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.
People need to stop putting chess on a pedestal. Its a game. General intelligence has no bearing. Its a specific skillset you can hone by practice and research, just like any other game.
It is a super deep game for how simple it is, i think that’s the “genius” part. But remembering openings in chess and their names doesn’t make you a genius, it makes you a genius in chess.
Almost anything where memorization is the primary skill is going to be dominated by people with specific interest, rather than general high intelligence (certainly doesn’t exclude it, but it’s just statistics). Gotta look for something frequently requiring novel problem solving and adaption to filter for high probability of high general intelligence.
Then there’s also a lot of games requiring very narrow intellectual ability. Being able to parse a specific ruleset, or doing a specific kind of math fast, without needing to be able to handle anything novel. You’ll certainly find some “interesting individuals” around those kinds of games.
Being able to parse a specific ruleset, or doing a specific kind of math fast
Oh man, I would love competitive tabletop games, where the goal isn’t to min/max your build, but to min/max your build after being given a brand new system and 45 minutes to read the rules.
Lol, I can relate. My friends are always surprised how good I am at a game when I’m playing for the first time (mostly card games, and board games). But I quickly get bored, so never get to be actually good at any of those.
Same with language. I can pick up a little bit of any language fairly quickly, but to actually learn it, I basically need to be forced e.g. live in a place where most people don’t speak anything else.
Exactly, Chess is Mario Kart.
Anyone can learn how to play Chess. Anyone can learn how to play Mario Kart.
You slap a controller in someone’s hand tell them “A” is go and they can play Mario Kart. Sure they have to learn the track, where to collect power ups, where the shortcuts are, and eventually they have to learn about and master drifting.
But being a genius in Mario Kart doesn’t make you a genius. No heist movie ever said, “And this genius over here? They scored first place in 200cc Special Cup.”
Would be hilarious if Hollywood moved away from chess to show someone being smart and instead showed them yelling at teammates in League of Legends.
Chess is mostly a memorisation game for gambits / openers and subsequent sets of follow-on moves.
After that, it’s mentally simulating the board state a few moves ahead, varying pieces and guesstimating probability of what move the opponent will make. A lot of that you start to memorise, especially since other chess enthusiasts will often play well-known gambits / strategies.
Intelligence often correlates with memory but they’re not one and the same. I grew up knowing a competitive chess player and remember the time they referred to their “hambag” (handbag). English was their mother tongue…
“Ah ha! I see you’ve played the Frenchman’s Cumsock. I will have checkmate in 4 moves!”
Wait, my hand is still on the piece… I… have … not… completed… my… move
“I understood that reference”
KOLANAKI
Yeah I was sorta interested in pursuing Chess more at least as a hobby a few years ago. Learning about the ‘meta’ strategy was kind of intimidating and discouraging. The basic strategy is interesting to me but learning and memorizing different games just sounds awful to me. I guess it’s like most things - the more you learn about it the more you realize there is a lot more to it than what you initially thought it was.
I have a mishmash dialect as we moved around a lot when I was a child; very rural, too. I’ll say “hambag” and “ain’t” and “me an’ this guy” and my sister says “ambliance”, but we spell it all correctly.
Did your chess expert know the spelling and say it wrongly, or was there confusion about the spelling too?
They thought it was because the leather was from a pig…
I think it’s a good name if it’s a pigskin bag. Gonna start calling my wife’s bag that now. Most of her other bags are nylon or whatever, but on she’s had for 20 years is some kind of leather.
Ain’t ain’t a non-word. I’ll fight anybody who says otherwise.
The person who taught me chess was constantly perplexed by my bizarre tactics. He found it refreshing and interesting. Obviously, I had no idea what I was doing, and I got nuked to oblivion on a regular basis. Maybe he was expecting to see some popular moves, but was only faced with whatever sketchy tactics I could come up with.
Disclaimer: not calling myself smart or anything.
I always found chess boring, for some reason. Like, not because it is too complex, but because it isn’t complex enough, in a way. As an example, the first time I tried my hand at Medieval II: Total War, I fell in love with all things strategy.
I still can’t do chess, though… It’s like my mind goes to its happy place halfway through a match and I start making moves just to progress the game and be done with it. Gimme a 4X game, and I’d need reminders to pee every 12 hours.
Well there is not a lot of action going on in a chess game and you are a lot of patience, I guess that makes it feel boring for you.
Honestly, I don’t think the action’s the problem, I enjoyed creating interlinked databases with tens of thousands of entries in Spreadsheets. I think it’s strictly to do with the complexity itself, I need more. I like the concept of every piece having a specific move set, I’d just need more of them. And add more complexity to them, but at that point may as well just play grand scale combat games, like 40k.
Edit: plus, to be honest, this lack of complexity doesn’t even let me properly enjoy a victory. Maybe it has some fetishistic tinges at this point, but a protracted victory is so much sweeter, make me feel like I pulled my brain through high intensity training for a couple of hours. Either that, or something which can start acting as a reflex, like backgammon.
I dont play a lot of chess and I’m bad at it but I recommend playing chess puzzles or timed chess. If it helps, just think of it as a mini skermish on one area of the “map”.
While there is competitive chess, I think the advantage it has over most things is that many people know how to play and that most of the time its a casual background game. Like you aren’t trying to win, you are trying to not lose.
When someone is playing at a house party, it’s so much fun to make wierd faces after they played a move or so.
Yeah I always laugh when movies or TV portrait a character being good at strategy by depicting them being good at chess. Those two have zero relation. Total war on the other hand, get good at that and you’re cracked at strategy
In my teenage years I really tried to master it well. I score relatively high in chess.com and lichess but I share your sentiment. If you are a chess master it doesnt mean you are super smart it means you are super good at chess.
Science confirms this in a way. Prof Andrew Huberman has a podcast episode about games in general and their effect the brain development and the takeaways:
- Games can help the brain development according to publications because of the different experiences that you will never have irl
- The positive impact was only noticed when you play a variety of games under different setups and not when you master a single game and play it a lot
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.
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.)
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
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.
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?
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.
There’s also a similar trope with the Rubiks Cube.
Bonus points is when there’s a game theory department in a movie. Then they all will be masters in any game.
Lol. Just in case someone finds it useful, the math of game theory has very little to do with games.
I remember Crazy Rich Asians was a great offender of this. The main character is a teacher in game theory, which naturally makes her great at any game (which also becomes an important plot point later in the movie).
One of the daftest people I ever met managed to beat 3 of us at once at chess. Would routinely kick my ass every time and it wasn’t even close.
The kind of person who absolutely would have injected bleach to cure covid.
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.
Folk always seem to underestimate the effect of training and experience. In a match between two unpracticed players, sure, the more analytically inclined of the two will have an edge. This is true of any game with a strategic component. General intelligence helps but specialist knowledge is better.
„The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.“
More about interest than intelligence, honestly.
That’s because playing chess doesn’t make you smart it just makes you better at playing chess
Can confirm, my brothers are both very good at chess. One is smart, the other is dumb as rocks
Same with rubiks cube
Guess I’ll start with the same disclaimer: I don’t think I’m too smart for chess or anything.
I always thought chess is kinda boring. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fun enough as a novice. It’s probably also fun for people who mastered it, I’m not denying that.
However, for everything inbetween, it’s mostly about memorizing stuff. You just learn hundreds of openings and how to counter them. From what I’ve seen, a lot of intermediate players fall apart once they go off-script. It takes years until you’re good enough to strategize properly on your own, like a novice would, without some going “That’s the ‘double helix chin twister’” and beating you.
It’s kinda like the problem multiplayer games often have for me. There’s a set meta and you either learn it or lose. To experiment yourself successfully, you have to invest a massive amount of time. Experimenting myself is the fun part. I’m don’t want to invest hundreds if not thousands of hours before I get to have fun.
I largely don’t agree with this, I played chess (Battle Chess) as a kid, I wasnt the best at chess but I had fun. I hadn’t played it in over 15+ years.
My coworker plays chess on a regular basis, against other players and against the computer at 1,700. He knows quite a few strategies that I never bothered to ask what they entailed, which is a part of your point, but I just play off of the moves I see on the board, I don’t know any technical moves or strategies other than checkmate the king, castling, and en passant.
I literally wing it every time and my opponent is always thinking about future moves to try and destroy me. Our matches include blunders and typically end up with only a couple pieces left on the board. Its such a fun experience when it’s played without expectation and you’re relying on pure personal strategy in real time.
I’ve won twice In a row now. Its usually back and forth
Yeah… everytime I see it in movies I kinda cringe. However it still is an effective narrative tool to say that the person is a stategist or is in a higher tax bracket ( or honestly any quality that the common viewer doesn’t have). Even so, I wish writers would stop doing this.
