Chess is all about memorizing patterns of many kinds to then recognize them and reapply on the spot.
What all great chess players have in common is an amazing memory and the will to think and work on chess all day long (which is more astonishing to me than the memory side).
This line of thinking ends up being applied only to chess, while what you are saying is true about most fields that need human expertise and judgement.
LeBron James is famous for being able to remember every shot he makes. There are cricketers who can tell you ball-by-ball plays from memory. Roger Federer remembers most of his matches. I have seen technical founders have an uncanny ability to 'remember' their code bases and figure out what to change. Boxers remember fights and sparring sessions in crazy detail. Mathematicians can do the same with papers they read ages ago.
I feel that memory and understanding co-evolve. The more you understand something, the better you remember it. The more knowledge you are able to memorize, the better you are able to understand and assimilate and create new ideas.
I am commenting because I have seen several smart people give this line about chess being about memory without realizing their professional expertise involves a great deal of memory too. In my experience, this is probably because when kids play chess, there is always this one kid trying to memorize opening and dazzle other people. Ultimately, those kids do not go on to become grandmasters. But yet, the people who lose to them think they lost because they did not memorize an opening.
"LeBron James is famous for being able to remember every shot he makes"
No he isn't, and no he can't. This is total hyperbole and he has never said he can remember "every shot" he has made. He can identify games from short sections of video, and he can remember certain memorable dunks, etc. But he can't (and no one else can either) remember every shot (including failed shots).
You are right. Upon, rereading - yes, this is hyperbole. I didn't intend that.
My point should have been that he can remember plays when triggered just like a high level chess player can remember positions when triggered. The expert's memory is way better than what ordinary people remember in almost any domain that requires human expertise and judgement.
It's easy to remember something when it has logical structure to you. A King's Indian chess opening line I can rattle off from memory: 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 Bg7 4.e4 d6 5.Nf3 0-0 6.Be2 e5 7.O-O Nc6 8.d5 Ne7 9.Ne1 Nd7 10.Nd3 f5 11.Bd2 Nf6 12.f3 f4 13.c5 g5 etc. Every move in this sequence makes sense. White is playing on the queenside with the c5 break, and black is gaining space on the kingside.
This is a great point! But chess (and other such games like Go) vastly improves your working memory which should translate to improved performance in other tasks like coding.
> Because with Chess you can store the entire search space in memory.
That is incorrect.
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> Chess has approximately 10^120 game paths. These positions comprise the problem search space.
Typically, AI problems will have a very large space, too large to search or enumerate exhaustively.
But as Go has an even larger search space, it makes sense that DeepMind sees it as a bigger challenge.
Effectively, yes. But I attach no greater philosophical significance to that than to say drilling holes is solved because most people can go buy a nice electric drill foR $30-$40. Flying to the moon is solved, too.
Professional chess, you mean; I think that's worth mentioning.
Thar description would put me off entirely: whilst it's a game I've enjoyed and taught to several others (I've helped at a school chess club, for example). My memory is terrible - I play by analysing a tree of possible outcomes, or more casually by strategic feel (positional play) which is far less intense and still enjoyable for me.
To be decent at chess also requires an ability to methodically think through the implications of each possible move.
Although this might seem like stating the obvious, I don't think it necessarily can be taken for granted that everyone is equally strong at this kind of thinking.
Maybe it's just due to impatience, or maybe there are actually differences in people's ability to keep these details straight so that they don't lose track of what they have and haven't considered, or maybe it's something else. Even if it's just impatience, conquering that impatience might be one of the factors in intelligence. And there might even be differences in brains (perhaps anxiety) that could affect how much patience one has for this kind of mental effort.
This is true but as someone who played chess as a child and who was never trained, chess forced me to think ahead. At that time I simply enjoyed the game and frankly did not know all things like patterns etc. All of us who played never read any books about the game, we simply played move by move.
Their dedication and mental stamina (maintaining focus over multiple long games) is a big factor.
Their proficiency is like any game that you might practice to extreme: whether speed-cubing or competitive video games. Getting really good (fast), even for simple games like Tetris, Solitaire or Minesweeper is just training your brain to quickly recognise some very specific patterns.
It’s only a bit surprising because it makes perfect sense if you think about it: memory is where the future happens, not just the past. You need a good working (I guess the human term would be short-term) memory to plan ahead. The better it is, the better plans you can make because you can analyze more futures/longer futures.
I think at casual levels chess is mostly about carefully parrying, till the opponent makes a mistake, perhaps alertness is more important than memorising patterns at that level..
There is also the The Theory of Steinitz, that says that one can only win in chess as a result of opponent's mistakes.
You recognize mistakes by memorizing patterns. There is no level in chess where you don’t memorize patterns. Maybe in the lower levels the patterns are simple enough that you don’t consider them patterns, but forks, skewers, etc. are still patterns.
What all great chess players have in common is an amazing memory and the will to think and work on chess all day long (which is more astonishing to me than the memory side).