Introduction - Chess and Cognitive Science

I am not now, nor have I ever been a good chess player.

To sum up most of my competitive playing history, I played chess in grades 5-6, then took a break of about two years or so before returning to competitive play at events sponsored by the Murrysville Chess Club (the premier chess club in Murrysville, PA!). I didn’t really learn openings at any point, took one session of chess classes offered by the club before deciding it was a little too boring for me, and mostly went to tournaments to see if I could do reasonably well anyway. Most of the time, it went sort of okay: I have a few medals and trophies from tournaments where I placed, even one from a tournament at the Greengate Mall (the premier mall in Greensburg, PA!) that I won. Sort-of-okay was really as far as things went, though: There were a lot of kids who were consistently better than me - some of whom were and are good friends, and others who were just kids from the community that I saw at chess tournaments and always hoped I could avoid in the pairings. Sometimes I did avoid them and other times I didn’t, and when I didn’t, I tended to lose. If I’m being as objective as possible, I think a fair bit of my successes were the product of more luck than skill or preparation. One of the trophies I won from a chess tournament in junior high school offers some hilarious support for this perspective: It reads “Top 8th Grader.” That sounds pretty good, until you find out two things: (1) The tournament had a rule that nobody was going to win more than one award and (2) they gave out awards for overall placement in the tournament as well as grade-level awards. What “Top 8th Grader” actually meant was that 3 of my 8th-grade friends won 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place in the tournament, leaving only so many kids left for the remaining trophy. I got a nice bit of hardware, but it really ought to read “Top 8th Grader who didn’t win anything better".  (see also: Flight of the Conchords "Most Beautiful Girl in the...Room.")

That short history might make you think that I don’t like chess that much, but this isn’t true at all. I’ve always loved the game. I love the pieces, the boards, the notation in chess books, I love solving chess puzzles, and I devoured books about World Chess Champions throughout history (Jose Raul Capablanca remains my favorite).  Chess openings seemed to me like the epitome of obscure wisdom when I was a kid, with names like the Traxler Counterattack, the Winawer Variation, and the Latvian Gambit. I also was enough of a competitor that the idea of matching wits with someone really appealed to me. I did math competitions, science competitions, writing contests, and chess was one more outlet through which I could test myself against the field. 

But if I liked the game so much, why wasn’t I better at it? Like I said, as an adult, I think the key issue certainly has to be my lack of real study and preparation. But didn’t I just say that I loved reading chess books? Yes and no. I definitely loved *looking* at chess books, especially books like Bobby Fischer’s “My 60 Memorable Games” that included rich annotations for each game, amounting to a full narrative of the game itself, the history of the variations on display, and gossipy asides about other players. What I didn’t do a lot of was read chess books with an eye towards improving my game through learning openings more thoroughly or testing my tactical abilities using the diagrams interspersed through the text. I had a Pocket Guide to Chess by GM Raymond Keene, and it had a short list of openings in which the first few moves were described and some history of the opening was provided. That was about all the actual training I took away from a chess book and I didn't ever memorize all that stuff.

The real question then isn't why I wasn't better at chess, but why I didn’t work more at getting better. This one’s easy: I was a pre-teen/teenager who had limited patience. I just wasn't that motivated to do drills on opening theory, mid-game tactics and strategy, or the finer points of endgames.  I liked that there were all these openings with their branching variations and their esoteric names, but when it came time to sit down and learn the ins and outs of trappy lines, it wasn’t too long before I was sitting in front of my Sega Genesis, or shooting baskets in the driveway, or talking to friends on the phone. I justified this to myself in what now seems like a peculiar way: I held memorization in contempt and told myself it was in a way more meaningful to try and play well without knowing all the details of the vast labyrinth of opening theory or the known maxims of endgame technique. Better (perhaps more honest) for one to work those things out during the heat of battle rather than learn them by rote. Was it still a game if you were just rattling off moves that you had learned were correct? Did that make you a creative player? Did that make you smarter than your opponent? 

As a 40-something adult, I can only laugh at my teenage self. Of course it’s still a game if you learn these things. The best players in the world are as creative as they are because they put in this work and know this stuff cold. Are they smarter than their opponents (or me)? This is where we run into the conflict between how I think about learning and intelligence now compared to how I thought about these things as a younger man. Now, I can say that what the best chess players in the world have going for them is a ton of domain knowledge about chess: They’ve developed their memory, their ability to assess visuospatial relationships, and their ability to apply transformations to the pieces on a board, among other skills specific to chess. Could they sweep me off the board while doing any number of other things at the same time? Undoubtedly. Does that mean they’re smarter than me in general? Nah. Using chess, or any one domain of human cognitive ability, to characterize an individual’s intelligence is foolish. I say it’s foolish for two reasons. First, it’s absolutely possible (and perhaps common) to be highly skilled at chess and not especially clever at other things - more on this in another post, I think. Second, saying that chess skill only depends on general intelligence (“g” or “IQ”, if you prefer) also elides the many intriguing sub-processes and abilities that support top-flight chess playing. Why should we just say being good at chess is down to being smart instead of exploring all the different neat stuff you have to learn to do to really play the game at a high level? Not only would we be missing out on some interesting details about what good players are doing, we would also be missing out on an opportunity to be better players ourselves. If we knew what these skills were and how to work on them, we wouldn’t have to just hope that we got smarter to get better at chess. Instead, we could train ourselves to memorize more, to see spatial relationships more quickly and accurately, or to envision what a sequence of moves will do to a position without needing to physically move the pieces.

If I had to pick one shift in my thinking that changed me most from childhood to adulthood, I would have to choose this: You can put in effort to get better at most things. Maybe this sounds obvious to you, but I had a different perspective on the world when I was a kid. If you had asked teenage Ben to tell you what made people good at different things, I probably would have talked a lot about talent: Some people just *are* good musicians, or artists, or mathematicians, or athletes. The rest of us schlubs just have to deal with it and be happy with whatever set of talents we were given. I’m not here to argue across the talent/practice divide (look, they both contribute) but I will say that a strong belief in talent led me to not engage with a bunch of things that I now wish I’d spent more time on. Luckily, I’ve been able to spend some of that time as an adult and I now run half-marathons slowly, play guitar quite badly, and make the occasional painting, drawing, or cut-paper design that I’m seriously proud of. 

What made me change my mind about talent, practice, and learning was my training as a cognitive scientist. Both as an undergraduate student and as a PhD candidate, I specialized in learning how the human mind works, including how it memorizes things, recognizes what you see, and most relevant to this discussion, how it changes as a function of your experience. I am a slow learner (or perhaps just slow to apply what I’ve learned), so it took a few rounds of exposure to topics like procedural learning, distributed practice, and the cellular mechanisms of learning and memory to realize what it implied about all kinds of skill learning. Practice - work - actually does make you better at things. Eventually I got it though and I still marvel at it, and at how much my younger self missed by being ignorant in this particular direction.

Back to chess, because that’s where we started. During the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, our family found ourselves at home more than we ever had been, with odd stretches of time that would usually have been spent seeing other people, visiting libraries, movie theaters, restaurants, or the many lovely boutiques in downtown Fargo. What to do with all that time? We read a lot of books, watched friendly British people bake things on television, and eventually drifted towards a collection of activities we always wished we had more time for. For me, it started with drawing and running. For my daughter it was music and familiarizing herself with the internet (which we only got our house connected to once it became apparent that we really were in this for the long haul). For my wife, it was sewing and quilting. The latter led to a number of projects, including a lovely quilted chessboard that was a Christmas present for me. The board was so nice that I thought it was a shame to not have proper pieces for it, so I bought a set of weighted tournament pieces. Once you have a nice board with nice pieces, you of course want to play a game, too. Remember how I said we only got home internet because of the pandemic? It turns out that the internet has chess, too. LOTS of chess. I started up an account here on chess.com and immediately felt the rush of wondering what my rating was, what my rating should really be (definitely higher), and what was coming in the next game. I was rusty, of course, but now that rustiness felt like an interesting challenge to address. Could I make myself a better chess player? What do we know from the cognitive science perspective about how that works? Is it at all possible that knowing what I do about the mind and the brain will help me improve my chess playing acumen?

These posts are about these questions and anything else that I think is fun to write about from the perspective of someone who knows a lot about cognitive science and is trying to learn more about chess. I’m interested in finding out what the science says about chess playing in particular, because for a decent stretch a lot of scientists thought that chess was a perfectly good proxy for intelligence and expertise and did studies about it. I’m also interested in finding out what the players think about how one should try and improve. Finally, I’ve also got a few interesting ideas about how some of what we do (or try to do) on the chess board may relate to other kinds of learning, perception, and memory that we know even more about. Along the way, maybe I’ll get a little better, but mostly I’m hoping to have fun.