Chess Players & Autism Quotient

I think autistic people also think differently than non-autistic people do. For example, computer programming was/is much easier for me (I have Asperger's syndrome) than it was for my identical twin brother, who isn't autistic. Autistic people tend to be more logical and therefore understand computers better. Though I did spend a lot of time focusing on my hobbies (mainly computers), I don't know if that is a norm for autistic people.

I was being serious. Were YOU being serious or just being a smartass?

Or, in my case, find writing music easier to do than taking a science test.

From all I've read it seems as though there are more positives than negatives associated with it. Why is it cast in such a way (when its discussed on TV for instance) as to leave negative connotations?

This has to be the most reasonable post in this thread. Sample, methodology, and self reporting. The sample consists of chess lovers who love the game but probably don't have the talent and/or means to become masters. By stating that great chess players tend towards autism, romanticises this condition to the point of being desireable. Because inside these boys/men there is a desire to one day conquer the world of chess, so they will biase their results towards stereotypical autistic behavior - no social life, mechanical, emotionally dysfuntional etc.

FYI Alekhine loved women and whisky and Kasparov is great with the ladies too. Karpov is a very normal guy with wife and kids and loves to help homeless kids with his charity... so this image of some obsure guy watching the washer tumble hours on end, and then saying "it tumbles 2137 times every cycle" is more of holywood imagery than reality.

Kinda the opposite IMO.  From what I read there are negatives but in popular media it's all positive (oh look, they're a rainman, yay).

Nice straw man, but in which posts did people supposedly say great chess players tend towards autism? I just read every single post in this entire thread again to see if I had forgotten some people saying how great players tend towards autism, and you're the only person who mentioned this, so your reading comprehension is absolutely atrocious, assuming you're not just intentionally lying in order to troll, or deceiving yourself about what you read because of some personal chip on your shoulder.

Pssh

It doesn't matter what was said as good chess players tend towards normality. That is, of course, the very definition decided by those who happen to be looking, as normal is only defined by the one giving the definition.

*crosses legs and floats away*

It definitely shows its age by the copyright notice at the bottom of the test: © MRC-SBC/SJW Feb 1998 

(EDIT: And maybe my fascination with dates is stronger than I thought ;-))

I got 24. How does that tell what kind of a person i am?

25, not that it means much to me. I posted it for the study.

I am being serious.  My best friend is autistic, but he's the best person I know.  He brings out the good in everybody just by being himself.  He's also excellent at stop-motion animation, as I mentioned earlier, and he can memorize many things that he finds interesting.  He knows what will happen in every Red-Green episode five minutes before it does and can build lego structures so complicated in so little time, I am amazed that it is possible.

Like I said, it seems to me to have more good points to it than bad points.

I didn't get the 100 entries that I was hoping for (yet), but here is some discussion of the data. I'm hiding it down here in the thread (but will link to it from the first post) so that anybody who wanders in to the thread for the first time and still wants to take the test and report their score can do so without being biased by this discussion.

I ignored 6 entries which either didn't give an AQ score or didn't give any rating. That left me with 59 data points. I then normalized the ratings by just taking the average of all ratings the user reported. I know this isn't very accurate, since a FIDE rating is almost always going to be lower than a chess.com standard rating, for example, but it is good enough to get a rough idea of whether there is any correlation at all, which is all I was interested in.

The linear regression equation (calculated using R's "lm" function) that best fits the data is "rating = (aq * 12.84) + 1314". I would have liked to post the scatter plot, which makes it very clear visually that the higher ratings tend to have higher AQ scores (and vice versa), but that would reveal too much information.

There were some intriguing results though, including:

• The mean AQ score of the 10 entries with ratings over 2000 was 31, compared to a mean of 24 for all entries (versus about 16 for the general population).
• The mean rating of the 12 entries with an AQ score of at least 32 was 1777, compared to a mean of 1624 for all entries.

Amazing! (not really...)

So it is a linear equation ....

That makes sense to me because the ability to focus totally on one single task and to shield from any external stimuli gives surely an advantage in chess.

I wonder if females have an lower average AQ than males. This would maybe be a part of the explaination why they perform rather poorly in chess.

it doesnt have anything to do with authism i think everyone who says so , either cant play chess or never even played chess at all

I agree with TetsuoShima. If chess relates to autism then so does poker and magic the gathering...

Wow. These are really interesting results!

I agree. I suspect it's actually that some autistic traits either:

1. confer an advantage in chess -- and many similar games like go, magic the gathering, etc.
2. make it more likely that one will enjoy chess more and/or play chess more and for longer

I suspect that probably both 1 and 2 are factors (and they aren't independent, since people generally enjoy and do more of things that they are relatively good at).

This informal poll is obviously very far from any kind of scientific study that anybody should put any faith in the results of, but even if the results did hold in real studies, I would expect any influence on chess rating by 1 and/or 2 above to be quite far down the list of factors correlated to chess rating in terms of importance. Far more important would be things like amount of deliberate practice, amount of tournament play, formal study with a coach, etc.