Chess Players & Autism Quotient

Hi LoekBergman

I interpreted these questions as the ability to pretend to be an astronaut or a superhero or something like that. The ability to step out of your own identity and imagine how someone else would feel or react. It's an indicator of your ability to perceive others / flexibility of thinking.

Children do it all the time.

Aha, role playing. :-) Then I gave the wrong answers to that, because that is what I like to do while playing with children.

28

Yes, and you also must have no predilection for solitude or your looney score will go way up!

I got 30.

I always thought I had autism but never was able to substantiate my claims.

Only as weird as me.

Oh well.

It's always about you, isn't it?

The human mind is a complex thing and while your attempt at getting correalating data is interesting, you cannot possibly draw any firm conclusions based on this. Gary Kasparov is a very sociable guy with a great sense of humor, he was a great world champion. One thing is for sure, great chess players are very good at recognizing patterns OTB and remembering these patterns effortlessly. Remember the 7yr old kid who remembered 20games at the Norwegian Open, only a few months after he learnt to play the game? So there must be a singularity of purpose and a super-human photographic memory at play somewhere.

Someone said that blindfold chess is the biggest indicator of chess talent. If some 8yr old kid can play 5 of his friends without seeing the board and beating them all. Or a GM who plays the Uni of Penn chess team (all 15 of their best) and beats them 15-0 while blind-folded. There is something with their brain that is exceptional. Whether this could be a degree of - autism who knows. But even with this talent this 8yr old kid will have to play thousands of useful games a year for another 6 or 7yrs to really get to GM level. A normal GM can recall 50,000+ positions effortlessly (Scientific America did one study in 2006 I think) and recognize them OTB.

So these people are definitely gifted in a specific cognitive ability.

By the way, 16.4 may be the average score, but so is a 1500 chess rating and an IQ of 100.

23 points for me eh

20 - I am above the average score then (not sure what that means though)

24, but could some of that be manerisms that rubbed off from my best friend since preschool who happens to be autistic?

13 - I think I got most points for liking numbers (I'm a mathematician) and liking my own company (I don't mind socialising but I'm quite happy not to a lot of the time).  It seems a flawed test to me, but probably works ok up to a point.  My brother is a very good chess player and would score higher than me I think, whatever that proves.

I updated the first post with a link to the results. You can still take the test and submit results though, and the report will automatically be updated.

Mathematicians, like programmers and engineers, generally score much higher than the general population, as discussed here.

 7

15

But I've already been diagnosed with "high-functioning" autism, whatever that is.

It's similar to Asperger's Syndrome.

But in the wikipedia article it is given with scores less than 26 asperger syndrome is effectively ruled out.