RESEARCH ON CHESS

CHESS IS A VERY DIFFICULT PUZZLE GAME BUT DO YOU KNOW WHAT RESEARCH SAYS???

OPENING

Chess fascinates many people, even those who do not play it. It is
played at all ages, in all countries, without any attention to religion
or ethnic background. As a symbol of intelligence and good decision-making, it is often used in advertisements for banking and business.
As a symbol of genius bordering on madness, it is a common theme
in fiction and has generated numerous books and movies.
Born in India in the 6th century, chess was adopted in Persia (Iran)
in the next century, and then by the Arabs. The first books on chess
were written in the 9th century but did not survive to our day. It is
also in the 9th century that chess was introduced to Europe, through
Spain and Sicily. By the 13th century, chess was the dominant game
in Europe, as witnessed in the Book of Games, written in 1283 at the
request of Alfonso X of Castile: “Since chess is the noblest game,
which requires the most skill compared to all the other games, we
are going to talk about it first of all”. By then, its influence had spread
well beyond the sphere of games and was part of the culture.
For example, in the second half of the 13th century, Jacobus de Cessolis, an Italian monk, preached morality using chess as a metaphor:
“In life, as on the chessboard, each piece has its own rights but also
its own obligations”.

Chess has sometimes been the mirror of historical developments.
At the end of the 15th century, at a time when women were gaining importance in politics in medieval Europe, the rules of the game
changed, and the until-then modest vizier – who could move only
one square diagonally – mutated into the powerful queen, who can
move in any direction without any limitation. Anticipating the French
Revolution by 40 years, François-André Danican Philidor, the best
player of the time and an opera composer, asserted that the pawns
(the weakest of the chess pieces) were not just cannon fodder, but
actually was the “soul of chess”. This paved the way for the scientific
approach to chess, and in particular, the theory developed by Wilhelm
Steinitz. The impact of his approach on chess has been compared to
the impact of Newtonian theory in physics.
At the height of the Cold War, the match between American Bobby
Fischer and Soviet Boris Spassky captured the imagination of the public. So did the matches between political refugee Viktor Korchnoi
and Soviet apparatchik Anatoly Karpov, spiced up by various scandals
including the presence of a parapsychologist on Karpov’s team allegedly hypnotizing his opponent.
In 1997, world champion Garry Kasparov defended the honor
of the human race against artificial intelligence in his match against
Deep Blue – and lost. This defeat, a milestone in the history of science
and technology, led to considerable soul searching in the media and
was the inspiration behind several books and movies.

CHESS AND SCIENCE

The nature of chess has been often debated in the literature. It is frequently presented not only as a game but also as a sport (because of its
competitive element), an art (because of the beautiful combinations
it allows) and a science (because of the systematic way it is studied).
Although chess players speak of chess “theory”, the term is not
used in the same way as in science. Rather than a formal system of
laws, mechanisms, and principles, “theory” in chess means a catalog
of initial moves and their evaluation for the theory of openings and a discussion of key positions and the way to handle them for the theory
of endgames. There were some attempts to identify the fundamental
principles of play, most notably by Wilhelm Steinitz, the founder of
the classical school of chess, with his 1889 textbook The Modern Chess
Instructor, and Aron Nimzowitsch, one of the founders of the hypermodern school, with his 1925 book My System. However, despite their
great originality, both fell short of the rigor of a scientific theory. In
addition, what is generally lacking with chess is any effort to test its
“theories” systematically, beyond recording new games. Such
tests are obviously at the heart of scientific research.
Chess has been the topic of much scientific research. It has been
investigated by several academic disciplines, including sociology, ethnology, philosophy, mathematics, and neuroscience. By far, it is
in computer science (including artificial intelligence) and psychology
that chess has been studied to the greatest effect. In artificial intelligence, chess has been a standard task for the development of machine
learning and search algorithms. It has been the topic
of seminal research into perception, memory, learning, thinking, and
decision-making in psychology. It has sometimes been called the drosophila of cognitive psychology, by analogy to the role of the fruit fly in genetics. 

REST IF YOU WANT TO READ THEN GO TO THIS WEBSITE AND DOWNLOAD IT 

THROUGH THIS LINK:  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328097627_The_Psychology_of_Chess 

AND HAVE FUN KNOWING THE DEPTH OF CHESS