Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

My memory isn't all that great, so I hate to go out on a limb here, but what I think was discussed in GEB was that if shown a sensible board layout that could be reached in real play, the pros could nail it in five seconds, whereas normal people could do only tolerably well in five seconds. Show the pros a nonsense board that could never come up in real play, and the normal people do the same as they did before, but the pros crash and burn. This is meant to show that the mental conception of a board is different between a pro and a novice.

View on HN

I would vouch for this being the correct interpretation, and the parent being quite wrong. It's originally from a study by W.G. Chase and H.A. Simon in 1973, but I can't find the full text free online.

After consulting GEB, I replied to parent with corrections, we're both largely right in point but got some details wrong. The text claims the study comes from Adriaan de Groot in the 1940's, the bibliography refers to a book published in 1965 by Mouton, under the title Thought and Choice in Chess. If you can summarize the other study, I'd love to hear it.

It's not the most scholarly thing in the world, but this Chessbase biography of de Groot suggests that where de Groot measured the distinction between novices and experts, Chase and Simon were the first to measure differences between random positions and game-like positions.

http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=3290

Thank you for the addition, your memory is mostly correct. I drudged out my copy of GEB, first part of Chapter X, and we're both correct. Both groups of players are given a 5-second glance at the board. If the game is a real game, the pros can assemble the board very quickly, and they do make mistakes but they're mistakes that other pros recognize as strategically invariant, while the normal people take longer (accuracy not mentioned). Given a random board, they both perform the same.

The general point is the same: the pros perceive the board differently, because they see the emergent patterns. My contention is that this is the heart of intuition (or at least an important subset of intuition).

Hooray! Everybody's a winner!

Hmm, so this would mean that a normal player sees the game as just a bunch of pieces, whereas a pro looks at the position (strategy, advantages for one player, etc). Well, it would explain some things about pros, but what does this mean when you train with an AI? I mean, yes, you get more experience, but a typical game for a computer is not a typical game for a computer at all. It would be nice to know which AI Magnus Carlsen used to train and compare it's playstyle to that of pros. Maybe his strategy is just different enough to catch people with something they don't expect/know and give him a slight advantage.

This is not really accurate. The strongest chess programs (mostly Rybka, Shredder, and Fritz) are commercially available, and all top grandmasters are using more or less the same ones.

The advantage of training with an AI is that the AI will happily play you for ten or twelve hours a day, from any position you please, without tiring; you can ask it for the evaluation of any position, and it will generally provide an extremely accurate one; it will immediately reveal errors in your calculations and suggest tactical possibilities that few humans would see; and it will play perfect (for small sets of pieces) and near-perfect endgames against you.

Last, but not least, computer chess databases are like nothing available 20 years ago. Chess professionals (and amateurs) have access to all the games they have ever played, hundreds of games played by any potential rival, and hundreds or thousands of games played by IMs and GMs in any potential opening line.

@mqander (for some reason I can't reply directly):

Yeah, you're probably right. I had also forgotten about those chess databases, those are quite powerful. The problem is probably that the last commercial chess AI I used dates from ~1995, when they weren't that smart yet. Or, more accurately, the computers didn't have enough computing power to be strong and at the same time take a reasonable amount of time before playing.

I think the pro did the same as the novice on a random board.

They also misplaced groups of pieces instead individual pieces in meaningful positions.

Make perfect sense with pattern matching, pros obviously think in terms of patterns more than amateurs.

But this is still far from knowing in any significant detail how pro think in patterns.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com