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.
Quoting from [0]
> 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.
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.