost 2 years and I take lessons, but I started as an adult after finishing my PhD in actual rocket science and supervising a research lab in that area for 10 years. Consequently, I will never be as good as the 10 year olds playing with coaching since they were 6. I have met exactly one good player through my connections to that lab in 17 years. So here are some perspectives on chess if you played in high school or you “learned how to play in 30 mins and think it’s boring”:
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It’s a game with layers. The first layer is knowing how the pieces move, the second layer is memorizing openings, and the third layer is some basic knowledge of tactics (I.e., forks, skewers, pins, removing the defense, etc etc) and THEN you learn the game. Most people never learn the game unless you went out of your way to do so.
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For reason 1, “good at chess” is a hugely subjective statement. You knew a few people who can beat all your friends? Cool. I was that guy and it took me MONTHS to get to what the chess world calls “intermediate”: 1200-1400 ELO. Your friend is probably rated 700 to 750. You have probably never met more than a handful of good chess players in your life unless you were in a university club or better.
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You do not have to be typically smart to be good at chess, but it doesn’t hurt. Top GMs are sometimes impressively smart or impressively… Uh… susceptible to misinformation cough Kramnik cough. But what they CAN do is master the shit out of board positions, visualization, and prediction.
Case in point, Hikaru Nakamura, arguably world #2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WsEQuoOz-c&t=490
Or you can watch him play blindfolded chess against actual good players, or speedrun 1 minute games winning hundreds in a row while talking about his pineapple shirt. He’s alternatingly pretty entertaining and kind of annoying to listen to.
If you are that kind of smart, the visualization and memory kind, yeah you’re probably going to also be a good chess player. Otherwise, there’s not a lot of traceability that I’ve seen research on.
All that said, this thread is absolutely annoying to see the whole world show up and talk out of their asses about it.
/end rant
Edit:
More Hikaru craziness https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhDYSNbPs_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXDol9GqK64
Completely agree. Just a bunch of people who clearly don’t play the game and know nothing about it talking out of their asses.
IMO you can’t have a serious opinion about the game without having actually played it competitively. If you’re just somebody that’s casually played a couple games with friends and family, your opinion about the game isn’t really relevant.
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Same with rubiks cube
Some of the smartest people I know do the cube
Learning a few chess pro tips will make you better than anyone trying to figure that game out.
The top levels of chess are skill but the bottom is people doing pre-learned openers.
That checks out. I think I beat most of my friends simply because I remember a chess aficionado mentioning the center as being important to hold.
As a child I attended a chess club. There were no lessons. People simply played chess against each other.
I learned less in my entire years there than I did later in life in reading chess tips such as this page.
https://lichess.org/study/y14Z6s3N/A9uqbWxr
Looking back at those games I could recognize ways in which I was beaten by two moves in hindsight. But I had no idea about macro such as controlling the center or moving out the knights early were generally advantageous moves.
I recall some top player saying that he’d deliberately do a really ‘bad’ move at the start of a game and watch his opponents head explode because they’d never seen any top level player do that.
I consider myself reasonably intelligent but I also have ADHD so … I completely suck at chess.
Chess requires dedication, conviction, and patience. Anyone with average intelligence can learn the game to the point of competence in 30 minutes.
It requires much more time to become an expert, or master.
And most people don’t have that much time to expend on it. That’s not something to be ashamed of.
Much of the game of chess, particularly becoming an expert or a master, relies on memorizing every possible move and, then, every possible counter move. Mastery of chess is almost always reliant upon that memorization.
The game itself is not that complex, and most people can learn how to play chess fairly quickly. Much of the apparent wizardry of chest mastery is actually just a sign of excellent memorization of every possible move and it’s possible counter moves.
There’s not a lot of creativity in chess
I think DeGroots work in the 30s and 40s shows otherwise. Grandmasters know rather quickly what they were going to do in general as they orient to the board state. Then they explore a small set of moves and explode them into a few moves into the future and pick the best candidate. Finally, they spend time verifying their selection.
They have good memories, for sure, but for real game states. This is a quote from Herb Simon, an important early researcher in psychology and computer science:
The most extensive work to date on perception in chess is that done by De Groot. In his search for differences between masters and weaker players, de Groot was unable to find any gross differences in the statistics of their thought processes: the number of moves considered, search heuristics, depth of search, and so on. Masters search through about the same number of possibilities as weaker players-perhaps even fewer, almost certainly not more-but they are very good at coming up with the “right” moves for further consideration, whereas weaker players spend considerable time analyzing the consequences of bad moves.
De Groot did, however, find an intriguing difference between masters and weaker players in his short-term memory experiments. Masters showed a remarkable ability to reconstruct a chess position almost perfectly after viewing it for only 5 sec. There was a sharp drop off in this ability for players below the master level. This result could not be attributed to the masters’ generally superior memory ability, for when chess positions were constructed by placing the same numbers of pieces randomly on the board, the masters could then do no better in reconstructing them than weaker players, Hence, the masters appear to be constrained by the same severe short-term memory limits as everyone else, and their superior performance with “meaningful’ positions must lie in their ability to perceive structure in such positions and encode them in chunks.
That makes sense. Here’s a video of Magnus Carlson identifying famous chess positions without seeing that actual pieces in the board and usually knowing what happens next. It’s incredible
Apparently Carlson loses his keys regularly as well. So this type of memory is domain specific.
This couldn’t be further from the truth, and it’s pretty clear you don’t actually play the game. I had no idea this misconception was so common.
Chess is ALL ABOUT creativity and figuring out how to outplay your opponent and secure a win. It’s a game of strategy and tactics, of timing and technique. The way “memorization” works is that players tend to have some number of moves in their opening(s) memorized (typically 5-10, though top players can go to greater depth), at which point they are “out of book” and into the middlegame, which is where the game is actually played using some combination of positional ideas, tactics, and calculation. Many players opt to play less theoretically viable openings (that is, variations that are not quite as good with best play), because it gets their opponent out of book faster. “Novelties” (a move in a variation not previously played by a master/grandmaster in a tournament) are played all of the time, even by grandmasters.
I’d argue that there is a certain kind of creativity in coming up with those moves. But since it’s mostly a solved game now, modern players probably don’t experience it anymore.
A lot of it is bluffing, like in Poker.
If you get to that level, you know all the strategies and moves.
It’s all about tricking someone into making a mistake.
I’m certainly happy to hear that climate change is “solved” now, but that doesn’t really address the problems I raised. Particularly, what is the OP’s opinion on the advancements in green initiatives/goals that Apple has made as discussed in the article?
Do you understand this is discussion about chess?
Sir, this is a Wendy’s
Huh?
Might be an AI Bot?!
If you can’t make sense of your own proposition, repeated to you, then don’t be surprised when nobody else can make sense of it either
Wtf are you talking about? I’m gonna give you the benefit of doubt, and assume that you’re replying to the wrong thread.
You also need a sharp memory. I’m good in math, but terrible in remembering things. I forget terms that I’m actively doing research on, and constantly need to look at notes. (Aside: I work on modular forms, and often write them down as MF in my notes. I have more than once read that aloud as motherfucker, once in front of my advisor. Dude is chill, so it’s fine. But I dread the day it happens during a talk lol.)
Can confirm, my brothers are both very good at chess. One is smart, the other is dumb as rocks
Being skilled at a game has little bearing on your intelligence beyond maybe “above average”. Intelligence is often best reflected in learning speed.