Who else with Average IQ sucks at Chess ( lol ) ?
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May 7, 2012
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#63
Thanks for the posts. That photo of the late Randy " The Macho Man " Savage fits right in with our discussion. Professional Wrestlers often start in sports at a very early age, frequently in College level Football or Olympic wrestling. Often having only a short career at the College level the need to make a living may drive the Athlete into Professional Wrestling. The point is that the person had a talent and/or ability which they worked hard to develop. But the question remains how was the talent discovered ? The late Ted Williams was of course famous in the World of Baseball but he was also a successful Fighter Pilot in the Korean War. One would presume that he was involved in Baseball from a early age but where did the Fighter Pilot ability come from ( and also how was it discovered ? ).
May 7, 2012
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#64
I don't dare taking an IQ test so I wouldn't know.
but test say more about the persons who make them.
are you really intelligent because you can say that the next number in this row is ... 2 4 6 _ =8 it is just plain logic.
3 5 9 11 15 _ _ = 17 & 21
or that you can see the matching drawing or that a drawing goes in this or that direction.
or if you can say if male is adam ...female is _= eve.
a kid could answer the above without being intelligent.
May 7, 2012
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#65
Thanks for the post BobbyDK, you make some very good points. The other day I heard someting quite funny in regards to discovering Math abilities. Recently a person was hit over the head in some sort of an accident and now suddenly he is a Math Whizz, quite remarkable. What we may need now is a new type of Doctor who will be used to hit people in the head at the correct time and place and perhaps we may then end up with a planet of Geniuses. Well perhaps not, after all we don't want to overdo it lol. However the case of this new Math Whizz is still quite interesting.
Chess skills improve by playing on a regular basis. Playing chess is like learning a language, knowing the words isn't enough, it takes time and practice to comprehend everything with ease. The more you play, the more patterns you will begin to recognize. You're previous choices will aid in your decision making.
Look into cognition and neuroplasticity. Being good at chess is not as simple as having a low / high IQ.
May 8, 2012
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#67
People with an interest in the subject may find the following links interesting:
The research referenced in this interview has gotten a lot of press and blog discussion, including on chess.com
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/01/20/5884849-how-your-brain-picks-the-best-move?lite
This article deals with brain activation during Chess play:
http://sheng-lab.psych.umn.edu/pdf_files/Atherton_fMRI_chess.pdf
The takeaway element from the article is that certain regions of the brain are highly active when dealing with tasks traditionally associated with IQ tests, but different areas of the brain are activated when playing Chess.
May 9, 2012
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#68
Thanks for the recent posts. I see we have a new thread here now dealing with two types of Intelligence: Chess Intelligence and General Intelligence. It will be interesting if the discussion in this new thread becomes as detailed as things got in the High IQ thread ( that has since been locked ).
May 20, 2012
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#69
Another new thread that someone has on the go here starts off with a quote from Oliver James that contains a couple of interesting points about IQ ratings. Also reference is made to Asperger's Syndrome which is of course sometimes found among people who are very talented in Math.
^^ i wish i had some damn syndrome that made me into a super grandmaster . :(
cabadenwurt wrote:
Also reference is made to Asperger's Syndrome which is of course sometimes found among people who are very talented in Math.
I know it makes your pee smell funny.
May 22, 2012
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#72
Thanks for the posts. When I read your post AndyClifton I had a flashback to " The Madness Of King George " for a minute there. Up here we had a well known Classical pianist by the name of Glenn Gould who in the opinion of some experts may have had Asperger's Syndrome. However Gould had a very successful career despite being a bit " odd " so I guess that not all is lost lol.
People don't suck at chess because of average IQ. Becoming a strong chess player has to do with cognitive abilities. Everyone with average cognitive abilities and that has done the long hours of study in chess can become a chess player of master strength.
Chess Grand Masters Have Average Cognitive Skills
"Chess grandmasters have average cognitive skills and average memories for matters outside of chess, and only show their extraordinary skills within the discipline of chess. This suggests that expertise in chess (and most other areas) has less to do with analytical skills - the ability to project and weigh the relative merits of hundreds of options - and more to do with long-term immersion and pattern recognition - having experienced and "stored" thousands of game situations and thus having the ability to pluck an optimal answer from among those stored memories. It also suggests that expertise may be less a result of analytical prowess and more a result of passion, love or obsession for a given subject area - enough passion to have spent the hours necessary to accumulate a robust set of experiences and memories in that area,'' writes Joshua Foer.
The classic example of how memories shape the perception of experts comes from what would seem to be the least intuitive of fields: chess. Practically since the origins of the modern game in the fifteenth century, chess has been regarded as the ultimate test of cognitive ability. In the 1920s, a group of Russian scientists set out to quantify the intellectual advantages of eight of the world's best chess players by giving them a battery of basic cognitive and perceptual tests. To their surprise, the researchers found that the grand masters didn't perform significantly better than average on any of their tests. The greatest chess players in the world didn't seem to possess a single major cognitive advantage.
But if chess masters aren't, as a whole, smarter than lesser chess players, then what are they? In the 1940s, a Dutch psychologist and chess aficionado named Adriaan de Groot asked what seemed like a simple question: What separates merely good chess players from those who are world-class? Did the best-class players see more moves ahead ? Did they ponder more possible moves? Did they have better tools for analyzing those moves? Did they simply have a better intuitive grasp of the dynamics of the game?
One of the reasons chess is such a satisfying game to play and to study is that your average chess buff can be utterly befuddled by a master's move. Often the best move seems entirely counterintuitive. Realizing this, De Groot pored through old games between chess masters and selected a handful of board positions where there was definitely one correct, but not obvious, move to be made. He then presented the boards to a group of international chess masters and top club players. He asked them to think aloud while they brooded over the proper move.
What De Groot uncovered was an even bigger surprise than what his Russian predecessors had found. For the most part, the chess experts didn't look more moves ahead, at least not at first. They didn't even consider more possible moves. ... They tended to see the right moves, and they tended to see them almost right away.
It was as if the chess experts weren't thinking so much as reacting. When De Groot listened to their verbal reports, he noticed that they described their thoughts in different language than less experienced chess players. They talked about configurations of pieces like 'pawn structures' and immediately noticed things that were out of sorts, like exposed rooks. They weren't seeing the board as thirty-two pieces. They were seeing it as chunks of pieces, and systems of tension.
Grand masters literally see a different board. Studies of their eye movements have found that they look at the edges of squares more than inexperienced players, suggesting that they're absorbing information from multiple squares at once. Their eyes also dart across greater distances, and linger for less time at any one place. They focus on fewer different spots on the board, and those spots are more likely to be relevant to figuring out the right move.
But the most striking finding of all from these early studies of chess experts was their astounding memories. The experts could memorize entire boards after just a brief glance. And they could reconstruct long-ago games from memory. In fact, later studies confirmed that the ability to memorize board positions is one of the best overall indicators of how good a chess player somebody is. And these chess positions are not simply encoded in transient short-term memory. Chess experts can remember positions from games for hours, weeks, even years afterward. Indeed, at a certain point in every chess master's development, keeping mental track of the pieces on the board becomes such a trivial skill that they can take on several opponents at once, entirely in their heads.
As impressive as the chess masters' memories were for chess games, their memories for everything else were notably unimpressive. When the chess experts were shown random arrangements of chess pieces - ones that couldn't possibly have been arrived at through an actual game - their memory for the board was only slightly better than chess novices'. They could rarely remember the positions of more than seven pieces (which is the average for most people). These were the same chess pieces, and the same chessboards. So why were they suddenly limited by the magical number seven?
The chess experiments reveal a telling fact about memory, and about expertise in general: We don't remember isolated facts; we remember things in context. A board of randomly arranged chess pieces has no context - there are no similar boards to compare it to, no past games that it resembles, no ways to meaningfully chunk it. Even to the world's best chess player it is, in essence, noise.
In the same way that a few pages ago we used our knowledge of historic dates to chunk the twelve-digit number, chess masters use the vast library of chess patterns that they've cached away in long-term memory to chunk the board. At the root of the chess master's skill is that he or she simply has a richer vocabulary of chunks to recognize. Which is why it is so rare for anyone to achieve world-class status in chess - or any other field - without years of experience. Even Bobby Fischer, perhaps the greatest chess prodigy of all time, had been playing chess intensely for nine years before he was recognized as a grand master at age fifteen.
Contrary to all the old wisdom that chess is an intellectual activity based on analysis, many of the chess master's important decisions about which moves to make happen in the immediate act of perceiving the board. Like [experts in other areas such as the veteran] SWAT officer who immediately notices the bomb [when others don't], the chess master looks at the board and simply sees the most promising move. The process usually happens within five seconds, and you can actually see it transpiring in the brain. Using magneto-encephalography, a technique that measures the weak magnetic fields given off by a thinking brain, researchers have found that higher-rated chess players are more likely to engage the frontal and parietal cortices of the brain when they look at the board, which suggests that they are recalling information from long-term memory. Lower-ranked players are more likely to engage the medial temporal lobes, which suggests that they are encoding new information. The experts are interpreting the present board in term of their massive knowledge of past ones. The lower-ranked players are seeing the board as something new."
Author: Joshua Foer
Title: Moonwalking with Einstein
Publisher: Penguin
Date: Copyright 2011 by Joshua Foer
Pages: 63-66
Cognitive definition can be stated as the mental process of knowing and including aspects such as, perception, awareness, reasoning, and judgment.Cognitive definition also said to be known, as through perception, knowledge, intuition, and reasoning.
A simple way to state cognitive skills are to describe them as the available brain skills which make makes us possible s to think,learn as well as remember. These are the skills and techniques which allow us to collate the huge influx of information we receive daily at work, at school and in our own life.Tutoring re-teaches information which we couldn't grasp the first time around. This is fine if the information didn't "stick" was because ofpoorpresentation. But 80% of all learning struggles aren't for poorly taught information, but the result of cognitive weaknesses.
Q. Cognitive definition -- What are cognitive skills?
Cognitive Skills: What are they?
Who hasn't had the frustrating experience of trying to run the latest software on an outdated computer? Or asking a computer with a small processor or insufficient memory to handle several complex tasks at once? In order to handle information and tasks with ease, a computer needs the right hardware and underlying systems (think processor, RAM and hard drive). If these underlying systems aren't up to speed, it doesn't matter what cool programs or impressive data you load into the computer: Everything's going to run slowly. Cognitive skills serve your brain in the very same way.
Raise your hand if you need a faster, smarter brain.
A simple way to define cognitive skills is to describe them as the underlying brain skills that make it possible for us to think, remember and learn. These are the skills that allow us to process the huge influx of information we receive each and every day at work, at school and in life. If your cognitive skills aren't up to speed, no matter what kind of information you try to grasp—or how many times you try to grasp it—the process can feel sluggish and slow. This is why brain training and tutoring are so completely different. Tutoring re-teaches information you didn't quite grasp the first time around. This is fine if the reason the information didn't "stick" was because the information was presented poorly. But 80% of all learning struggles aren't due to poorly taught information—they are the result of one or more cognitive skills weaknesses. If the reason you didn't grasp the information the first time around is because of a processing weakness in your brain, you don't need to be re-taught the information. You need to upgrade your brain.
Brain training rewires the brain so that it can function faster and more efficiently than ever before. This makes thinking, learning, and processing information easier than ever before.
Key categories of cognitive skills
To define cognitive skills, it's important to know that they include a wide variety of abilities. These abilities are necessary for analyzing sounds and images, recalling information, making associations between different pieces of information, and maintaining focus on a given task. Here are the core areas of cognitive skills, all of which can be targeted and strengthened by LearningRx Brain Training programs:
- Processing Speed: This is the speed at which your brain processes information. Faster processing speed means more efficient thinking and learning.
- Auditory Processing: This is the ability to analyze, blend and segment sounds. It's also known as phonemic awareness. Surprisingly, auditory processing is crucial not just for speaking, but also for reading and spelling. This is because when you read, you need to be able to identify the individual and blended sounds that make each word unique and recognizable.
- Visual Processing: This is the ability to perceive, analyze and think in visual images. Visual processing is imperative for reading, remembering, walking, driving, playing sports and literally thousands of other tasks you do every day.
- Long-Term Memory: This is the "library" of facts and knowledge you have accumulated in the past.
- Short-Term Memory: Also called working memory, this skill handles the dynamic job of keeping at the forefront of your mind the information you need to complete immediate and short-term tasks.
- Logic and Reasoning: This is the ability to reason, form concepts, and solve problems using unfamiliar information or new procedures. It enables you to create correlations, solve problems, plan ahead and draw conclusions.
- Attention Skills: There are three types of attention skills. Sustained Attention is the ability to stay focused and on-task for a period of time. Selective Attention is the ability to quickly sort through incoming information and stay focused on one thing in spite of distractions. Divided Attention is the ability to multi-task.
Cognitive Weakness in Any of These Areas Can Make Life More Difficult Than it Needs to Be
We ask our brains to read, think, remember and process information all day, every day, which is why functioning with any cognitive weakness at all can be exhausting. Whether your goal is to thrive in school, at work or in life, a faster, smarter brain simply makes life easier. No one needs to settle for the brain they believe they were born with. Because of the brain's incredible abilities to adapt and grow, anyone can have a faster, smarter brain.
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May 22, 2012
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#77
Thanks for the recent posts. I agree with Man-O-war that was some very interesting info Transpo, the workings of the human mind are a bit of puzzle to say the least.
May 22, 2012
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#78
"No one needs to settle for the brain they believe they were born with."
This part sounds like I need a brain transplant.
"Because of the brain's incredible abilities to adapt and grow, anyone can have a faster, smarter brain."
This part sounds like I need to buy something.
Great article, though.
May 23, 2012
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#79
Thanks for the post PoppaMike, the idea of a brain transplant might have some merit in my case lol.
May 23, 2012
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#80
What has surprised me most about what I've learned in these various "IQ" threads is the apparent role of memory in Chess mastery.
I'm also still curious about what sorts of cognitive abilities are correlated with a natural ability to learn chess. Obviously, learning and study are necessary, but for some, it comes easily. For others, it is a struggle, or never comes despite the effort. Several studies have shown that whatever is measured as IQ has only a weak correlation with the ability to play Chess, but is there anything else that can be measured, and can also predict Chess success? If we give someone an IQ test and they do well, we can predict that they will succeed when studying mathematics, engineering, law, or some other "difficult" subject. Is there some sort of test we could give someone that predicts that they have the sort of brain that would be good at chess playing?
And then, the question becomes, is it worth it? One study I saw compared the art of Chess playing with a radiologist's talent for interpreting MRI images, but both skills required years of study to be honed. That seems to suggest a Chess master could have spent the same amount of effort and developed a talent for radiology, which most people would say would be a better use of time. It's a rather subjective determination, of course, but it is something to consider before setting out with a goal of becoming great at Chess. The fact that it seems to be memory related suggests that there are no shortcuts. You will have to spend an awful lot of time achieving that goal. Of course, if the pursuit itself is pleasurable, then it makes sense to pursue the goal, but if there is a lot of sacrifice and it's not a lot of fun, would it be wiser to pursue something else?
I have an IQ of 92 and I can play chess just fine.