I came across an great article recently. Thought why not share it here. It's a must read. Tell us what you think. So here it is....
Mind Games: Who is Doing the Playing?
Discoveries on consciousness have inspired the Norwegian philosopher Rune Vik-Hansen to forge a new view on development of chess skills. Challenging the current pedagogical climate, which claims that talent is insignificant and exposure to material a magic formula, he clarifies why blunders in chess are caused by a lack of interplay between consciousness and mind. Treatise with summary.
Summary/Abstract
Born out of recent findings from the field of consciousness and mind, the article explains that chess playing is based upon a fine interplay between a mind subconsciously triggering moves, and a well disciplined consciousness knowing what to keep and what to discard. The highly popular opinion that chess playing is done solely by a conscious self is challenged.
Disputing the concept of “conscious memory”, it is shown that that one cannot remember material by acts of volition, and that development of chess skills cannot be explained by concepts revolving around consciousness.
The article takes to task the current pedagogical claims that talent is of no significance and that exposure to chess material will bring the aspiring player equally far, and also the prevalent understanding that passion for, taking an interest in and believing in what you do are important components in improvement, chess or otherwise. On the contrary, the text demonstrates the significance of innate ability, and that passion and interest merely can direct our attention towards certain fields of study, but that acquiring skills involves different mental processes than these.
Avoiding blunders being a major component in development of chess skills, they are here explained as caused by a flawed interplay between consciousness and mind, based upon the distinction between seeing and perceiving. A possible solution to the problem is suggested.
A closer look is taken at the highly popular concept in chess lingua, “pattern recognition”. By pinpointing functional as well as conceptual problems, it is shown that the concept does not meaningfully lend itself to explain chess playing. Specific idiosyncrasies between patterns and structures are scrutinized to show that the conceptual problems run deeper than mere semantics. The fundamental difference is argued by looking at how these two relate to each other, and how they are expressed in chess discourse and chess literature. Since no formal definition of “pattern” in chess exists, it is impossible effectively to meaningfully communicate “pattern recognition” as a workable concept to explain the development of chess skills. To then explain chess playing and support the claim that the idea of “pattern recognition” is highly problematic, “exformation” is introduced as a new concept to chess discourse, thinking and communication.
Upon closure, chess playing is compared with judgment in the field of morality, trying to explain that just as in morality, chess players constantly encounter and have to deal with situations (positions) never before encountered.
Finally, it is offered why many present methods of study will not seriously improve or develop chess skills. In context of the undertaken analysis, Kotov’s method is suggested for chess improvement, and it is explained why it works.
Development of Chess Skills – A New Understanding
In light of recent discoveries on consciousness and mind, a whole new framework regarding development of chess skills and chess playing has to be forged, and the present discussion takes as its point of departure Jonathan Rowson’s well written and thought-provoking article from NIC 2008/05. Rowson addresses the role of talent and also the relationship between opening work and general chess ability, explaining it by “conscious memorizing” and the more familiar “pattern recognition”. Our analysis will revolve around these concepts, revealing a different position than Rowson's as quoted later below.
Introduction
The premises for challenging Rowson’s point of view are based upon The User Illusion, Tor Nørretranders’ outstanding and still relevant book about consciousness from 1991 and we will first have a look at some basic premises for chess acquisition and learning.
Research (Kornhuber, Deecke, Libet, later reproduced and published in Brain, 1991) has shown that any apparent act of volition normally begins subconsciously. Experiments have shown that, by changes in electrical fields, the brain prepares actions before we become conscious of them. It takes from a half to a second and a half of cerebral activity (evoked response and Bereitschaftspotenzial and other fancy phenomena) to become conscious of what is going on “back there”. It takes time to create consciousness (to become conscious) just at it takes time to organize the millions of sense impressions, separating the relevant ones from the irrelevant to create our unified and coherent perception of the world and the half second is just enough time to do that. The distinction between what we are conscious of and not might be called “the interface of consciousness” which illustrates the lack of transparency of the human mind. Illustrative might be an analogy from the world of computers; what you see on screen is only a fraction of what is going on beneath the surface.
Even though we have no idea how immaterial consciousness may arise from material processes, it certainly does, and remains one of the great mysteries, if not the greatest, along with quantum mechanics. We might feel and experience our decisions as conscious but strictly speaking, in the strong sense, they are not, since consciousness itself never triggers impulses but only can relate to impulses triggered by deciding to “veto” them or not. The usual way to go about it is to “veto”, or abort impulses that will lead to unwanted, awkward, unfortunate, embarrassing or immoral actions, thus saving the “free will” in a negative sense since it does not purposefully or intentionally initiate or trigger impulses/actions as traditionally understood.
The problem with the notion that man consciously can act on will or by volition, is that if one finds oneself in a vacuum, figuratively speaking, it is in principle impossible to stringently give an account of why some actions are to be preferred to others since all possibilities in some sense might be considered equal. This implies that decisions are “conscious” only in a weak sense, meaning that “conscious decisions” exist only in the veto, and not in the triggering.
People, of course, if perceptive, are consciously aware what impulses are triggered (body language or physical movements), but most of what’s going on inside of us, passes without involving consciousness at all. Consciousness might be said to be in the receiving end, so to speak, of cerebral processes, resembling what our German chess playing friend uses to say. “What have we here?” This also solves the problem of choosing among an infinite number of equally held possibilities; it is far easier to choose among possibilities already presented to consciousness, since we would already have a penchant or be more prone to some than to others. These, apparently, quite abstract findings, certainly have some revolutionary, concrete implications regarding human life in general and chess playing specifically.
Conscious memory
Regarding the extent of the relationship between opening work and general chess ability, we begin our discussion by quoting Rowson from p.83-84 (italics ours):
“You may think you are learning opening moves, but while you are consciously memorizing variations, you are also subconsciously learning new structures, feeling new squares, picking up new patterns and ideas and most of these things probably makes you stronger in a more general sense.”
There are several quite confusing and problematic issues (see italics) in this quote and to start out; there is no such thing as conscious memorizing, due to the fact that memory and cerebral activity are (subconsciously) independent of consciousness and possible acts of volition. This is the reason why people are hard pressed to explain why they forget something; their consciousness being “denied access” to the processes that makes one forget. Strictly speaking, it is not the “I” that forget but subconscious processes referred to by the pronoun me. Forgetting “on purpose” more resembles repressing or suppressing than forgetting in the strict sense. With regard to memory; nobody forgets things “on purpose”, though many of us probably are familiar with sins of omission. This means neither remembering nor forgetting are controlled by the will, or any other intentional/volitional activity, but that sins of omission are made possible because impulses already subconsciously triggered are thereupon aborted before running to action. When speaking in mentalistic terms, it is of paramount importance to distinguish the different concepts to avoid unfortunate implications later on. What might be meant by “conscious memorizing”, is that one is (intentionally, like “desire”, or “urge”, not necessarily involving some kind of volition,) set on remembering what is read, that one entertains a wish to remember what is studied, however, memory works differently and independently of these kind of mental acts. Purporting that memory is conscious, has some rather serious implications, which Rowson seems to be unaware of. Consciousness is often confused with will, as are desires and urges as well. Contrary to urges and desires, acts of volition are often associated with an agent, who, out of nowhere, is able to act on purpose or intention, implying that if there is something we should remember (opening theory, our loved ones‟ birthdays etc.) there would be no reasons, not to.
World class chess players are said to have a strong memory but there seems to be no reason to assume that they are more “conscious”, in the sense of being stronger willed to remember, than lesser blessed wood-pushers. Differently put, chess players, irrespective of strength, have the same “level” or “amount” of consciousness, which again, is different from “presence of mind”. A certain Fischer, for example, was renowned for his memory, writing down all of his 22 blitz games at Herceg-Novi in 1970 after playing, and this has nothing to do with him “wanting” to remember, for natural reasons, the games “stuck” in his memory.
There are, of course, different memory “tricks”, which in their turn, paradoxically enough, also must be remembered, like making up a story or a line of associations, of the things one are to remember, like shopping lists or names, but when it comes to remembering chess theory, main lines, subvariations, all their ramifications, different structures etc. these are simply too ineffective to work properly.
Memory and the ability to remember are subconscious and take place regardless of our knowing, i.e. consciousness. If memory were conscious, there would be no reason as to why we would have problems remembering our analyses, preparations, openings or the whole series of Informators, Yearbooks, magazines as well, since “conscious memory” plays on the analogy of a computer, consisting of different partitions with files which our RAM, i.e. conscious (short term) memory, would easily enough access, which is not the case. If memory were conscious, chess playing and acquisition of chess skills would partly be reduced to a mechanic exercise, where the only thing to do was at will to load the memory with chess “stuff” which we thereafter would access “downloading” the relevant files. Also, memory tends to fade with age, which would not be a problem if memory were based on acts of volition, since we at our own will, could reproduce any chess material whatsoever.
However, we know just too well that repeated studies is necessary to remember games, variations, lines, fragments, themes, bits and piece etc. Very rarely do things immediately stick to memory no matter how strongly we want to remember it all the very first time. So, our first conclusion is that memory works subconsciously.
Acquisition of Chess Skills
Moving forward, regarding development of chess ability, Rowson (p.84) goes on to explain Karjakin’s and Magnus Carlsen’s acquisition of chess skill more by their exposure to games, positions, structures etc. than innate talent or ability, which, incidentally, also is in accord with the pedagogic spirit of the times, underestimating the significance of inborn talent.
Karjakin and Magnus’ talent (i.e. their brains’ ability to absorb and assimilate what it is exposed to) plays a far greater role than Rowson seems to admit. Without the ability to absorb or assimilate what one is exposed to, it does not matter how much or how many times one is exposed to different games, structures etc. Rowson’s point of view reduces chess learning to a rather mechanical exercise and also implies that far more players far more easily would become far stronger than is actually the case, simply by being exposed to chess material. If Rowson is correct, we would be hard pressed to explain how younger players come to be stronger than older ones with far more experience and having had the time to assimilate and absorb infinitely more chess than young prodigies. True, work can do much, but without talent one will forever sing the song of mediocrity. What characterizes talent is a certain ability or capacity to much better exploit, apply and take advantage of a smaller amount of material than lesser gifted players might. Talent is extremely effective use of presented material, and this is why both Karjakin and Magnus are as strong as they are at such a tender age. What characterizes talent, prodigies and whiz kids, is the ability to absorb and assimilate material amazingly fast upon which the brain generalizes and then produces one brilliant move after another, which is impossible to explain if exposure to chess was the main component. Differently put: full conscious transparency with unlimited access to information would seem to render talent superfluous and unnecessary. Rowson is right when quoted as saying “probably” since nobody knows or has not even the remotest idea about how the brain generalizes or processes the absorbed material for the simple reason that consciousness is “denied access” to these inner processes.
Who is Doing the Playing?
Research (Kornhuber, Deecke et.al) showed that thinking, generally and more specifically, is independent of consciousness and acts of volition (not be confused with wishes, urges and desires) and that most of the information passing through our central nervous system is subconscious but we might be able to direct our attention or awareness. The thinking processes, the material and the preparation themselves are all subconscious, i.e. outside our conscious control, with the implication that we cannot think “what we want”, and having access only to the results of these processes (Julian Jaynes &William James). The brain silently works in the background feeding our consciousness with different suggestions, some good, others bad, some brilliant, others just horrible, which is the task of consciousness to keep or to discard. Our brain per se has no notion of quality, consciousness does, which means that chess playing (and human activities in general) is left in the hands of the fine-tuned interplay between conscious and subconscious processes; knowing what to keep and what to dispatch among all the suggestions, whims and ideas the brain comes up with. If this were not the case, we could conjure up brilliances in all walks of life, thinking brilliant thoughts solving all our problems, on and off the board, simply by acts of volition.
Most of the time when playing, consciousness is not involved at all. If chess playing were conscious, as a logical implication, with all information readily accessible through the eyes that sees the board and the memorizing of chess material and since we would clearly know when we were about to make a bad move or blunder, we would never make mistakes since no-one on purpose, intentionally or wilfully, blunders. Why would they? Simply by acts of volition, we could decide to play the best moves as we would have full overview of what is going on since consciousness is transparent, and the position on the board is there for everyone to see. However, this is not the case as consciousness never triggers moves, the brain does. So, when does consciousness arrive, we hear you ask, since you obviously are aware that you are playing a game of chess. Well, consciousness, humming away in the background, might be said to function as a “blunder-check”, to use Fritz lingua, quite lightly monitoring our play before making a move, making sure that no pieces are left hanging or put en prise.
Of paramount importance is to recognise the corollary of thinking being subconscious as this seems to undermine the notion and understanding not only of who is doing the playing but also how this playing is explained.
Traditionally, chess games are explained and moves attempted justified in the analyses after the game where the players try to give reasons or motifs for their choice of moves and this is usually the order of the day; moves first played – and then explained.
In the light of our new knowledge, doesn’t this strike you as rather peculiar? Strictly speaking, we would think it should be the other way around; first we explain why certain moves are to be played and then the brain triggers the requested moves, right? If we could have an ongoing discussion with ourselves during a game (silently!), explaining what moves to play and which to avoid, we would never make bad, neither dubious moves nor even blunders, why would we? If we could give perfectly viable and reasonable explanations for every move we make, why would our brain then not produce or come up with moves best fitting the explanation? The Russian proverb; “We are all satisfied with our reason, but not with our position”, captures this apparent paradox nicely. Still, our experience is that we quite often make weak moves and even blunder from time to time.
A problem with our current everyday understanding is that consciousness does not create its own content and therefore needs a source to feed it something it can relate to. The brain is this source and consciousness might then conjure or concoct explanations to moves after being triggered, while logically speaking, the explanation for moves should come first, making chess the rational game it is perceived to be. The brain does actually not need to be able to articulate why certain moves are to be preferred or triggered, the sheer ability to produce moves based on experience and knowledge suffices. In blitz and rapid games, where consciousness is almost absent, these kind of games are merely perception and intuition, this is even more apparent since there is no time during play to ponder possible explanations before a move is to be triggered.
Who is blundering?
A “blunder” might be perceived as some sort of spontaneously ill-conceived move- suggestions, impulses to moves which would be detrimental to one’s position if not aborted before running to action. However, we are not talking about strategically weak moves on a general level, like misplacing a piece, which might occur due to lack of general chess ability and understanding. What we are talking about, are moves seemingly, literally, occurring out of nowhere, so to speak, moves there apparently are no sensible reasons to play. The key question is; if consciousness does not do the playing, then, who does the blundering? Someone or something must be responsible for players blundering, and who or what part of us might that be?
As mentioned earlier, a light consciousness monitors while playing, whereas full consciousness announces itself the moment a chess player blunders, which his/her body language just too well illustrates. Note the order; we never encounter players saying in advance that “in ten moves I will blunder my Rook on c5”. On the other hand, how often do we not hear about the ones that actually did blunder their Rook on c5 and THEN became aware of it? We have seen them, haven’t we? The howlers? Even super-GMs commit them. All of us commit or make blunders, but some seem more prone or liable than others. (No names being mentioned to protect the innocent) So, what are blunders and how to explain them, since nobody blunders on purpose? We have seen them, haven’t we? The amateurs and professionals alike in the aftermath of a game, trying to explain their blunder, shaking their heads in disbelief, scratching their brows, sighing while desperately trying to come up with a rational explanation.
This time, only briefly can we touch upon the “whys” and the “hows” of blunders but as a general pointer, we might say that blunders occur due to lack of interplay between brain and consciousness and seem to have only three possible explanations:
1) Taking in only parts of the position due to lack of adequate vision, focussing only on certain parts of the board.
2) We take in the whole position but something happens while processing the material resulting in apparently spontaneous and inexplicable blunders.
3) Even when seeing the whole board, our brain does not take it all in.
The first explanation might be the most clear-cut, implying that inadequate focus is lack of information and thus absence of interplay between the brain and a conscious mind able to abort the impulse before running to blunder, i.e. action. Your brain has not informed you that Rc5 is or will be hanging, you don’t see it and thus blunder. Had you been informed, you would have seen it, and perhaps be able to stop or abort the impulse before blundering.
Mistakes in this department might be caused both due to fatigue but also due to lack of general chess ability and experience. Differently put: this kind of mistakes might also strike quite strong GMs as well, but still to a lesser degree than amateurs and having more to do with GMs being humans than GMs. GMs might fall victim to this kind of blunders due to fatigue rather than lack of proficiency, while amateurs might suffer from it both because of fatigue and lack of chess skills.
Regarding the second explanation, blunders are something we try to avoid, so if blunders have anything to do with what we take in, why would the brain process the material in such a way that it leads to blunders?
This seems to happen only if there is a problem with the “wiring”, so to speak, which is conceivable if not too frequent. An analogy might be when people say one thing and the listener hears something completely different or making highly unlikely or unreasonable interpretations of what is being said. This way of misinterpreting or misprocessing information, has nothing to do with our consciousness; we are in no position to wilfully “choose” to misinterpret or misprocess the information as the information is already misinterpreted by the “wiring” and then informs the consciousness. Consciousness does not create its own content, and its sources are either external (sense impressions) or internal (imagination). Purposefully or intentionally misinterpreting information might make for a brilliant Monty Python sketch but seems too ineffective and tiresome a way of communicating with and relating to other people, not to mention playing chess where the goal is to mate your opponent. Why would you want to cock things up for yourself?
The plot thickens when arriving at the third explanation, valid for both amateurs and professionals, raising a timely question: how it is possible to blunder when seeing the whole board with our own two eyes, right? Wrong! This reason for blundering is closely connected to our point about the order in which chess is played and explained and research shows that only a fraction of all information passing through our eyes is perceived by consciousness implying that we might see the whole board and still not perceive it. This means that there might be chunks of information your brain does not take in or misses even when your eyes physically are seeing the board. How else to explain blunders when seeing the board knowing perfectly well where the pieces can and cannot go? Amateurs and professionals literally perceive different boards even if they see the same one and a pertinent question is why? The answer is simply that the minds of professionals are trained to perceive more information when they look at positions than amateurs’ minds are. This is so since perception has nothing to do with possible acts of volition. We might direct our attention towards what we want to see, even though wanting is not conscious either, but we are in no position to control what our brain perceives as the brain works independently of what we think it should perceive, think etc. Unforced or unmotivated errors might be described as some kind of “bug” in the “system”, if not a collapse in some quantum mechanic wavelength function, at least it seems that some kind of sudden, spontaneous cerebral short circuit has taken place, and this just happens because chess playing is done subconsciously and humans are still fallible. The more exercised the brain, the more of the position it can take in, and the more is perceived, the smaller is the chance for triggering impulses leading to blunders.
Blunders happen simply because impulses prove stronger than our ability to abort them and might be said to arise due to lack of interplay between brain and consciousness. Precisely because of the interface of consciousness chess players can be held only partially responsible for their moves, although to what extent is an open question even though there is a widespread misconception of chess being a game without “luck”. In this respect, chess might be said to be a game of metaphysical luck, since chess players, not being responsible for their wiring, neither can know what their brains might come up with on the next move nor if they will be able to stop themselves when about to commit a blunder or a bad move.
As long as there are factors outside our control, depending on whether they turn out to our advantage or not and as long as these factors cannot definitely be established as lack of chess ability, chess is partially a game of luck. If one blunders because of too narrow a vision, then this faculty needs to be exercised and if blundering does not depend on what is taken in, it is far more difficult to explain but still possible drastically to reduce the blunder rate.
Towards the end of the article we will discuss a foolproof method for fighting impulsiveness and blunder tendencies.
Pattern recognition or How is chess played?
Chess players, chess authors and chess psychologists attempt to explain chess playing by the concept of “pattern recognition” which at first may sound plausible. However, closer examination reveals serious conceptual problems needing to be dealt with.
We begin by addressing what might be called “functional” issues, i.e. problems linked to constructively applying the concept of “pattern recognition‟ to explain development of chess skills and chess playing. Secondly, we will have a closer look at more pure conceptual problems inherent in the notion of pattern recognition. Hopefully, we will also discover that the functional problems are closely linked to the conceptual problems (If the concept is unclear, how can it be applied?).
Functional problems
We are told that GMs need to learn a 100 000 patterns and that familiarity with patterns and the number of patterns known are what distinguishes GMs from IMs, IMs from FMs and FMs from more ordinary players. The number appears to be rather random and why not 50 000, 75 839, 212 576 or 500 001? How are numbers of patterns delimited and measured? Do GMs count each and every pattern learnt? Are number of patterns linked to the GMs rating? Are lower rated GM from 2500-2600 familiar with fewer patterns than GMs from 2600-2850?
An instructive question is first to ask what a pattern is with the intuitive understanding defining “pattern” as the logical equivalent of “piece configurations” (i.e. “positions”), i.e. how pieces on a board are placed, located or situated which seems to make the acquisition even more problematic: how many patterns does a GM have to acquire a day? A week? A month? A year? How long time to spend on each and every position? Number of patterns a day probably depends on how fast one can set up different positions either manually or on a computer screen. With 10 patterns a day it takes 27 years to acquire 100 000 patterns. With 20 patterns a day we are down to 14 years. This seems to be an impossibly cumbersome way of acquiring GM strength and it also makes it hard to explain how young super-GMs, like Magnus Carlsen, (GM at 13, learning chess at age 8, means 20 000 patterns a year and 55 patterns a day), at such a tender age can be much stronger than older GMs having had much more time to acquire far more patterns or, do different GMS know different sets of pattern,
some more useful than others reflected in the rating differences? Are there inventory lists of the necessary patterns? Since no human has the full oversight of all possible patterns, how do players know they are acquiring useful patterns and not wasting time? If GMs were better players due to knowing more patterns, logically, the way to beat a GM is to get non-pattern positions on the board, since this will exclude much of what the GM has on his personal “hard drive”.
If pattern recognition is how chess playing at GM level is done, we are hard pressed how to explain why GMs performance decreases when growing older. One would think that patterns acquired, still are in their brains, so if patterns are a way of playing chess, why wouldn’t GMs bring back every relevant pattern to the game they are playing and thus keeping their performance still at peak, which would be possible if memory were conscious? Why does older GMs‟ performance decrease? Is it because other cerebral factors not accounted for interfere with the GM‟s ability to reproduce relevant patterns during a game? Another problem is that “acquiring patterns” as a means to GM strength, seems to reduce chess to a mechanical exercise making it difficult to explain why not more players become GMs, IMs or FMs? Does the GM-title come as an effect of having an adequate amount of patterns, like a fixed formula: 100 000 patterns = GM?
This clearly illustrates that chess playing is more than just mechanically reproducing patterns and it is impossible to determine how much of the chess playing is pattern recognition and what is ability to spontaneously produce high quality moves.
Besides, what is the point of recognizing a pattern if your brain triggers an impulse that blunders your rook on your very next move? Pattern recognition seems to apply only in the moment of seeing something you remember resembling something you have seen earlier, but this is only half the story since you still need to make moves. You cannot lean back on your chair, saying confidently to yourself: “Oh, yes, I have seen this before, the game Krapinshzkavoshvili-Babulovsky, Leningrad ch. 1943”, and settle with that. You still need to make a move, and if your brain triggers a bad move, the value of your pattern recognition is in a split second reduced to zero, which seems to indicate that the brain‟s ability to trigger moves, works independently of the ability to remember patterns. Remembering patterns appears to be a more passive faculty while triggering moves seems the opposite emerging as more important. The brain is able to trigger moves even in positions never before encountered and if recognizing patterns is the key, this would seem impossible as chess is reduced to a game of memory mechanics.
Finally, there seems to be too many problems linked to the use of the concept of pattern recognition to give it the explanatory force it traditionally is granted.
Conceptual problems
The second question concerns what a pattern is, i.e. what defines a pattern and how do we come to know one?
When teaching children in school the concept of “pattern”, often they are handed sheets with different figures, numbers, images etc. where the point is to teach them to see how these identically repeat themselves infinitely. Other examples of “patterns‟ might be knitting (probably not too many GMs into that!) where the pattern is a motif for a sweater or a pullover. To make something a pattern, repetition seems to be a necessary inherent component, if not, how to tell a pattern from a discrepancy? A key question is if this definition of pattern meaningfully lends itself to understanding chess positions or if we are talking about something different?
What is striking when using the word “pattern” in connection with chess, is the apparent abyss of discrepancy between the two; Pattern; rigor, order, uniformity, stringency, transparency and discipline; Chess: chaos, obscurity, disorder, havoc, diversity and uniqueness. How to reconcile the two?
What apparently fascinates people about chess is the endless variety of positions, never encountering the same one. Since when did you encounter two identical positions? The notion of “pattern recognition‟ appears highly problematic when it comes to applying it to chess positions due to the fact that no position repeats itself infinitely and that no player will live long enough to see if a position repeats itself and thus be able to establish a pattern.
Are we talking about a different pattern for every new position? A single position can never constitute a pattern as long as repetition is an inherent component of the concept, so how can there be anything resembling a pattern as long as every position is uniquely different and diverse from the previous one? Due to the diversity of chess, there will always be a principal problem of formalising a pattern definition comprising the infinitely occurring unique positions while not violating the notion of identical repetition. To make this rather abstract theorising more concrete, let us chip in an example that should be familiar; the fianchetto position; i.e. White King on g1, Rf1, Bg2 and pawns on f2, g3 and h2.
To many, this configuration of pieces would appear to be a pattern since this specific configuration is known to repeat itself numerous times in different kinds of positions.
The fundamental problem, of course, is for the sake of the argument, how we come to learn or know when a position contains or makes up what psychologists denominate as a "pattern". Example; you encounter a position for the first time and a GM says to you; "This is a pattern position". You say; "Really, and what exactly constitutes the pattern?" It seems that there must be something going on already before we are to be able to understand or grasp what a pattern is. The GM can point at the pawns, squares etc, telling us that "together...they make up a pattern" ("Together" meaning what?) but, if we have absolutely no idea, what the GM is talking about, how are we mechanically going to understand?
To understand that isolated pawns constitute a pattern, first we must know that they are both weak and strong simultaneously(!) and only sang-froid would enable us to understand when they are weak and when they are strong and since this may diverse endlessly, there seems to be no way to formalize this as a pattern comprising a definition applicable to all IQP-positions. It is simply impossible, consciously, to sit down at a chessboard and each and every time say: "Okay, this is a pattern. It looks so and so. I have to remember this". Then you encounter another position, completely different from the one just seen. How to generalize this completely different position into the same pattern definition as the previous one, the previous position being different as well? It is impossible, since the positions are uniquely different.
There are specific problems precisely defining what a pattern is and when a position is said to constitute a pattern. The perceptive reader would have noted the term “pattern” seems to comprise the whole position and not just parts or fragments of it, which makes it difficult to pinpoint when a pattern occurs, since a position might change completely by the simple change of the position of a piece. Moving a pawn results in a completely new position, since the whole position must be considered when evaluating what move to make. Will the change in the position of a pawn imply merely a change in an already existing pattern within a position or are we talking about a completely different pattern due to a completely new position? Where do we draw the line and how to settle this? This exact problem we face when it comes to learning from so called classic games; all chess players are told to study the classic games of the greats, Morphy, Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Botvinnik, Fischer,
Karpov, Kasparov, Kramnik etc. to “learn” from their games. The only question is what one is to look for and what is one to learn? As the positions constantly change while playing through the games, how or when would we know we have a pattern position before us, if we not already knew what constituted a pattern position? It appears to be some sort of the same paradox we face in one of Plato’s dialogues; How to search when not knowing at all what you are looking for? How to search for something you do not know at all? If finding it, how will you know that this is the thing that you did not know?
As we have seen, thinking and learning are subconscious and assuming these premises are true, they seem to implicate serious conceptual problems to if the notion of “pattern recognition” holds up or not. Both due to the problem of formalizing an all comprising definition of “pattern” and because the acquisition of chess knowledge is subconscious, as a corollary, there is no way to tell if the brain perceives different positions as patterns or as something else but psychologists try to make it look like a mechanical, conscious process making the acquisition look more straight forward than it actually is. Pattern thinking is a fairly easy and straight forward way to try to explain human behaviour, thinking in categories etc. to make it easier for us to adapt to and orientate ourselves in new (foreign) surroundings but, strictly speaking, it does not explain the real course of events. The only way tentatively to explain a supposed acquisition of patterns is to reverse the process; what is called "pattern" (definition problems aside) is something established only after the so called patterns are learnt, not in advance, like a recipe to be followed. The brain learns chess subconsciously and we rationalize and justify what happens to the best of our abilities to make is possible to make recipes and write instruction works etc. to learn more quickly.
It is only after a player have become a GM, being presented a number of positions, we can say that "Oh, yes, this is a pattern", but when learning it, we do not know it is a pattern so a pertinent question is; how and when exactly does chaos transform into pattern in the chess mind? If chess learning were conscious, more players than what actually is the case would have been stronger. Learning chess resembles Wittgenstein's idea on how to learn to follow a rule; there must be something going on underlying our ability to understand rule bound instructions before we know the rule, and it is the same with chess.
Pattern vs. Structure
Having discussed functional and conceptual problems linked to “pattern recognition” regarding acquisition of chess skills, we arrive at another concept having sneaked into Rowson‟s quote, viz. structure, apparently not adequately distinguishing betwixt the two and we will try to show what the difference might amount to.
Contrary to “patterns”, “structures” might be defined as something created from a number of interconnecting parts, in this context, pawns, pieces and squares. Usually, when speaking of structures, one does not have in mind positions in their entirety, but a certain smaller configuration or distribution of forces occurring at certain delimited sectors of the board within positions as a whole. Castlings, fianchettos or distribution of pawns (pawn chains) might serve as examples of such structures consisting of interconnected parts being arranged in certain ways irrespective of piece configuration and distribution of forces elsewhere and might recur without positions as surrounding, all comprising contexts identically having to repeat themselves. Even if we have only remnants or fragments of broken or shattered structures, instantly, we recognize the contours of an intact structure within positions as a whole regardless of what the rest of the board looks like.
In short; structures might repeat themselves from game to game, without the whole context within which they occur having to identically and infinitely repeat itself, which would have to be the case if we were to talk about patterns since patterns more seem to suggest a closed totality delimited by the 64 squares. Chess positions seem too diverse for any regularity in the strict sense and too fluctuating to establish if positions in their entirety will repeat themselves frequently enough for us to know if we can speak of “patterns”. “Patterns” per se, seem to involve something more than just the chunks making up a structure, a sort of framework to fill out or “around” the interconnecting parts constituting structures. The observant reader might by now also have noticed that structures, consisting of smaller parts or fragments within a greater totality, naturally will repeat themselves more often than whole positions which it takes much more to repeat and which do happen extremely rarely.
In light of the above, we suspect chess psychologists, chess authors and players to confuse “patterns” with structures where the fine distinction lies in the fact that patterns are regularities recurring infinitely while structures might be interconnected parts or elements occurring within the most diverse positions without implying identical repetition as their corollary. In other words, when seeing a broken castled position with pawns on f7, f6 and
h7/h6, we immediately spot the possibility of a Knight on f5 this having more to do with recognizing a structure on a restricted part of the board rather than an all comprising pattern.
The practical relevance of this apparent subtle distinction is that chess is a concrete game, each and every single, unique position needs to be approached and addressed on its own accord and not based upon some generalized knowledge of structures. No matter how many structures, themes or motifs you might recognize or are familiar with, the mind still needs to produce moves correctly corresponding to the position on the board. Familiarity with themes, motifs or structures might facilitate the speed of calculation but still, the ability to produce concrete, correct chess moves appears to be more important as otherwise we would be hard pressed to explain how super strong young GMs like Carlsen or Karjakin so well handle and play positions never before encountered having had less time than more experienced (by age) players to be acquainted with all these new structures, motifs and themes. In short: playing chess on autopilot drawing on a database of generalized knowledge is impossible, even in blitz games.
Another argument undermining the notion of “pattern recognition” as a means of playing and learning chess, is the chess discourse, i.e. the way chess is communicated and talked about. The chess discourse seems to suggest that “pattern recognition” is not the most accurate term when attempting to describe acquisition of chess proficiency as on different DVDS or books (opening, middle game or endgame, periodicals, columns, or yearbooks) we never encounter the term “pattern”, only “structure”, which should make a bell or two ring. We are never “dealing with different/identical patterns”, but with “the different/identical structures”. We “weaken our structure”, not our “pattern”. We “change the structure of the position”, not “the pattern of the position”. We decide “to expand our structure”, not our “pattern” and finally, we are “ruining someone’s pawn structure”, not their “pawn pattern”.
To round off our discussion of the difference between “patterns” and “structures”, we conclude that due to functional and conceptual problems our analysis seems to suggest that “pattern recognition” more appears to be an idealized simplicity, a mere mental abstraction, rather than a concept apt to explain acquisition of chess skills paving the way for the timely question; how to clearly define what a pattern is and if “structure recognition” is acquired by playing and studying chess, how does “pattern recognition” relate to this?
Exformation
To explain chess playing abilities and to show that the notion of pattern recognition is more than just apparently problematic, we will introduce a concept new to chess literature and chess thinking,
Effective communication might be said to depend on a shared body of knowledge between the persons communicating. In using words, sounds and gestures the speaker has deliberately thrown away a huge body of information, though it remains implied. This shared context is called exformation, a term meaning explicitly discarded information coined by Tor Nørretranders in his book The User Illusion published in English 1998. Exformation is everything we do not actually say but have in our heads when, or before, we say anything at all - whereas information is the measurable, demonstrable utterance we actually come out with. If someone is talking about cows; what is said will be unintelligible unless the person listening has some prior idea what a cow is, what it is good for, and in what context one might encounter one. From the information content of a message alone, there is no way of measuring how much exformation it contains. Thought, argues Nørretranders, is in fact a process of chucking away information, and this detritus (happily labelled exformation) appears instrumental in automatic behaviours of expertise (riding a bicycle, playing the piano), and which is therefore the most precious to us as people.
Exformation, in our context, might be described as the sum total of chess knowledge in our heads when or before making a move and which is actually not being played out at all though it remains implied. When chess players study games, books, magazines and watch chess DVDS etc. they are building the foundation of chess knowledge upon which exformation is made possible. During play, there is no way of telling how much exformation (i.e. sum total of background information) each and every move contains, i.e. when playing it is impossible from the moves themselves to read off the underlying exformation context, the only thing we can relate to is moves actually made. Effective chess playing and communication might therefore be explained as depending on a shared body of chess knowledge between players, and just as in the example with cows, talk about patterns would be unintelligible if we did not already possess some kind of a prior idea of what a pattern is, what they are good for and in what context they might be encountered. Regarding our previous discussion on how these patterns are to be defined and acquired, this brings us right back to square a1; since no precise definition exists, it is in principle impossible to meaningfully communicate “pattern recognition” as part of chess players’ shared body of knowledge which further renders the concept even more problematic as a means for producing chess moves.
Chess thinking and playing might thus be explained as subconscious chucking away information, just like a statue is carved out of a marble block, though in our case the information explicitly discarded leaves us with moves which might be said to arise out of the shared context called exformation. Subconscious chucking away information is exactly what makes automatic behaviour possible since, if brought to the attention of our time consuming consciousness, it would render the activity anything but automatic. Contrary to automatic behaviour, like riding a bicycle or playing the piano, chess might at best be described as semi-automatic as chess players constantly need to consider the moves of their opponent before deciding on what to do next. However, it appears that the extent of automation depends on the resistance although automatic play comes even more to the fore in blitz or rapid games where thinking time is severely limited.
Judgment
Not surprisingly, chess playing ability might further be said to have strong similarities to a phenomenon known as moral judgment associated with Aristotle’s discussion of phronesis. Reacting against what he perceived to be Plato’s belief that virtue consists solely in the knowledge of general principles, Aristotle protested that moral action depends on exercise of judgment in applying these principles to particular circumstances. Judgment itself, he stressed, is not an activity governed by general rules; instead, it must always respond to the peculiarities of the given situation. Thus, no one can acquire judgment by being imparted some kind of formal doctrine but can be learned only through practice by doing just actions. The point of judgment (morally and otherwise) is to enable us confidently to encounter situations never before encountered (since it is impossible to practice all kinds of situations one might end up in).
The perceptive reader will have noticed that due to the diversity of chess, chess players most of the time find themselves in positions or situations never before encountered and the crucial question is how to handle these confidently. Regardless of chess literature studied, chess players still find themselves at a loss when encountering new ground which goes to prove John Watson’s point that chess is a rule independent game and cannot be played according to general rules or principles, i.e. each and every position must be played on its own premises and not somehow based on other (different) positions.
Moral and chess judgment might be explained as being performed by the interplay between subconscious processes and conscious decision, since, if judgment were fully conscious and transparent, we would never display poor judgment, now, would we?
Along the lines of morality, we might also say that chess playing ability resembles speaking a language where we somehow are able to understand and utter sentences never before uttered or spoken and Richard Reti’s apt description of chess as Capablanca’s mother tongue still springs to mind.
Playing on Noam Chomsky’s LAD, or Language Acquisition Device, we might say that chess players are guided and supported by a, perhaps slightly Kantian sounding, CAD; “Chess Acquisition Device, making is possible to display sound chess judgment which foundation is the subtle interplay between knowing what to keep and what to discard among triggered moves and in the final part of this article, we will have a closer look as how to increase and improve our chess judgment to form better decisions over the board.
Chess Improvement
Chess players are often encouraged to read chess books and watch DVDs to improve their playing strength. However, most books and DVDs might inspire, motivate and fascinate, but crucially suffer from didactical lopsidedness as they will not genuinely help players improve due to only filling up the players’ RAM i.e. short term memory or consciousness at the time of reading or watching. In other words, most chess books and DVDs might capture players’ attention and imagination by presenting chess as an easily and readily accessible conscious activity but do not seriously improve the ability to generate or produce high quality moves as this is governed by subconscious processes.
There is, however, a foolproof method for increasing playing strength, improving chess judgment and combat, if not completely eradicate, blunder tendencies and, as rendered in Alexander Kotov’s Think like a Grandmaster, it goes as follows:
- No matter what position you choose to analyse, opening, middle game or end game, complex or simple; find annotated games from tournament books or magazines and play through them till you to come to the point with the greatest number of variations.
- Cover up the annotations with a sheet of paper and, without moving the pieces, just like a tournament game, analyse the position from 30 minutes to an hour. If the variations are extremely complex, you might write down your analyses while analysing.
- When time is out, stop analysing and uncover the annotations in the book or magazine, and compare your notes with the annotator’s.
When starting out, there might be a great discrepancy between your analyses and the annotators’ but with time, one learns to delineate relevant moves and variations as this training and final comparison will exercise and target the mind’s ability to perceive chess positions and produce high quality moves.
Strictly speaking, this, and not his highly criticised graphic presentation of tree-analyses, is the Kotov-method. As long as thinking is subconscious, we have no idea what the mind looks like when pondering or producing chess moves or analysing positions. Kotov was merely trying to create some sort of order in an otherwise inaccessible world, but what we do know, is that this method seriously improves our chess playing abilities regardless of whether the mind looks like trees, boats, shoes or penguins. This method simultaneously teaches a whole array of different chess skills even if not targeted individually or specifically. This was the method catapulting Kotov to super GM strength and even if Kotov was unable to, we can partly explain why it works, and in short, it can be put as TWT or “Targeted Wiring Training”.
Initially, this system of training may appear time consuming and even monotonous, but patience and diligence will return generous rewards since you will:
- Achieve total mastery of a new and important position
- Attain absolutely confidence in your ability to play that position against anyone – from either side of the board.
- Increase your comprehension and enjoyment of published games featuring that position.
- Learn the various opening lines and move orders which will transpose the game into your position.
- Broaden your opening repertoire and the theoretical knowledge, while improving your study habits and research techniques.
- Become better acquainted with positions of similar pawn structures or themes (note; not “pattern”)
- Absorb motifs and finesses which you can also apply to other positions.
- Dramatically improve combinative skill.
- Improve both long and short range planning.
- Analyse more deeply, accurately and efficiently.
- Train yourself to think objectively and reduce dependence on dogmatic principles and stereotyped opinions.
- Heighten your awareness and respect for the myriad possibilities and hidden resources in a given position.
- Expand your sense of creativity and capacity for discovering original ideas.
- Discover that your analytical potential is not as limited as you perhaps thought.
- Increase concentration and attention span.
- Sharpen board visualisation, and develop a facility for piece coordination and spacial relationship.
- Develop patience and perseverance, and control impulsive tendencies.
- Discover the importance of adequate home preparation.
- Stimulate your appetite for studying and playing chess.
- Raise your rating and overall playing strength to a much higher level.
Kudos to Alburt for listing virtues Kotov seems to leave out (“Test and Improve your chess”, pp. 38-39)
Finally, we might add:
- Play more resolutely, faster and less indecisively
- Gain confidence when playing stronger opponents
- Overcome tendencies of underestimating weaker opponents
- Increase & trust your intuition and resourcefulness
- Develop & improve your judgment
Copyright, Rune Vik-Hansen, 2008-01.12
About the author
Born in 1968, Rune Vik-Hansen graduated from the University of Tromsø in 1999 with a thesis on Heidegger's concept of Dasein. Other fields of interests are metaphysics, ontology, theory of science and political ethics.
Besides having worked as a teacher on different levels, Vik-Hansen also writes philosophical texts, chronicles, papers and essays as well as children’s literature.
He is currently actively involved as a mentor on writing, philosophy and chess projects with school children in New York City.
Article Source : Chessbase
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Chess and math have always slept side by side. But are they a happy couple? I think every chess player has had the experience of someone asking you, in high school, if your math grades were as good as your chess results. Sadly, for me the answer was often ‘no’. By Arne Moll
In the end, we should credit the authors for mentioning the most important aspect of all education: “Children learn best while having fun“. This is definitely true, and when the authors say that the children they work with enjoy their method, there’s no reason to doubt them. Indeed, if we agree that chess is fun (and I hope all readers of ChessVibes will agree on that!), we should perhaps be able to integrate chess in a useful way into any curriculum, be it math or biology or English literature. But chess is surely not unique in stimulating children to perform better in maths. Who knows, draughts may work even better. Or poker. In any case, if they’re confused by exercises, puzzles or chess figurines - even though they may enjoy them visually - it’s perhaps too early to write tradional methods off. In any case, more research is needed.
