In his best-selling book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of a Kouros (an ancient Greek statue of a male youth). The Kouros in question was acquired by the Getty Museum in California for some $10 million after an exhaustive 14-month investigation. But doubts about its authenticity lingered. After a single glance – or blink – at the statue, lasting only a few seconds, some experts in Greek art had an immediate sense of “intuitive repulsion”. It just had to be a fake. In a few seconds, says Gladwell, “They were able to understand more about the essence of the statue than the team at the Getty was able to understand after fourteen months.”
“Blinking” isn’t confined to artistic judgments either. During an exhibition tour in 1909, Capablanca, the Cuban world chess champion, played 28 matches simultaneously and won them all. How did he do it? How many moves ahead did he consider when he only had a few seconds to look at each game? “I see only one move ahead,” Capablanca is reported to have said, “but it is always the correct one.”
As a well-structured but complex game, chess has provided a wonderful laboratory for studying the capacities of the human mind. It is to the cognitive sciences what the fruit fly is to geneticists. Initially, everyone thought that the amazing intellectual feats of chess grandmasters were due to three factors: photographic memory; high IQ; and an ability to analyze the implications of many different possibilities several moves ahead. However, scientific research has rejected these ideas – and come up with three totally different factors!
The first key requirement for a grandmaster is to focus intuitively on the best move. Researchers have placed cameras under chessboards to record the eye movements of great chess players. They’ve discovered that, once the opponent’s turn is over, three out of four times a grandmaster’s eyes focus on the best move available (as agreed by other grandmasters). Next, he or she examines other possible moves – often of equal quality – only to return (three out of four times) to the first move considered. Thus, grandmasters demonstrate two important abilities. One is to come up with high-quality (and often creative) moves spontaneously; the other is the analytical skill to check this move against other possibilities. It sounds as if Capablanca wasn’t overstating his case after all. Genius blinks – it’s official.
The second differentiating factor is pattern recognition – another blinking ability. When grandmasters are shown, for only five seconds, chess pieces on a board from an ongoing game between other grandmasters, they can reproduce what they have seen with approximately 90% accuracy. The few mistakes they do make are usually in the minor pieces, mostly involving pawns. Expert players, on the other hand, can’t recall more than a few details, while novices are incapable of remembering any positions accurately. Just as importantly, no one, including grandmasters, can remember the positions on a board where the pieces have been placed by chance – that is, when they’re not the result of a real game. The memories of grandmasters are highly dependent on recognizing patterns – not unlike most people’s abilities to recognize a familiar tune after hearing the first few notes.
Third and perhaps most importantly, there’s the “practice factor”. Scientists have found that it takes years of practice to reach the level of the chess grandmaster. Not just any old practice though. Aspiring grandmasters must deliberately target continuous improvement, which means a lot of repetition, and seek constant feedback. Consistent hard graft is also crucial. Great achievers – in chess as in many other fields – have been found to practice, on average, roughly the same number of hours every day, including weekends and holidays. Finally, research indicates that the more they practice in this way, the better their performance. Continuous, painstaking practice facilitates “deeper” or better information processing and helps retain, as well as develop, skills. Curiously, it seems that, to become good at blinking, there’s a lot of painful thinking along the way.
Contrary to popular belief, then, it looks as if talent owes more to hard work than natural gifts. Genius, in chess and elsewhere, comes from long, deliberate, thoughtful practice. Herbert Simon, whose wisdom we’ve drawn on several times already in this book, estimated that, through years of intensive practice, the typical grandmaster develops a long-term working memory amounting to roughly 50,000 to 100,000 “nuggets” of chess information. Because grandmasters can retrieve this information effortlessly, they’re free to concentrate on evaluating the most promising moves that come spontaneously to mind. In contrast, weaker players generate and examine many alternatives without being able to focus on the essential. They lack the 50,000 to 100,000 chunks of chess information stored in the brains of grandmasters.
So it turns out that the critical skill of playing chess is not analytical. Instead, it’s the capacity to focus, instantly and effortlessly on the best move (or moves), a capacity that’s developed through long, deliberate practice. The role of analysis, although indispensable, is secondary: first as part of the practicing, then to verify or reject alternative moves during the game.
© Spyros Makridakis, Robin Hogarth and Anil Gaba, 2009