> yet it still fails to account for the impenetrable mystery that enshrouds such birds of paradise as Bobby Fischer, who started playing chess at the age of 6. Nine years later, he became the U.S. chess champion.
What's the mystery there? Bobby Fischer was completely obsessed with chess and played and studied it incessantly.
9 years of manic dedication and he "suddenly" got good.
His mother spoke something like 8 languages and his father was a Hungarian physicist who headed the Theoretical Mechanics section of the Naval Ordnance Laboratory and was an expert in elasticity and fluid dynamics.
One famous story about his memory:
"One day when he was in Iceland, Fischer called Frederick Olaffson, Iceland's only Grandmaster. Olaffson's Icelandic-speaking daughter answered the phone and explained her parents were out and would return at suppertime. Fischer understood nothing that was said because he did not know the language. But he listened, apologized and hung up. Later that day Fischer met with another Icelandic player who spoke English. He explained what had happened and repeated every Icelandic word he had heard on the phone, imitating the sounds with perfect inflection. The Icelandic player translated the message word for word for Fischer."
Despite being prodigiously "intelligent", it still took years of dedication to get good, and years more to get really good.
Plenty of average people undoubtedly beat him at chess when he was a kid. When you think about it, it should be obvious that he was always that smart. Just because you're a kid and don't know anything yet doesn't mean you aren't smart. "Smarts" is not the same as skill.
Incidentally, his record as the youngest grandmaster in history lasted for many years until it was broken by Judit Polgar, whose father was explicitly running an experiment with his daughters to prove that prodigies are made, not born. All three daughters became chess experts. He explained that Judit, the youngest, was the most successful because she worked the hardest. She's the only female ever ranked in the top-10 of the "Men's" ratings list.
Since then, many people have gone on to break the youngest-grandmaster record at younger and younger ages. I can only assume that if being a classical composer had as much of a "lobby" as chess (parents pushing their children into it, reward structures), we'd see more Mozarts as well.
The reason it takes HARD work is because even geniuses aren't that genius. If you look at the top level of any objectively measurable and well-subscribed field, there is generally less than a 1% difference between the best, whether it's sprinting, bike racing, weight lifting, or chess.
Knowledge builds on knowledge and skill builds on skill. If you think of it like compound interest, a few percent difference between two individuals at any given moment eventually turns into a huge dividend a decade or three later.
For chess, if you take two average players rated 1500 each, and one improves at 2% "interest" and the other at 4% "interest", in 10 years the former player will be rated in the 1800s (moving from class C to class A), and the latter will be rated in the 2200s (National Master).
To become a Grandmaster (typically 2500+) in 10 years, that's an "interest" rate of about 5.3%.
Meanwhile, a super-genius with a 7% compounding rate who puts in 7 years and then burns out will be stuck at ~2400, International Master level.
Humans occupy a pretty narrow raw talent niche. The best people tend to be pretty tightly clustered together. I'm not smarter than I was when I was young, but I have compounded YEARS of knowledge and experience to the point where I can vastly outperform my younger, smarter self.
IIRC, one of the reason Judit Polgar is so good at chess is because she uses the part of her brain that recognizes faces to remember certain board configurations (ever wonder how people can recognize faces they've seen briefly before so easily?). Her memory was trained from a very young age, but I'm not sure if the "rewiring" of her chess memory was intentional, or if it was just a case of the brain adapting (probably the latter).
They once did an experiment where they sat outside with her and a truck drove past with a particular chessboard configuration on the side. She glanced at it, then recreated the entire board in a few seconds. Then another truck drove past with a different configuration and she couldn't recreate it. She remembered the first one because it was from a game she'd seen before. She'd never seen the second one before so she couldn't remember it.
I think the story comes from GEB, but I've heard that good chess players (not even anything-masters) can recreate boards from actual games from memory much better than non-players, but are no better than non-players when dealing with randomly arrayed pieces. The theory is that they can abstract out the few hints they need to put the majority of the board together when it comes from an actual game, but those abstractions don't exist in a random placement.
As an analogue, you and I can memorize speeches relatively easily in our native tongues (I would suppose it's fair to say we're domain experts in the languages we know), but it's not easy at all to memorize and repeat (a) random strings of sounds, or (b) sentences from languages that don't have any common base with the languages we know.
This is the classic Chase & Simon (1973) article. Similarly, programming skill has been described as being based on the ability to remember abstract solutions (programming schemas e.g. Davies, 1994; Détienne & Soloway, 1990; Soloway, 1986) and applying them. From the perspective of a non-programmer, a program is just a wall of text. I remember someone did the same basic experiment with program fragments (real vs. random) and got similar results.
Experts can write the focal elements (e.g. pseudocode) first and then expand them into a full program. A good example might be the fizzbuzz test, or generating the permutations of a string, you'll have an idea of what the problem involves because you've done it before. If you can't visualize the problem in terms of something familiar, you'll have a hard time taking a top-down (e.g. memory-recall-based) approach.
IM and GM are not awarded by rating and do not approximately equate to any particular ratings. Those titles are awarded by 3 good performances ("norms") in tournaments each, with strict rules about what tournaments qualify. It's common for a 2400+ player not to have an IM title.
To get the titles special tournaments are often set up designed to give the players a chance to get a norm if they do well. If you let any low rated players in, it lowers your chances a lot. It doesn't matter if you win 100% of the time against the lower players, it still prevents you from getting a title because chess "performance ratings" are calculated by an average of your opponent's ratings (modified +400 if you beat them and -400 if you lost).
Also, ratings are not a linear thing. Going from 1500 to 2000 is WAY easier than going from 2400 to 2500. When you do percentage based interest, you're making it easier to go up when you're at a higher rating, which is the wrong way round.
(I have several GM and IM friends who have organized this kind of tournament.)
Correct. That's why I used phrases like "typically" and "International Master level".
The mentioned ratings are part of the requirements, and are STRONGLY associated with those titles.
"The requirements for becoming a Grandmaster are somewhat complex. A player must have an Elo rating of at least 2500 at one time (although they need not maintain this level to keep the title). A rating of 2400 or higher is required to become an International Master. In addition, at least two favorable results (called norms) in tournaments involving other Grandmasters, including some from countries other than the applicant's, are usually required before FIDE will confer the title on a player. There are other milestones a player can achieve to get the title, such as winning the Women's World Championship, the World Junior Championship, or the World Senior Championship. Current regulations may be found in the FIDE Handbook.[12"
For a National Master (depends on country), here is the USCF:
"The United States Chess Federation (USCF) awards the Title of National Master to anyone who achieves a USCF rating of 2200, and the title of Senior Master to anyone who achieves a USCF rating of 2400."
A computer playing at well above 2500 can be said to be playing at Grandmaster level, despite not filing the paperwork for officially conferring the title.
> When you do percentage based interest, you're making it easier to go up when you're at a higher rating, which is the wrong way round.
Compound interest is obviously an oversimplification for learning, which everyone already knows is not a linear process. It's illustrative, however, of the vital point: small differences in a feedback cycle accumulate over time into a much larger absolute difference.
have compounded YEARS of knowledge and experience to the point where I can vastly outperform my younger, smarter self.
I wish I could say the same thing. I sometimes look through code I wrote over 10 years ago, and think to myself "damn, I wish I could hire this guy to help me build this thing today".
What about geniuses that didn't enjoy a supportive environment? Dali's father has an accountant radically opposed to his painting career. They broke relations. At 26 he had surpassed all his teachers in the most prestigious classical art academy and refused to be evaluated by them, consequently he was expelled and got into surrealism.
What's the mystery there? Bobby Fischer was completely obsessed with chess and played and studied it incessantly.
9 years of manic dedication and he "suddenly" got good.
His mother spoke something like 8 languages and his father was a Hungarian physicist who headed the Theoretical Mechanics section of the Naval Ordnance Laboratory and was an expert in elasticity and fluid dynamics.
One famous story about his memory:
"One day when he was in Iceland, Fischer called Frederick Olaffson, Iceland's only Grandmaster. Olaffson's Icelandic-speaking daughter answered the phone and explained her parents were out and would return at suppertime. Fischer understood nothing that was said because he did not know the language. But he listened, apologized and hung up. Later that day Fischer met with another Icelandic player who spoke English. He explained what had happened and repeated every Icelandic word he had heard on the phone, imitating the sounds with perfect inflection. The Icelandic player translated the message word for word for Fischer."
Despite being prodigiously "intelligent", it still took years of dedication to get good, and years more to get really good.
Plenty of average people undoubtedly beat him at chess when he was a kid. When you think about it, it should be obvious that he was always that smart. Just because you're a kid and don't know anything yet doesn't mean you aren't smart. "Smarts" is not the same as skill.
Incidentally, his record as the youngest grandmaster in history lasted for many years until it was broken by Judit Polgar, whose father was explicitly running an experiment with his daughters to prove that prodigies are made, not born. All three daughters became chess experts. He explained that Judit, the youngest, was the most successful because she worked the hardest. She's the only female ever ranked in the top-10 of the "Men's" ratings list.
Since then, many people have gone on to break the youngest-grandmaster record at younger and younger ages. I can only assume that if being a classical composer had as much of a "lobby" as chess (parents pushing their children into it, reward structures), we'd see more Mozarts as well.
The reason it takes HARD work is because even geniuses aren't that genius. If you look at the top level of any objectively measurable and well-subscribed field, there is generally less than a 1% difference between the best, whether it's sprinting, bike racing, weight lifting, or chess.
Knowledge builds on knowledge and skill builds on skill. If you think of it like compound interest, a few percent difference between two individuals at any given moment eventually turns into a huge dividend a decade or three later.
For chess, if you take two average players rated 1500 each, and one improves at 2% "interest" and the other at 4% "interest", in 10 years the former player will be rated in the 1800s (moving from class C to class A), and the latter will be rated in the 2200s (National Master).
To become a Grandmaster (typically 2500+) in 10 years, that's an "interest" rate of about 5.3%.
Meanwhile, a super-genius with a 7% compounding rate who puts in 7 years and then burns out will be stuck at ~2400, International Master level.
Humans occupy a pretty narrow raw talent niche. The best people tend to be pretty tightly clustered together. I'm not smarter than I was when I was young, but I have compounded YEARS of knowledge and experience to the point where I can vastly outperform my younger, smarter self.