The Immortal Game Page 11
An actual chess position (left) used in the 1890s Binet study, alongside a hand-drawn rendering by the master player Stanislaus Sittenfeld of how, with eyes closed, he pictured the position in his mind.
The intricate chess positions, it turned out, were not stored in chess masters’ brains as distinct photolike snapshots, but as a more abstract set of integrated patterns—like a musician’s chords or a computer programmer’s code. What looked like a chaotic field of data to the nonexpert was to the expert a coherent, meaningful song. “I grasp it as a musician grasps harmony in his orchestra,” offered French master Alphonse Goetz. “I am often carried to sum up the character of a position in a general epithet…it strikes you as simple and familiar, or as original, exciting and suggestive.”
In the mind of Goetz and the other chess masters, each portion of every game triggered impressions, feelings, and observations as meaningful to them as pieces of a car engine are to a mechanic, or as cloud formations are to a meteorologist. In these players’ minds, there were no sterile boards or carved wooden chess figurines—only evocative configurations that were familiar or somehow resonant. Ultimately, it wasn’t even the chess positions themselves that they were warehousing so much as the impressions they sparked. “It is the multitude of suggestions and ideas emanating from a game,” concluded Binet, “which makes it interesting and establishes it in memory.”
This insight was not inconsistent with long-standing visual notions of memory, but it provided a key clarification: visual memory operated not by recording a multitude of snapshots, but by encoding information in a meaningful context. It turned out that mnemonics was not so much visual as it was meaningful. Great chess players, then, were not simply finely tuned camera-computers, adept at acquiring and processing visual data with superlative efficiency. Rather, Binet’s study proved their craft to be supremely human—a combination of resonant feelings, meaningful experiences, and rich memories. Studying chess memory proved that abstract thought and memory were fully entangled with human feeling.
A further surprising revelation of the Binet chess study was the degree to which photographiclike recall of visuals could actually hamper visual memory. “Some part of every chess game is played blindfold,” explained leading German player Siegbert Tarrasch in a letter to Binet explaining his thought process. “The sight of the chessman frequently upsets one’s calculations.” This comment echoed the sentiment of other top players. What they remembered was not a tactile reproduction of the pieces on the board, but rather an abstract sense of each piece’s properties and movement. In fact, it was the mediocre players striving to recall actual pieces on a board who inevitably fell short. Binet’s photographic theory had not only been wrong; the truth was quite the opposite.
Binet’s observations marked the first stage in a century-long effort by scores of psychologists and cognitive scientists to understand how great chess players think—and to incorporate those lessons into other areas of cognition research. Justifiably proud of his pioneering discovery, Binet was also humbled at the study’s conclusion by how much more there was to understand about memory and thought. “Though we search and examine in the most minute details,” he wrote, “we cannot comprehend with precision the complexity of intellectual activity.”
He was impressed, too, by the degree to which chess turned out to be a model for the mind’s intricacy. “The blindfold [chess] game,” Binet observed, “contains everything: power of concentration, scholarship, visual memory, not to mention strategic talent, patience, courage, and many other faculties. If one could see what goes on in a chess player’s head, one would find a stirring world of sensations, images, movements, passions and an ever changing panorama of states of consciousness. By comparison with these our most attentive descriptions are but grossly simplified schemata.”
Binet’s original hypothesis might have been wrong, but his insight of chess as a powerful lens into the workings of the mind was astoundingly prescient. In fact, it gave birth to a century of chess investigation that would substantially help rewrite our understanding of the human mind. In the ensuing few decades, a few researchers followed up on Binet’s important work. But it wasn’t until 1946 that Dutch psychologist (and master chess player) Adriaan de Groot picked up where Alfred Binet had left off fifty years earlier. De Groot published a study called Thought and Choice in Chess, which investigated the skills, speed, style, and articulation of four separate skill levels of the chess player—from grandmasters to ordinary club players. Among his conclusions, de Groot startled the cognitive world with the observation that great players did not actually calculate significantly more or faster than lesser players. They also did not have better memories for raw data. Instead, they recognized more patterns more quickly, so as to make more relevant calculations and therefore better decisions.
With his work, de Groot helped to invent a new field of study—cognitive science—that aimed to systematize and deconstruct the thought process. Cognitive science was created by members of older, more established disciplines—psychology, neurology, linguistics, sociology, and anthropology. It was inherently interdisciplinary, a recognition that better understanding of the mind could be gained only through a steady dialogue among experts from these disparate fields. Chess was considered an essential tool of the new field, allowing researchers to study how the mind works as a machine, combining memory, logic, calculation, and creativity.
In 1973 Carnegie Mellon psychologists William Chase and Herbert Simon published two landmark works that built on de Groot’s chess work and that introduced one of the most important cognitive concepts in the twentieth century: a new understanding of memory called “chunking.”
Chunking is a memory technique used by all human beings to convert a collection of details into a single memory. Phone numbers, for example, are stored not as ten separate numbers but in three easy chunks: 513-555-9144. Remembering ten unrelated items in the right order is difficult; remembering three is no problem. The same technique applies to reading words, music, or any other complex array of symbols—including chess positions.
Chess, in fact, helped Chase and Simon formulate their theory in the first place. In their experiment they assembled three groups of chess players: masters (among the top twenty-five players in the nation); experienced players (ranked in the eighty-fifth percentile); and novices (who had spent little or no time studying the game). Each group was asked to:
1. Reproduce a particular board position after viewing it for five seconds.
2. Study an entire twenty-five-move chess game and recall a series of different positions from the game.
Based on their reading of de Groot’s work, Chase and Simon hypothesized that chess skill depended largely on what players already knew—as opposed to how much new data they could remember. The data fit the hypothesis. Superior players did not have intrinsically faster or better memory skills, but their vastly deeper, broader, and better-organized store of chess knowledge allowed them to recognize patterns faster and to form chunks quicker and more reliably. Their brains were not necessarily any faster than other brains; through much work, they had tuned them to be more efficient.
Chunking was a landmark discovery, one of those ideas so brilliant it immediately seemed obvious. But for cognitive scientists working with chess, it was only just the beginning. Chase and Simon declared chess to be the drosophila, or fruit fly, of cognitive psychology. Just as the fruit fly was the ideal laboratory model for heredity—the right genetic complexity, quick to reproduce, physical traits easily manipulated by genetic tinkering—so chess was for the study of the human mind. Its attributes were particularly suitable for scientists seeking to unlock questions about decision making, attention, and consciousness.
Others have since concurred. “Just as biologists need model organisms to explore genetics,” writes the University of Waterloo’s Neil Charness, “so too do cognitive scientists need model task environments to study adaptive cognitive mechanisms. Chess playing provides a rich task
environment that taps many cognitive processes, ranging from perception, to memory, to problem solving.” In a 1992 study, Charness exhaustively reviewed chess’s impact on the field. The list of contributions was overwhelming. Among other areas, chess had shone light on the superiority of internal over external motivation; on the role of emotions in problem solving; on which parts of the brain are activated in spatial thought; on the physical maturation of brain components; and on the effects of aging on problem solving, memory, and perception.
One observation seemed to stand out. Cognitive chess research punctured the long-standing myth of the chess prodigy, the born genius—and in doing so, it contributed to one of the great ongoing discussions of our time: How great minds are formed. “One of the important points that chess research has made since its inception,” concludes Charness, “is that chess experts are made, not born.”
We’ve all heard the story in one version or another: A young child wanders into view of some chess play in progress, watches silently through a few games, and then asks or is invited to play. It’s all in good fun, the adults happy to take a break from mind-stretching play and to encourage the child’s tiptoe into the world of grownup games. Then the puppy-dog glances and condescending quips suddenly vanish as the child neophyte effortlessly checkmates the adult. Eyes widen. What the—? That must have been a lark. The board is quickly reset to the starting position, and the child repeats the feat. The parents, not even aware that their child knew the rules of chess, are stunned. Their darling but otherwise unremarkable child apparently has some sort of extraordinary talent. Their child is gifted.
Indeed, something special is going on, but not quite what meets the eye. Like related myths about musical prodigies, math prodigies, and seemingly inborn athletic talents like Tiger Woods or Lance Armstrong, the chess genius myth has been around for ages. It is a common feature in biographies of chess legends like François-André Philidor, Paul Morphy, Bobby Fischer, Garry Kasparov, and Josh Waitzkin, the real-life inspiration for the popular movie Searching for Bobby Fischer. As it is popularly understood, these true prodigies are rare and inexplicable—they are, depending on your belief system, either God-given miracles or exquisite accidents of biology. In reality, though, young chess luminaries like Fischer and Waitzkin fit nicely into a much larger spectrum of young chess players—many of whom show promise and keen interest at a very early age and from early on are carefully nurtured, trained into greatness. “He has become a fine player at a very young age,” chessville.com columnist Tom Rose writes about Norwegian wunderkind Magnus Carlsen. “But is that because of exceptional innate talent for chess?”
Maybe not! Imagine yourself in young Magnus’s place. You play in your first tournament aged eight, do well, and get noticed by [a grandmaster] who decides to help teach you. Immediately you believe that you are special, that you have “talent,” that you can really shine. This encourages you to work very hard at this game that gets you such agreeable attention…. [M]ore tournament success and more media attention [encourage] you to work even harder. At first you work at it for 2 or 3 hours a day. By the time you are ten years old it is more like 4 or 5 hours a day….With that kind of early start and support, wouldn’t almost any of us have been a much better player than we are now?
As Rose suggests—and as studies prove—the phenomenon is much less miraculous and much more interesting than commonly portrayed. There’s no question that intelligence and other aptitudes are partly inherited, and that these aptitudes can include specific skills like abstract thinking and perhaps even traits like ambition. But looking closely at genius-level achievement, psychologists have also established that there is an overwhelming correlation between mentoring and practice. The available evidence suggests that nurturing factors can give children an extraordinarily strong incentive to develop certain skills quickly and deeply. “Evidence for the contribution of talent over and above practice has proved extremely elusive,” writes University College of London psychology professor David R. Shanks. In contrast, he says, “evidence is now emerging that exceptional performance in memory, chess, music, sports and other arenas can be fully accounted for on the basis of an age-old adage: practice makes perfect.”
Shanks cites a number of studies that all point in the same direction. In one study, researchers used anonymous surveys to categorize classical music students into one of three different groups according to skill level: (1) superb, (2) highly proficient, and (3) adequate. Then they asked the students how much they had practiced in the past and how much they currently practiced. The responses were remarkably consistent and showed a high correlation with skill level. Cumulatively, the very best players had each practiced roughly ten thousand hours in their lifetimes. The next-best group had each practiced about eight thousand hours; the least proficient group hovered around five thousand hours of cumulative practice. Similar numbers have turned up in studies on chess masters, athletes, writers, and scientists.
None of this means, of course, that these achievers aren’t extraordinary. Quite the contrary. The likelihood that so-called gifted players actually acquire much of their gift on their own adds, rather than subtracts, from the marvel. Bobby Fischer, perhaps the most famous chess prodigy of all time, was far from a chess genius out of the box. After toying with the game for a year, he attended a simultaneous display in 1951, at age seven, and lost very quickly to an expert player. Afterward, Fischer joined a club and studied with ferocity. Six years and thousands of chess hours later, he had a spectacular “breakthrough” at age thirteen and was pronounced a boy wonder.
Perhaps the best-known example of mentored genius comes from Budapest, Hungary. There, in the late 1960s, psychologist Laszlo Polgar embarked on an unusual experiment in order to prove that any healthy baby can be nurtured into a genius: he publicly declared that he would do this with his own children, who were not yet born. He and his wife forged a plan to school their children at home and focus them intensely on a few favorite disciplines—among them chess. From a very early age, the three Polgar daughters, Zsuzsa, Zsófia, and Judit, studied chess for an average of eight to ten hours every day—perhaps a total of some 20,000 hours from age eight to eighteen.
Lo and behold, they all became chess “geniuses.” In 1991, at age twenty-one, Zsuzsa (who later Westernized her name to Susan) became the first woman in history to earn a grandmaster title through qualifying tournaments. The second child, Zsófia, also became a world-class player. Judit, the youngest, became at age fifteen the youngest grandmaster in history (a record previously held by Bobby Fischer), and was considered a strong candidate to eventually become world chess champion. “I remember late one night when Susan was analysing with a trainer, a strong IM [International Master],” recalls computer chess guru Frederic Friedel, a close friend of the Polgar family who visited them often at their home in Budapest. “They reached an endgame and could not figure out how to play it. ‘There is some trick here,’ said the IM. So they woke up Judit and carried the girl into the training room. Judit, still half asleep, showed them the win and was put back into her bed.”
Whether one is seeking the smartest chess move or trying to unlock an age-old scientific riddle, very often the most intelligent move a person can make is to acknowledge ignorance and seek assistance. What people casually refer to as “talent” turns out to be among the most complex subjects known to humankind. Scientists in the twenty-first century are still struggling to understand it. They have already learned enough to know that superb ability in chess or any other realm cannot be ascribed to some simple quirk of biology. Hopefully, with the help of a wide variety of tools, we will soon come to a reasonably coherent answer, and we will spread that answer far and wide in hopes of creating a better and more able world.
THE IMMORTAL GAME
Moves 10 and 11
SO MUCH OF “TALENT,” of course, is in the ambition to succeed. It didn’t take me very long, after I started playing chess again in midlife, to realize that I wouldn’t go very far. A
mong other obstacles, I simply didn’t want it badly enough.
I knew the difference. Early on in life, I was something of a wonder at the violin. At the earliest possible age I was awarded prestigious “superior” ratings for three consecutive years in national competition, and thus earned a prestigious solo performance spot in an honors concert. To a stranger listening to me play in those years, or looking at my gilded and framed certificates, my musicality might have appeared to be an unambiguous “talent”—until one learned the backstory: how, when I first took up the instrument in fourth grade, I practiced it with a ferocious intensity—easily eclipsing every other student in the school and setting a new practice record for my suburban school system. Where exactly I derived this compulsion to get up early in the morning and practice ninety ear-screeching minutes—while my poor father tried to eat breakfast and read the newspaper in peace—I don’t know. I just wanted to do well at it, and that compulsion was self-reinforcing. My parents were naturally encouraging, and my music teacher Mrs. Schneider was ecstatic. She sat me at the front of the orchestra and treated me as one of her favorites for the next five years of our working together. She treated me like a young genius.