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.

  • Geetnerd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    212·
    23 days ago

    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.

    • ѕєχυαℓ ρσℓутσρє@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
      11·
      23 days ago

      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.)

    • floo@retrolemmy.comEnglish
      11·
      23 days ago

      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

      • TempermentalAnomaly@lemmy.world
        4·
        23 days ago

        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.

        • gt5@lemm.ee
          2·
          23 days ago

          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

          https://youtu.be/J5BnJvhSryc