Is chess mostly about intelligence?

If you asked five different cognitive scientists what "intelligence" actually is, you would get seven different answers.

And if one gave the same answer as I did, s/he'd be right.

Isn't cognitive science one of those invented soft sciences that aren't real science? Like a sort of mix and match of a bit of psychology here and some elementary neurophysiology there?

It's okay if you don't have an answer to this, but how would you define or describe "intelligence"?

What neurophysiologist told you that the definition of intelligence is the one you said?

from the point of view of science we can distinguishe between animals that are less intelligent than we humans but we still do not have an absolute or specifc definition of what intelligent is totally. Even when your definition may soound right as it is empiric it does not say that is right and the only one.

Are you talking to me? Neurophysiologist?? You think I can't think for myself???
I just told you what intelligence is and it works the same for animals and other creatures as for humans. Wake up!

IQ does not equate to intelligence, or anything else except the ability to take IQ tests.

Yeah.. Im talking to you and Yeah.... and if you are not even a neurophysiologist why are you so sure that your definition is indeed the definition of intelligence? And why if you are not even someone related to this should we believe you? because is your definition? in that sense every people is right which everybody got their definition. Come on, do you know that that ignorance with asceveration is terrible?

Whatever the definition of intelligence is, I just know being well-educated on a wide array of subjects has no bearing on chess. I've played strong chess players that were particularly perceived as 'dumb' in general. In my case, I love to watch and play Jeopardy all the time, to the point where I get 75% of the clues correct in most games. However, this doesn't translate to my terrible chess play.
With strong chess play, the only part of your brain that needs to be 'smart' is in visual-spacial concepts.

That's more or less true except that well designed IQ tests are designed to offer a range of puzzles that reflect as many different facets of intelligence as possible. Such puzzles are basically models of real life situations and someone who scores higher is basically good at working out answers to quite a range of puzzles.

Really you might as well have said that chess is a test of ability to find a chess set, set it up and lift up pieces and put them down again on chessboards.

Again, people who claim there are many kinds of intelligence are not really being very accurate. We define different pieces in a chess set differently but they're all part of the game of chess and in general, someone who's good at finding places to put a bishop is probably good at finding good places to put a rook, just as people good at one kind of mental puzzle are likely to be good at another. The idea of emotional intelligence or whatever being different from cognitive intelligence is on a very low level of understanding. Someone really good at working out problems will be able to deal with their emotional issues just as efficiently. Of course there are people who can't, but there are clever people who can't tie their shoelaces, apparently.

We've been down the road of highlighting other factors in chess and it's rather ridiculous to repeat over and over that there are different aspects of chess ability. We do know that.

No, there's a lot of factors at play. Memorisation, calculation etc etc.

Visual-spatial is thought to be less important than those.

There's cognitive ability at doing hard sums, using languages well: IQ tests are designed to try to give examples of different types of cognitive tests. Creative intelligence is important and I certainly know some people on this site whose social intelligence is near zero at times. I've been talking to some recently and it seems that social intelligence is related to creative intelligence because when they're busy trying to tell me what and how to think on a thread like "What's New in Cosmology" and I come up with an altogether different take on something they imagine they know all about, I've noticed such people get very angry and resort to insults and then claim "I started the insults". So we can maybe take it that such trolls aren't socially aware and nor are they creatively aware. It must be like not being able to tie shoelaces.

And even so IQ test are not precisally an indicative of what your definition of intelligence is.

Lets suppose you give an IQ test to somebody which your definition applies but that never had education with math, logic, verbal abilities but even so naturally is an intelligent human, so the score will be bad for sure.

Totally agree. They try to make them representative of different culturally neutral types of cognitive ability and of course, languages aren't considered culturally neutral and nor is mathematical ability and suchlike, so they try to design problems to do with visualisation, much of the time, and carve themselves a niche they probably need to break out of. I do agree with much of what you say. Designing an experiment in engineering, physics or chemistry can be quite a test though because there's a sense in which many such experiments are unique and have to be logically worked out but all the same, that's a particular type of thinking maybe rather related to chess.

So is the same We said before.

your IQ does not match the definition of intelligence why said vefore.

Because lets suppose you received a good education, you got good grades you have multiple learnt skills and so you have high IQ becuase you with a psychology made the test, but that only says you have a high IQ, because if we put you together in a world with de definition of intelligence below where you need to survive in the world you are not going to be able to do that, lets suppose you dont have enough social skills, you dont even have the ability to make a toe, or to clean your teeths.. and that is what happened nowadays with people who said they have high IQS most of them can not survie to the daily world as example, and most of them are not sucesfull with money or society. And there are people without education that have incredible cognitive skills but maybe they lack of enough education.

Then you'd be countering Hikaru Nakamura, who has claimed many times in his video streams that it's mostly visual-spatial.

Not just me, he's thought to be wrong by many people who have researched it. Also he's just a name or a person with an opinion. Big Joe Soap, the Next World Champion, thinks differently for starters.

I wouldn't dismiss too quickly the opinion of one of the best players in the world about what it takes to be good at chess.

I don't dismiss it. However, I know that it's generally thought to be incorrect. Why should it be correct because he's one of the best players in the World? That means he's good at chess, not necessarily good at understanding how the mind works. Especially since he's only one player and there will of course be others who disagree.

I suspect he's taking the idea of visual-spatial thinking too simplistically. "Space", though, necessarily means three dimensions. We live in a "visual-spatial world" and I think that will be the objection of the psychologists. Chess is a two-dimensional puzzle. It can be thought of as three dimensional if we assign different strata to the operation of different pieces or different plans but in reality they all focus on the two dimensional board. It seems to be a misuse of the term and also, much learning and ability to concentrate is necessary. Short-term memory is incredibly important .... holding several plans in your mind and adapting or altering them. I haven't really thought about it before but I do find myself disagreeing with Nakamura. But never mind, because that means I'm agreeing with others who disagree with him.

The patterns in chess perhaps have more in common with a painting.

Two spatial and one temporal dimension?

I do agree with you that being a GM chess player does not automatically give one insight into the workings of the Human mind... not even his own mind.

Three dimensions normally assumes up, across and along. Time is thought by many to be a fourth element of a 4-D entity. There are those who aren't so sure though. Personally I expect it's all far more complex that the physicists and cosmologists think it is.

Thanks for agreeing that a practitioner, even perhaps the most brilliant one, doesn't always have the insight necessary. Back when I was ten, I visualised my mind as 3-D because I found I could do certain tricks regarding very fast calculation. Not ultra-fast calculation like the savants though, who seem to do it unconsciously. I think I found a way to use my left and right brain simultaneously. Later on, when I very foolishly took very large doses of LSD, when I was 22, I visualised my mind as two clockwork machines and consciousness was the point of intersection of their operation. I did gain some insight into how our minds operate but it wasn't complete enough to be able to pronounce on it. I would say that the visuo-spatial element will be that which H is most consciously aware of, but he will find that his mind seems to change, stage by stage, as he gets older.