Chess World Championship 2012: A First Win

"""To evaluate brain activity in players of differing ability, Ognjen Amidzic and colleagues measured so-called gamma-band activity in the brains of 10 grandmasters and 10 amateurs, using a new magnetic imaging technique known as magnetoencephalographic recording. While test subjects played against computers, the researchers studied which parts of their brains experienced gamma-bursts during the five seconds following the computer's move. They found that whereas the amateurs' brains exhibited more gamma-bursts in the medial temporal lobe, grandmasters had more gamma-bursts in their frontal and parietal cortices.

The team proposes that the use of the frontal cortex by the grandmasters�who have memorized thousands of moves� indicates that they recognize known problems and retrieve solutions for them from their memories. Use of the medial temporal lobe by the amateurs, in contrast, suggests that these players are analyzing unknown moves and forming new long-term memories.""" http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=brain-study...

I think what your parent meant is that at some point Chess becomes a glorified dictionary lookup. An exercise in memoization.

Many, but not all board games end up being about memorizing which strategies work and which don't. This is especially true in case of deterministic, turn-based perfect knowledge games. Tic-tac-toe has been solved, period. Checkers has been solved. Chess will be next, because it's next in terms of complexity. Go is also a solvable game, but it will take a while.

I think this is the more true the more rigid (deterministic) a game is. Legos and Minecraft are at the opposite end of the spectrum. They even lack a victory condition, but they're all about making new combinations.

Chess may boost analytical skills and foresight up to a point, but as a war game it has become very abstract and detached from reality. It seems to be inspired by the era of melee combat, specified battlefields and powerful rulers.

I used to play lots of chess, then stopped when I thought the game was taking too much of my time and couldn't give me much more.

Still I think I learned a lot by going to chess tournaments. Most of that you'd probably learn by playing any competitive sport. I transformed from someone who resigned inferior positions easily into a stubborn player who didn't give up. It was a good experience to learn to handle the pressure at tournaments when the time on your clock is running out and there are lots of people around you watching.

Moreover, I find it very interesting who can win when there are many players of the same skill level competing. That's very psychological. Some people are better at it naturally, but it's amazing what you can learn.

I've had a similar experience, in school I got hooked on chess. Having an unfortunate tendency to try to master anything I suck at that I find interesting I dedicated quite a lot of time to learning chess, playing in the swedish masterships and even attending a special high school with chess on the curriculum.

The thing is though with chess (as with anything I'd guess) the first 20% of skill can be really hard to acquire since you need to "get started". The next 60% is usually a challenge that's fun and stimulating. Going beyond that it gets rough (unless youre exceptionally talented). I think chess is especially bad from that aspect, at higher level the amount of pure database knowledge you have to memorize is tremendous and IMO takes some of the fun out the game. Fischer tried to solve this by inventing a version where you randomized the position of the pieces each time. Games like go also seems much better since it's more about skill and intuition than rote memorization.

A big part of becoming great at chess is actually retraining the part of the brain that remembers faces to absorb board positions. I'm not talking about absolute recall , but a grand master has seen so many games that he can "intuit" a board drawing from his experience.

"Good hobbies", IMO, form either new brain connections , improve body coordination or just generally improve mental or physical health. I'd be surprised if learning chess didn't change the brain pathways in some ways that are beneficial but it probably doesn't increase much after a certain skill level. Learning to play an instrument, juggling, snowboarding , meditating, jogging are probably all "better hobbies" quantiatively

Anyways, I realized that while playing at a top level was probably achievable, the effort wasn't worth it. Working with computers and playing chess is a little more sitting down than I'd like in my life and time was better spend moving around and enjoying the company of others :)

I wish I could spend chess "just for fun" but alas it's hard to do at that level. Better to play some of the more clever board games where memorization isn't such a large component and you actually socialize as well

"extremes are bad"

I disagree, a little. Extremes are good, because a bunch of worthwhile things get accomplished by people going to extremes.

As far as personal costs of going to such extremes go - they are difficult to judge objectively, from the outside. A study I recall claimed that elite athletes are "happiest", based on self-assessment, and it further speculates that one reason for this is because they have a clear goal and a clear way to advance it.

>> One would be surprised to learn just how bad some really good Chess players are about other things in life.

Really? Is Chess somehow different from any other activity? My teacher escaped from Kazakhstan simply because he could play Chess really well. Does the fact he chose an activity you have decided you don't like have any bearing on what type of person he is? Of course not.

>>In other words, you need to turn a fun game into a job.

To excel at something, you need to work at it; what is your point?

>> What they have to become in order to play at these levels is, to me, the absolute opposite of what the game felt like when I was a kid.

How would you know? Have you ever played at a high level or known a world champion?

>>In order to become truly competitive in Chess you have to become a human database.

This is demonstratebly false, rote memorization is meaningless in chess. Openings are the LEAST productive element of the game you can spend time on. Only ideas and concepts matter at all. A chess master does not automatically have a greater capacity to memorize than an amateur.

I have never seen a comment of such amazing paternalism directed at any other activity. How does studying music help one in politics or business or even as a lawyer? The answer: Just as much as chess. Simply the self-discipline required to play on such a high level must have some benefit. Even if everything you said was true, so what? Why does one take up activities except to interest herself personally? At least with Chess you are guaranteed to see moves or games of spectacular beauty. It does take time to develop a level of intution where one can recognize such beauty.