Yes. Though if you watch the video - he eventually discovers his own method for solving the 15-puzzle, and gets better at it. What's notable is his tenacity. Where some players would get bored and move on, Hikaru gets annoyed and more determined.
I think, if anything, this is the secret to his chess skill - that tenacity/obsession, whatever we want to call it. It's probably a big part of what pushed him to climb the chess ladder.
Also, I like to scoff at IQ not because I think IQ is irrelevant - but because I believe that it's not productive to worry about such things.
It's like worrying about your height, for example. Sure, your height likely matters for many things, but fretting about it isn't going to be the best use of your time ...
If you're an intelligent person, awesome. If you're an average Joe, that's fine, too.
Chess is the great equalizer, in a way. We can all find improvement in it, with a little bit of work and guidance along the way ...
IQ is a measure of general puzzle solving ability. Chess, essentially, is a specialised puzzle. Therefore ....
Just wondering if anyone would like to attempt to refute this rather conclusive argument?
Chess is a type of puzzle, sure. But chess-specific intelligence doesn't necessarily translate to ability in other forms of puzzles.
If we watch the video of Hikaru trying to solve a 15-puzzle online, for example, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMDGXeRK__E) we don't see a puzzle-solving phenom in all his intellectual glory. Instead, we see a typical person stumbling through a rudimentary puzzle via little more than trial and error - and doing what most people try to do: coming up with our own heuristic method to simplify our understanding.
One would think, if we were to assume that Hikaru's chess skill suggests a tremendous IQ (and if we were to assume that high IQ equates to general puzzle-solving ability), that a basic numerical sliding puzzle should be child's play for him. But it wasn't.
In fact, his attempts highlight an interesting facet in his approach: he tries to find rules and techniques that can be redeployed, like pattern shortcuts, instead of actually thinking ahead and planning out his approach. He clicks and shifts randomly at times, and when that doesn't work, he scraps the method and restarts the puzzle, to try something else.
This suggests that his approach to chess is likely similar - a matter of chunking patterns and re-using techniques for short-term progress and improvements. The bread and butter of blitz and bullet players ...
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Or, TL;DR: Being brilliant at chess doesn't automatically mean one is brilliant at anything else ...
There's sense in that. But the most difficult type of puzzles in chess, at least for me, are the very tactical exchanges that the engines like Norah find so easy. The positional puzzles, where I can fairly easily outthink the engines, are easier since I know what to look for. But the tactical puzzles are those that most closely resemble IQ tests.
There are darts players who can calculate automatically in the context of darts. Based on memory and patterns, I expect. Yes, chess is a specialised puzzle but it's still a series of puzzles, like IQ tests. If I can answer one type of IQ test puzzle quite accurately, I wouldn't be able to score high if I couldn't manage the others, if you see what I mean.
I don't do chess puzzles so I wasn't sure what you meant. Point is, in a game, we form impressions of the types of tactical chances we are likely to encounter. In a puzzle, we haven't built that database in our heads. That may explain his rather stumbling approach to puzzles.