Relationship between Chess rating and I.Q?

Fascinating.  Assuming there were no differences in experience (i.e the "control group" wasn't made up of people with extensive experience at Twixt) I would still expect great Chess players to be at least somewhat superior at other abstract strategy games.  I wouldn't expect grandmasters to be super Checkers or Hex players, but I would expect at least some measurable superiority.

I'll have to try and find that article.

My facial recognition abilities really suck. I probably wouldn't recognize my parents after a few years. It's kind of embarrasing when I don't remember family members or teachers I had a couple years ago.  I'm okay at chess, but there is another strategy game I play that I seem to be pretty good at. This makes me wonder (assuming the theory is correct) what chess has that this other game doesn't. The game is much more strategic than chess. Perhaps it's becuase the game is a little bit more chaotic than chess, and doesn't have as many common structures. The board is likely to change much more quickly than the chess board. There also is little or no opening theory becuase of a large branching factor, and many different possible starting positions which allows for much more variety.

Facial recognition has nothing to do with playing online.

I can't believe this thread is still alive.

Interesting.  There is of course a huge variation in Chess playing abilities, but at your rating I would say you are pretty good at it.  Sure there are a lot that are better, but there are a whole lot that are worse.

So this data point would seem to provide a counter example.  Good at Chess, lousy at face recognition.

On the other hand, the paper that first led me to the conclusion that Chess and face recognition had a lot in common was about brain activation.  In Chess experts, but not in most people, the area that is active during face recognition was active while examinging board positions.  The authors could not determine whether or not that area of the brain had been "taken over" to solve Chess problems, and therefore might be unavailable for facial recognition.  If that were the case, you would expect great Chess players to be sub-par on facial recognition tasks. 

Really, this is a scientific area that is just beginning.  Very little is known about cognitive functions, and almost zero is known about memory.

ETA:  Link to paper -  http://www.jneurosci.org/content/31/28/10206.full

Makes sense.  Possible support for the theory after all.

Conversely, I can remember people's faces (for many years), but their names fly out of my mind very quickly, unless I write it down, or see and talk to them with some frequency.

@Ponz111's comment about Super GMs being rather good at blindfold simuls seems like one clear marker for the "pattern recognition" skill needed to perform at the highest levels in chess.

Indeed, very few people are strong players at blindfold chess (against non-blindfold opponents).

As per comments above, lots of players on this site appear to have Online ratings about 300+ points higher than their Standard Chess ratings.  Is this a hardware or a software conceptual issue?  Who knows?  It may be an "engine issue," instead.  

Or perhaps as folks get older, they just need more time to "figure it all out."  And our "slowing reaction time" pushes us away from Blitz, and into slower game speeds.

For me, and I would assume many others here, the analyze feature has inflated my rating. Endgames can be figured in a matter of 2 minutes.

according to Mensa I have an IQ of 156, theoretically that categorises me as a genius on some IQ ratings (you need to be a genius to sift through them all) my Chess sucks ! Go figure ;-)

My blitz rating wasn't entirely accurate before. I haven't been playing much recently, and when I do play it's usually around midnight . I just played a few but it still can't really be considered accurate since I didn't have enough losses and it hasn't started to level yet. Also, online ratings seem to be higher than all the other ratings, so I'm not sure how well your idea holds up because of that, joeydivivre. It makes sense, but I'm not confident in any of the evidence.

So does your spelling, it would seem.

When I consider the recognition versus calculation debate, as it pertains to what really fuels the GM's ability, I can't get past one glaring thing.

When I compare a face I have seen many times, to how it looks one day with a zit. I might not notice or even pay much attention to the zit. It doesn't suddenly confuse me as to who the person is, or how I necessarily equate things in my memory about them. I don't have to get to know them all over again.

 When I liken this idea to a chess postion that a GM may have seen a few times prior, but it suddenly has one subtle pawn difference ( a chess zit, if you follow my logic), it makes me realize that the one little insignificant, practically unnoticeable thing, can make you have to completely recalculate the position, from the way your memory has it playing out. If this happens against another GM, regardless of whether you are up against his knowledge of theory, and or his calculation ability, the only chance a GM has to win, is to improvise, calculationing, at the GM level. This is what GM's do when the are caught off guard and they still beat other GM's.

If I was to play a decently playable line, but it wasn't as sound as the KIA, or the Ruy Lopez Attack and the GM didn't really remember much about it, I am sure he/she would still win, because they can simply calculate better than I can. Trust me, I have quite a memory for useless facts. I am sure plenty of people here at Chess.com will attest to that.

I know, I was just hoping for the rebuttal on it, I was also awaiting the proletariate vs proletariat also....forums are always interesting ;-)

I was gonna type rebuttle, but decided to change it to keep on topic

Peace

Glad you cleared that up.  Much appreciated.  Really Peachy Peace.

There's something I don't get about "pattern recognition" and Chess.

When I think about sample questions on IQ tests, a lot of them are of the form, "What's the next number (or shape, or word) in this sequence?"

I generally do a good job on those sorts of tests, especially in numbers and shapes.  Not quite as well on words.

However, this sort of problem doesn't seem to have very much in common with determining a good Chess move given a board position.  Likewise, distinguishing one face from another isn't very much like the "find the next in the sequence" problem, but surely face recognition is one sort of visual pattern recognition isn't it?

The "sequence" problems are a staple of IQ tests, and people good at them are likely to have high IQs as a a result.  However, great Chess players do not generally have extremely high IQs.  Some do, but most don't.  On the other hand, there is clearly some element of "pattern recognition" that goes on in the mind of a great Chess player, but is it more like the sequence completion form of pattern recognition, or the face recognition form of pattern recognition, or a completely different form of pattern recognition not correlated with either sequence completion or face recognition?

i agee my iq is low 80 and so is my rating ive beeen practicin chess for 10 years

Memory and IQ  go hand in hand.  I suspect strongly that Kasparov and Fischer had great memories.  There are some people that if you add multi talented at music, sports, many multi things, their IQs would be 200+.  I think, with all due respect, Fishcer and Kasparov, if you added sports and music and other things, might not be 200+ but their memory capabilties got them 190.   

For me this makes sense. It also makes sense to me that, in order for GM's  to be great calculators, they have to have the ability to keep many things available in the their short term memory, to recall them to the forefront of their minds, as well as the positions they've studied for years in their long term memory.

If you relate it to computers, a fast processor is nothing without an adequate amount of memory and vice versa.  When we are wowed by a computer's ability to be fast and handle multiple tasks without lag, it undoubtedly has both of these components, that are top notch.

Like really good computers, the brains of the best GM's in particular, not only have to have a really good memory generally, but the ability to quickly go through many computations, while handling the multiple tasks, a fellow GM is capable of throwing at them.

Hence, wonderful minds, have both great memories and great computing ability. If one or the other were missing, it would be noticed.

I think the real problem isn't that chess players aren't properly diagnosed for their correct intellectual levels, but instead the problems are with the testing methods themselves.

I can sight several examples of how this is. The first I love to point out is one of my favorites. How can you isolate raw intelligence, without accessing it via what someone has learned? In other words, if I built a computer with 4 gigahertz processor and a 100 GB hardrive(memory storage long term) and 4- 1 gigahertz memory sticks (short term memory), another with half of those figures and then if I wanted to compare them, I would need information to test them, in the form of a program to compare their performances. Another example of this is, How can you really figure out who has a higher IQ, a 2 year old who can't talk yet or a 50 year old man?

It is in this way, we have our first bias. We are all fed different information. If we were all fed the exact same information, the standouts in intellect would be more obvious. The last statement, wasn't prejudical or a complaint either.

I am sure if multiple people are reading this, there is at least one cynical person, looking to pick this apart. Even if they haven't found any credible inconsistencies, compared to the truth, their own biases are already at work. 

These biases really come into play when "trying" to determine intelligence, because we first aren't truly able to compute, who does more with less, but we think we can. Our biases also will only want to recognize a correct answer, that our opinion agrees with. That may seem absurd, however, if you attempted to give a subject an IQ test and his answers were right in a sense as they appealed either to his idea of the truth or his opinion , though it is irrelevant to the truth directly, then you might decide he didn't give a correct answer, because you had something else in mind. When I first realized this, I decided never again, would anyone ever play any part in determining how intelligent I am. Only a fool lets the opinions of other make him what he shouldn't have become.

Another thing that is probably not considered is the fact that, during what I am sure was quite a battery of tests, that were prepared for the GM and master level players who supposedly have been tested only to reveal average IQ, many of the chess players tested probably felt added pressure to perform, that other people wouldn't.

I am sure most won't give them a pass or they'll try to compare it to the pressure of games, they are used to.Pressure we experience that we are used to, isn't the same as sudden unfamiliar stress.  Also I tend to think many of them said to themselves, "screw this, I'd rather be playing chess". Do we really know how hard any subjects that have ever been tested, among good chess players, really tried as hard as they could on IQ tests?

I am trying to actually imagine Bobby Fischer's reaction to someone wanting to test him, because the scientific community doubted the intellect of the best chess players, or thought it to be perhaps ordinary. I am sure he would have reached some of the same conclusions I have.

Well it is obvious that not all chess players are intelligent, many of them show that in the forums without any special testing. On the other had, I guess the aforementioned biases that we have, also come into play when we epitomize the chess player.

I guess the best subject to use, from my view point would be to take the best chess player, who seems to be able to out wit all of his opponents, whether fellow GM's or an ordinary bystander and use him/her to see what the results are in comparing IQ to chess prowess.

It doesn't make much sense to take someone who doesn't appear to be intelligent by chess standards and then see if they are perhaps one of the smartest people on earth. Conventional wisdom would probably tell most of us, if they really are that intelligent, it would become manifest while the play chess.

Is the above some kind of metaphor for intelligent furniture??