"Pattern recognition" DEBUNKED

You cannot extrapolate from the way you play chess and assume that this is how everyone (or "GMs") does it. I have a hard time visualizing the board, and I certainly cannot close my eyes and remember the position. This has not stopped me from becoming a decent player, but I would never make the argument that visuazliation or board vision is a myth. Most chess players have much better spatial skills than I do, and they clearly use them to their advantage.

Here's the thing: chess skill is not something monolithic. We're all different. Some players rely hevaily on pattern recognition, others on calculation. Some cannot make a move without calculating concrete lines; others toss out a move because it "looks good". None of these styles is instrinsically better or worse than any other.

Whats a pattern. I just throw pieces around. 

Ziryab is going to quote "hyperbole" in my topic and then backtrack??

Oh hell no!

You should only study patterns in kindergarden.

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No. I cannot take credit. It may be hyperbole, but maybe not. Carlsen is a little better than me, even though I beat up on his child persona (age 9) on his iOS app. If the WCC says it is the main thing, it's probably more true than not true (allowing for hyperbole). Certainly the 1800ish blitz player who wrote the article you cribbed to start this thread has a wee bit less credibility (as do I).

 

I knew two good blind chess players. One, let's call him A, I believe at one time was blind world champion. He lives near here. He told me he can't visualise at all and plays from memory and of course, feeling the pieces. The other was, on his day, much stronger than A but much less consistent. He told me he visualises the entire position, which I guessed by watching him when we played. So you see, memory and visualisation both count.

One real test, I imagine, of the significance of pattern recognition would be to get strong or fairly strong players to play and analyze games in which the board was set up with a black square in the bottom right hand corner. That way the initial set up is the mirror image of the legal initial set up. Then get players to play games and try their favorite openings, look over well known opening traps, play over games that they are very familiar with (their own or those of famous GMs), and so forth, evaluating as far as possible the cognitive dissonance they experience with all the pieces on opposite color squares and on opposite sides of the board. If pattern recognition is a nonsense, this change of orientation shouldn't make any difference. There you go. There's your thesis project on a plate if you are doing a M.Sc in Cognitive Psychology. Thank me after you graduate.

@Karpak : nice idea - or alternatively, try to play with black starting first. I read somewhere that long long ago they used to do this.

But it definitely feels strange, even if the opening positions are the same, you don't evaluate them the same way with Black on move...

Different patterns develop based upon the flow from the opening. Thus one can slowly improve by specializing in particular openings. However, pattern recognition is not about memorizing a specific pattern. It is about learning about seeing similarities within differences and does require intuition and creativity.

Cognitive psychology is crap. I mean, the psychology of thought or a thought of psychology? What else is psychology about? Either way it's bullshit.

<<If pattern recognition is a nonsense, this change of orientation shouldn't make any difference.>>

I don't think the patterns are about black and white. More like shapes. When we're black and kicking someone around the board, there's no dissonance. We evaluate black as the stronger side and colour makes no difference. I think we can easily train ourselves to think in terms of shapes and not colours, if we have some kind of mental focus. Chess is all about mental focus. Talk about psychologists making wrong assumptions.

Me too:

@ optimissed - Cognitive psychology is the study of the mind in relation to the senses, perception and information processing. Psychology as a discipline also deals with such areas of thought as those concerned with moralities, language, cultural imperatives, emotions, drives, and so on, that have little to do directly with cognition. I'm not particularly interested in psychology myself but I am quite aware of the fact that psychology as a discipline involves much more than the study of cognition and that cognitive psychology is a sub-discipline within psychology. 

Thanks mate and merry Christmas. Maybe inspiration will hit more often.

Thanks razza. Merry Christmas.

Actually it's simple. No one said he needed 100,000 patterns and that he gained them at the rate of 10 per day. In fact the quote itself says 10 per day on average.

This is a disagreement about the numbers, not about the concept of patterns itself.

The main support for patterns (AFAIK) is from De Groot. You should challenge his experiments not some arbitrary 100,000 at 10 per day idea. 

I know I'm really late, but I remember seeing this topic a week ago.

Care to support this with arguments?

 

Sure. I'm right. Nah, nah, nah, nah.

 

How's that?

 

Or, would you rather that I work my way through one of the games in GM-RAM to show how there are 200 patterns in 35 moves? Would that convince urk and his ilk? Would it convince you?

 

Let's say that I can only find 90 patterns in a 35 move game. Would my point criticising urk's numbers be invalidated? Someplace on my blog I have a set of eight exercises that all come from unplaced variations in the thirteen move game Mayet -- Anderssen, London or Berlin, 1851 or 1859.* I think that I could easily document at least 25 patterns from that game. Such unplayed possibilities are part of what I mean by "fully comprehend". 200+ may be an exagerration.

 

 

*The game score first appears in a publication in the late 1860s, as I recall. It may not have been played at all.