Pattern Recognition

Hi everybody I have a interesting question concerning chess tactics which I am lead to believe is about ingraining pattern recognition into ones brain.

We are of course told that the way to do this is to do chess problems like on tactics trainer or by studying chess tactics books and the like.However this is a bit of a chore and kinda takes the fun out of chess a little as well as being quite time consuming.

further more we are told that after about 5 minutes if we can't do the problem to look up the answer and go on to the next problem,because the purpose of the exercise is to ingrained the ability to recognize common mating patterns and tactical motiifs,so once these patterns have been mentally noted they will be easier to recognize when we see them again.

So my question is, is it really necessary to actually do the problems or is it logically still achiving the purpose if you just go through the problem just looking at the answer straight away .If you did this to a set of problems just say 200 problems over and over wouldn't you still be ingraining the pattern recognition in your brain just the same as actually "doing " the problems.

I know people might find this lazy of me and a bit odd but logically I don't see the difference if the purpose is to ingrain the pattern recognition going through and looking at the answers is the same as doing the problems.

Hmm, sorta makes sense....

Garfield Cat: You can bet it wasn't an excercise freak who discovered power sreering...

I plan to conduct a experiment in this and will let people know how I've gotten on..

Good question, but I agree with fncll.  You can think of it like memorizing anything, notes for a class, a list of items, a process.  If you look directly at the information and go over it thinking -- "yeah, yeah, I know that, and that comes next, sure, ok I got it" -- you aren't really putting it into your memory.  If you cover up the next item, or what I like to do, take out a blank sheet of paper and write everything you know down, and then when you get stuck, you look at the information source.  Then wait a bit and repeat.  Try to recall on your own everything you've memorized... when you get stuck look again.  I don't know any technical terms but this works very well for me, and I know that immediately looking does not put things in any one's memory very well.

The other thing sovling tactical probles does for your games, which is also universally important, is it works on your calculation and visualization skills.  By calculation I mean working a short sequence and knowing if you've lost material or not.  By visualization I mean working a short sequence and really seeing that new position on the board.  Seeing it so well in your mind that you can try different moves and go back to it as needed without starting the calculation all over again.

I've been experimenting with something similar, creating checkmate diagrams with the hope of seeing a mate in one more often when playing blitz.

Example

But its not like you really have to remember anything complex its just recognizing how to attain a simple pattern .Also with just looking at the answers ,you are still doing something ,still requires some effort ,just a lot less than usual.

I know a lot of people have a bias towards hard work and think if you don't work hard then it can't be done ,its funny because some chess tactics are also about overcoming bias thinking like being prepared to sac a queen.

Also we are told to go over master games as a way of training presumably to ingrain in our minds the patterns of play,in these we are just going through the moves ,don't tell me people of less then say 1900 understand the intricacies of these games .If we can do it with master games then why not the much simpler chess problems in things like tactics trainer

@ Muskimole

I think that's a great training technique (neat mate by the way).  In time before all these chess books and computers, players has to do a lot of analysing and composing problems to find things out, and I think they were very strong for it.

If those get easy for you to create, try making a position with black to move, but no matter where he moves it's mate in 1.  This way you can practice trying to find a mating net that your opponent can't escape from (like a real game).  This isn't as hard as it may sound, for example.

That is a powerful exercise! It took me more than a few seconds to see the solution, since the king had two legal moves. That's too long. 

I will make these diagrams as well. Thank you.

Hi Oranghonda ,just wondered there are different kinds of information like the way we can still recognize peoples faces after years and years of not seeing them,sometimes even if you have only glanced at there faces for a few moments ,wouldn't you say that this kind of memory retaining is more similar to pattern recognition then for example studying for a exam or test.

I don't know any technical terms either but I would take a guess that it might be called visual memory or something,and its done almost subconsicouly .

Heh, funny that you pick face recognition as an example.  I'm terrible at remembering faces, and if I barley knew you then anyone that kinda looks like you I'll think might be you.  In movies, if the actor dyes his hair and grows a mustache I may not realize it's the same person between two different movies.

More than once I've had a stranger come up to me and say "hi how have you been!" and I have no idea who they are, but we went to grade school together or something and they remember me from when they were 8 somehow.

Well maybe its because you have allocated all your visual recognition capacity to playing chess

- "hi how are you,how you been"?

-"am sorry do I know you from somewhere "?

-"yeah we went to grade school together when we were 8 remember."

_"Nope I've had to ingrain a lot of mating patterns since then,not so good with faces".

I'm making "flash cards" to supplement my tactics training. When I learned how to play the piano-guitar-saxophone, I spent hundreds of hours on each instrument doing the exact same thing over and over again. Repetition for memorization. It takes too long for the same pattern to repeat in tactics trainer.

Example: King and Rook vs. King. I found myself in that situation not too long ago in a blitz game and it took too long to mate the lone king. I forgot the endgame technique found in Silman's Endgame book. More repetition and practice is in order, as it has yet to reach my long term memory.

I don't know of another way to memorize something, but to use repetition. It would be very cool if, for example, a new song I am learning on the piano would stick forever after playing it just one time.

Some guitar player did a study a long time ago regarding the number of times a musical pattern must be repeated before it goes into long term memory AND can be recalled at any time.

Does anyone here know of any studies that quantify the number of times a pattern needs to be repeated for it to stick?  My guitar teacher in college once told me that he had dumb fingers. He said that there are no shortcuts to learning the guitar. Why is the human brain so stupid? Why can't it work more like a computer? Computers don't forget stuff and learn something new after just one exposure.

Some things in life stick in one's brain forever after just the first exposure, due to emotions, like the time a car crashed into my car at an intersection. It all seemed to happen in slow motion and has yet to be purged from my memory. I can remember everything about it.

Is it possible to engage one's emotions while doing tactics drills? Maybe then I would only need to see the same tactic 10 times, instead of 1000 times, for it to stick forever in my brain.

My morning musings.

Hi I thought you made a interesting point about the fact that sometimes it takes to long for a pattern to repeat itself and thus the idea of learning repetition is lost.Have you heard of the book Rapid Chess improvement by Michael de la Maza.

The idea is that he chooses a set of a 1000 puzzles and goes through the same puzzle rather then different ones in 64 days,and then 32, then 16,8,4,2,1..so as to ingrain the patterns. 

Once I learn a piece on the piano it is memorized. So I think it varies from person to person.

To the OP you mention simple patterns but very frequently the patterns are complex or a combination of motifs. I don't think it will help very much to just look at the solution. Plus you are not developing your ability to calculate so I imagine after looking at a bunch of problems you would be stronger than someone who didn't do anything but weaker than someone who attempted to solve all the problems.

It's funny that facial recognition was brought up in this thread.

There's a *lot* of weird stuff going on in our brains with faces that we don't even realize. It's not as simple as us looking at a face, taking a mental picture and pulling it up later.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_perception

There was a chess documentary recently which claimed as I had thought that chess pattern recognition and facial recognition are linked ,and when I saw it I remembered this arguement in this thread...and it was most fascintating...

It was on the BBC with susan polgar,and basically the experiment went like this they had her sitting outside a cafe and a van drove past with a chess position printed on the side of it.After only a brief glimpse as it drove past she was asked to recall the position ,which is did correctly.

Then they had another van drive past with a different position on it only this time the position was of a irregular nature ,meaning if would imagine ,the rooks are not in the corner squares they the board is rather chaotic pawns are scattered everywhere ,of course its still a legal postion.

So this time she can not reconstuct the position...so when they asked the boffins to explain this I think they might have even scanned her brain they seem to reckon that a chess player who starts playing at a young age with a developing mind takes a part of the brain that is meant for facial recognition and uses it for chess position recognition.

Apparently she can only recognize commonly occuring groupings of peices though.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95eYyyg1g5s&feature=related

Could Loci be used in this endeavor . ? Just a thought ????