Is Obtaining GM Status = to Bachelors's?..Ph.D.?

Not exclusively, but I would be inclined to include these as well as pure mathematics.

As with many questions of this sort, a lot of the uncertainty arises simply from the difficulty of deciding what one is discussing. Part of the difficulty of getting a GM title is the ability to deal with the poverty that is likely to be involved while pursuing the goal. Also, is one considering strictly studying on one's own? If not, it must be considered that there is a lot of structure in place to help one learn math, but considerably less structure to help one learn chess.

"Any reasonably intelligent person should be able to attain C class in two years with hardly any study, if they have a slight talent for the game."

And any reasonably intelligent person should be able to get a bachelor's degree in something that they have a slight talent for.

"Probably, the main difference between mathematics and chess is that mathematics is about exactitude, while current understanding of chess is about precision. Not the same."

Could you explain that distinction a bit more, actually? Precision and exactitude were honestly complete synonyms in my book. There is the distinction between accuracy and precision, though I'm not sure how that applies here.

"Numbers (no pun intended) in aesthetics (golden ratio, symmetry), music (Bach anyone?), and so on, don't quite support your claim."

Yeah, numbers are in those things. Yet, they are very different experiences from "doing mathematics" in the most direct, literal sense.

"Incidentally, I would say my upper second class honours degree in single subject philosophy was far harder to achieve than my otb rating of 1950"

Well, 1950 is quite a high rating in the grand scheme of things, but even compared to master (2200), it's a very small amount of work, let alone IM or GM. So I don't think 1950 is "close enough" to have much relevance to this question :)

You can't just parrot chess principles to do well in chess at all. Maybe if you want to be a class c player. Pretty much any given position in chess will be a unique position to you and you'll have to think and calculate on your own. Sure, you'll have lots of old patterns and principles, but they are always going to be tweaked to your specific position because of specific details. If this happens for almost any position you get or think about, you can imagine how hard it is to play good moves and plans for an entire 50 to 60 move game, and harder yet, a multitude of games.

Sure, for a Ph.D you eventually have to create something unique, but the learning process relies a lot on being studious about the work of others. I'm sure it involves lots of creativity as well; I just find it odd, ironic, in fact, that for something that is so much about "homework," you wanted to use that to contrast to chess! Chess is for those kids in school who thought homework was intellectually tedious, are you kidding me?

No. a Ph.D is obtained when you've produced an academic argument for something and your Prof deemed it sound enough and believes you will be able to do it again in the field you specified. 

GM Title is essentially pure memorization, extrapolation and visuospatial ability. Nothing like Ph.D. More like M,D,  or BA sure... if anything but still not really anything like M.D, or BA. No real need to conflate them.

And why do you believe this is? Use some critical thinking lol... btw, I disagree with the former.

If you have the money to pay the fees and survive without working for 4 years (or possibly some more) in a row... the Ph.D. will eventually come. On the other hand, more than one has spent a whole life trying to attain the GM title without success.

Main difference may be that the fact that in order for you to get your Ph.D. you do not have "to beat" others that are pursuing the same degree.

On the other hand, getting a Nobel Prize is certainly harder: just around 880 Laureates in history, compared to 1541 living grandmasters today.

If we take the USA, about 1.8% of population have a PhD. But about 0.000018% of the USA population are chess grandmasters. So there are about 100,000 more PhDs than Grandmasters. This alone would make one think it is harder to become a chess Grandmaster than a PhD. Of course, this might be a simplification. More people try to get PhDs than try to become a chess GrandMaster; so we should not be surprised that more people get PhDs than become Grandmasters. 

However, as someone who has a PhD (and has supervised 30-40 other people to get PhDs, and examined more than 60 PhDs) and how plays chess quite well (in the top 5% here on chess.com) I can say that it is clearly much more difficult to be a chess GM than to get a PhD. Both require a reasonable degree of talent and quite a lot of hard work. But to me there is no comparison. GM is much harder to get than PhD. 

A lot of people think of PhD as the pinnacle of academic achievement. It isn't. Someone who has a PhD is making the first rung on the ladder to become an academic. In fact, I would say that having a PhD is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition to becoming an academic.

Some people who have PhDs go on to become Assistant Professors. I don't know the stats but perhaps only about 1 in 6 or less people with PhDs become Assistant Professors (this is because want to but can't make it for whatever reason and also because some don't want to and go off and work in some other profession). Some of these Assistant Professors become Associate Professors. And a few Associate Professors become full Professors. It is hard to make the comparison but I would say that being a GM *might* be equivalent to being a full Professor. 

And a Bachelor's degree is equally attainable with a little work, very little for anyone with reasonable intelligence. The comparison not ridiculous at all. Rather, it's the smarted thing that's been stated in this thread.

This makes more sense than most of the preceding posts.

If we take the USA, about 1 in 30 million are serial killers...ergo, becoming a serial killer is harder than both, and...

Oops, wait, no...all you need is a K-Mart...this line of reasoning is completely faulty.

People don't become GMs because there's no significant money in it for the amount of effort required.  Less than one in a billion people make a killing playing chess, so...you are far better off buying lottery tickets.  Being a serial killer is even less potentially lucrative, as it turns out (well, someone may make a ton of money from your serial killer story rights, but it won't be you ...).

Some people are just obsessive about being the best in the world and proving they are special snowflakes, though, and do so against their best interests.  This is not a sign of higher intelligence...competitiveness at this extreme level is form of dysfunction/illness.

For those who are criticising my earlier post and say that there may be fewer GMs than PhDs because there is less money in becoming a GM, note that I did make this very point myself. I agree. Fewer people try to become a GM than a PhD and this is probably part of the reason why there are more PhDs than GMs. So, note that I did say that this sort of analysis is probably too simplistic. 

And for the guy who says I analysed the academic process but not the chess process. Well, hello!!! We are on a chess web site. I assume that many people on this site already know something about chess and are somewhat familiar with the process of becoming a GM. But lots of you (not all, obviously, but lots of you) might have less idea about how the academic process works. So that is why I described that a little. And the point I was trying to make was simply that having a PhD is really quite a modest achievement and I just cannot say that it compares with becoming a GM (either in terms of the effort required to become one or the natural talent required). 

However, I think that becoming a full professor *might* be somewhat comparable. Note that asterisks around "might". I am not saying that it is comparable but rather that it *might* be comparable. But PhD v GM - in my view that has no chance of being comparable. 

The guy who started talking about Nobel prizes - well, I never mentioned them. But note that the youngest science Nobel prize winner was in his early twenties. And if you are in your forties and you have not made it in maths you are considered over the hill in academia. But, like I said, I didn't bring Nobel prizes into my argument. 

That said, the Nobel prize issue did make me think of one thing which is that in my opinion the difficulty between the comparison between full professor and GM is that they are really not the same sort of thing at all. In my opinion, both becoming a GM and a full professor require hard work and natural ability. However, the need for natural ability to become a GM is probably higher than for professor. I think lots of people have the intellect to become full professors given the right circumstances and extreme hard work. But to be a GM I think requires an extraordinary ability and a fantastic memory. Yes, hard work is needed but will only get you so far. So in truth I think it is difficult to say whether it is harder to become a professor or a GM. But at least you can make the argument and have the discussion. And I know that some people might raise the issue of the Polgar sisters. But at the end of the day, it depends what you mean by 'more difficult'. How difficult is it to become a Premier League footballer? If you are Ronaldo, not very difficult. But how difficult would it have been for Ronaldo to become a GM or a full professor? Probably very.

But just to clarify, the point my original post was simply to say that in my opinion there was no comparison between the difficulty required to be a PhD or to be a GM. I described the academic process somewhat to help make that case. And I think that one can have an argument about whether it is more difficult to be a GM or a professor. But I would not begin to say which of these is more difficult partly because to even start to answer that you need to define clearly what you mean by more difficult. And that is difficult .

Academics is about the production of knowledge. Its closest resemblance to chess at high levels is the pursuit of truth--the truth about a chess position or the truth about climate change. Recognition is a by-product of success. Many of the most successful scholars that I have known shun the recognition.

That would be because the L-infinity metric is being used, d((x1, y1), (x2, y2)) = max(abs(x1-x2), abs(y1-y2))