Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Learning Chess at 40

nautil.us

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 104 posts

Re: Learning Chess at 40

#11

Post by keiferski »

Probably the most interesting example of someone pursuing chess later in life is that of Marcel Duchamp, the famous Cubist artist. He grew up playing chess for fun, but at age 36 he basically stopped making art and started pursuing chess full-time.

"I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art—and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position."

"The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem. ... I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Duchamp#Transition_from...

Re: Learning Chess at 40

#12

Post by lordnacho »

danielvf wrote: post #2

I'm learning the game of Go at near fourty. But I'm not having any of the problems he describes. A great thing about learning and playing online is that you can find an opponent at your same skill level within minutes. Unlike learning in a local club, where every person you will ever play beats you every time, I win slightly more than half my games. I also get this nice increasing graph of my skill level. This is a l…

I wish physical sports were like this. Anything online is blessed with this mechanic where you can keep it challenging for everyone other than the people at the top or bottom (based on my experience in CoD where I'm pretty sure I'm bottom).

With sports like soccer it's quite noticeable that some people are way better than everyone else, or way worse. And there's no way to improve since you can't just rearrange thousands of teams.

Re: Learning Chess at 40

#14

Post by mathattack »

I'm a parent in a similar situation. I'm ahead of my young child, but I think my days are numbered. I've improved since we both started getting interested, but my ramp is slower. (In part because he has classes, and I don't)

Perhaps with this in mind, I found the interesting context of the story more about the parent-child relationship, than learning beyond a certain age. It is very easy to mis-balance the roles of parent, coach and competitor. In the last line, the author captured this very clearly.

Re: Learning Chess at 40

#15

Post by chongli »

diogofranco wrote: post #8
pitchka wrote: post #3

The research on young and successful isn't really showing any causation. Maybe being young and concentrating on a single thing makes you more obsessed about it? So you end up spending a lot of time on just it. Maybe the older you get the less obsessed you can be, having the interest spread around on family, work, and other thoughts? Maybe accumulated knowledge makes you slower at learning and playing because you're m…

That would mean that all the GM's very well documented decline after 35 has to with lack of obsession at that age, which seems a rather strong claim. Maybe amateurs learning at different ages is a different phenomena than the top competitors decline, but the research showing the decline of professionals is certainly not weird, and probably not even research, since they are easy to lookup facts.

Not all GMs decline immediately after 35. Anand is 46 and still right at the top. His peak rating came at age 41 and he held on to his world champion title until age 43 (when he lost to Carlsen).

Re: Learning Chess at 40

#16

Post by lordnacho »

EliRivers wrote: post #7
pitchka wrote: post #3

The research on young and successful isn't really showing any causation. Maybe being young and concentrating on a single thing makes you more obsessed about it? So you end up spending a lot of time on just it. Maybe the older you get the less obsessed you can be, having the interest spread around on family, work, and other thoughts? Maybe accumulated knowledge makes you slower at learning and playing because you're m…

"As I've got older I felt I learned stuff much more quickly than when I started college." Drifting into a personal monologue, I know I am a lot better at learning now than I was 15 years ago. Learning advanced mathematics now is much easier than it was then (measured in the rather subjective unit of "amount learned / time taken"). Languages also are much easier. The only difference is the amount of time I put in now…

Same here. Machine learning wasn't in vogue when I graduated, but now I'm actually able to help my younger brother through the last courses in college. Quite surprising, because I'd have sworn when I was that age it would take weeks to understand something like Random Forest.

I reckon part of the reason is that when there's no pressure on you, you can explore around a question (how do you classify this particular thing...) rather than try to steer right towards the answer as fast as possible. Which isn't actually as fast as when you read around.

Re: Learning Chess at 40

#17

Post by vijayr »

keiferski wrote: post #11

Probably the most interesting example of someone pursuing chess later in life is that of Marcel Duchamp, the famous Cubist artist. He grew up playing chess for fun, but at age 36 he basically stopped making art and started pursuing chess full-time. "I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art—and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position." "The chess pi…

During this period his fascination with chess so distressed his first wife that she glued his pieces to the board.
Post reply on HN