The science of chess
13.08.2004
– Science good science does not try to corroborate theories. It attempts to destroy them, to falsify the prime theses, as Karl Raimund Popper so eloquently described. Now it turns out that strong chess players behave like good scientists a conclusion reached by cognitive scientists Michelle Cowley and Ruth Byrne. It is all in Nature magazine.
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Nigel Davies:
A busy persons opening system
Players with interests and commitments away from the chess board often find it difficult to compete against those with more study time. Their opponents come to the board armed with the latest theory and can bash out moves well into the middle game. On this DVD Nigel Davies addresses this issue by demonstrating a simple and easy to learn opening system designed for the busy person.
More information...
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Science secret of grand masters revealed
The Nature Magazine article deals with the way in which chess experts gain
the edge over opponents by falsifying their own ideas, while chess novices'
optimism usually leads to a crushing defeat.
Cognitive scientist and chess player Michelle Cowley |
In deciding which move to make, chess players mentally run through possible
continuations of the game. Michelle Cowley, a cognitive scientist and keen
chess player from Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, decided to study how different
chess players decide whether their move strategies will be winners or losers.
Along with her colleague Ruth Byrne, she recruited 20 chess players, ranging
from regular tournament players to a grandmaster. She presented each participant
with six different chessboard positions from halfway through a game, where
Black and White had equal chances of winning, and there was no immediately
obvious next move.
Each player had to speak their thoughts aloud as they decided what move to
make. Cowley scored the quality of the move sequences by comparing them with
Fritz 8. She found that novices were more likely to convince themselves that
bad moves would work out in their favour, because they focused more on the
countermoves that would benefit their strategy while ignoring those that led
to the downfall of their cherished hypotheses.
Conversely, masters tended to correctly predict when the eventual outcome
of a move would weaken their position. "Grand masters think about what
their opponents will do much more," says Byrne. "They tend to falsify
their own hypotheses."
Falsification
Philosopher of Science Sir Karl Raimund Popper |
This kind of hypothesis testing was called "falsification" by Sir
Karl Raimund
Popper, who is generally considered one of the greatest philosophers of
the 20th century. Every genuine scientific theory, in Popper's view, can be
tested and falsified, but never logically verified. It should not be inferred
from the fact that a theory has withstood the most rigorous testing, for however
long a period of time, that it has been verified; rather we should
recognise that such a theory has received a high measure of corroboration.
As such it may be provisionally retained as the best available theory
until it is finally falsified (if indeed it is ever falsified), and/or is superseded
by a better theory.
But cognitive research, according to Cowley and Byrne, has shown that many
people find falsification difficult. Until recently it was thought that scientists
were the only group of experts that could be shown to use falsification routinely
in their work. Now the two scientists have found that chess players, too, behave
like good empirical scientists. Byrne speculates that this behaviour could
be limited to those who are expert in their field. She thinks the ability to
falsify is somehow linked to the vast database of knowledge that experts such
as grandmasters or scientists accumulate. "People who
know their area are more likely to look for ways that things can go wrong for
them," she says.
Byrne and Cowley now hope to study developing chess players to find out how
and when they develop falsification strategies. They also want to test chess
masters in other activities that involve testing hypotheses such as
logic problems to discover if their falsification skill is transferable.
Any volunteers?
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