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Comment by RangerScience | Hacker News Reader

> else we'd all spend five hours on each move. Chess is about bounded rationality

Without any other tools (as in, pencil and paper to note conclusions), do you really think you could make a more effective move given five hours?

I mean - if the conclusion of the study is actually that use of drugs gave players a larger personal time bounds within which to think up a move, that's still significant.

I don't know about you, but my #1 blocker for productivity is how long I can actually concentrate on something. If a drug lets me focus for 10% longer, even if it doesn't improve my capabilities while focusing, that's still huge.

Edit: But you're not wrong, it does stink of p-value hunting. On the other hand, if your experiment is expecting one correlation, and instead you find another... then the p-value hunting was the correct move...?

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There are certainly players who could make a much better move given five hours in a highly complex position (not every move--you'd be hitting sleep deprivation by move 3!). It's not unheard of for grandmasters to spend an hour of clock time on one move, and I bet you money that same player would sometimes go to 2 or 3 hours if they weren't on the clock.

As to visualization without pen and paper, the best blindfold players can keep track of a whole board in their mind, and explore variations deeply without losing track of the current state of the board or forgetting about the key variations they found along the way.

It sounds like you're into chess more than me, so I'm sure you know most of this stuff, I'm just noting it for other people in the thread.

"do you really think you could make a more effective move given five hours?"

I play on chess.com from time to time and I perform much better in games where I have a few days to make a move vs games that are played live with a timer. So for me, absolutely, if I have time to analyze I will almost always make a stronger move. I don't need to write down conclusions, I can just stare at it longer.

There are some kind of matches that take more than that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correspondence_chess

I know you've said "other tools" (like miniboards) but even in your head, more time is an advantage.

Edit: I wouldn't play a match with five hours time, not even for the whole game. I take that "five hours" was hyperbole.

> On the other hand, if your experiment is expecting one correlation, and instead you find another... then the p-value hunting was the correct move...?

at best you'd have to make corrections to your p values to account for the fact you're conducting multiple tests. those corrections weaken the results. (i did not check this paper to see if they did the corrections.)

Yes I could definitely make a more effective move in five hours than in four hours.

But the study we are talking about didn't give their players anything near such time, only rapid chess was played, where each player gets 15 minutes for the entire game. In rapid chess, time management is a crucial part of the game so it is very strange that they decided to eliminate games where a player ran out of time.

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