tag:theconversation.com,2011:/africa/topics/chess-5680/articlesChess – The Conversation2024-02-19T17:10:03Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2238732024-02-19T17:10:03Z2024-02-19T17:10:03ZFrom bridge to chess, why men outperform women at ‘mindsports’ – and what to do about it<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576463/original/file-20240219-24-m3v5sz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=28%2C40%2C3805%2C3414&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Elite bridge player Margherita Chavarria from Italy.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Francesca Canali from the World Bridge Federation</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Why do men strongly outperform women at “mindsports” such as chess and bridge? <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00948705.2018.1520125?journalCode=rjps20">Mindsports</a> mainly use the brain and require skills such as memory, critical thinking, problem solving, strategic planning, mental discipline and judgment. Without physical differences in strength, how do we explain why the top level of such games tends to be dominated by men? </p>
<p>A defining characteristic of bridge, which I study, is that it is always <a href="https://www.scipod.global/professor-samantha-punch-benefits-of-bridge-the-partnership-mindsport/">played in partnership</a>. Each game consists of four players divided into two pairs who compete against each other to win tricks. Major bridge events have open and women’s categories, often held concurrently, with very few women playing in the open. </p>
<p>While this allows women to compete at an international level, it feeds into perceptions about women’s <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/16078055.2022.2051068">inability to succeed</a> at the highest level.</p>
<p>Women have <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00222216.2021.1887782">limited visibility</a> at the top levels of bridge. The chief tournament directors and those on international executive committees are most often men (although this is starting to change). The captains and coaches of the women-only teams are nearly always men. Female sponsors <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41978-021-00099-y">prefer to hire male professional players</a> as partners and teammates.</p>
<p>Male domination at both the top levels of administration and of the game means there can be a lack of recognition of the structural barriers for women. </p>
<p>Research conducted by the academic project <a href="https://bridgemindsport.org/">Bridge: A MindSport for All (Bamsa)</a> <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14927713.2022.2160787">found that</a> gender stereotypes and <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-neurosexism-is-holding-back-gender-equality-and-science-itself-67597">“neurosexism”</a> (claiming there are differences between female and male brains that can explain women’s inferiority), can partly explain differences in achievement.</p>
<p>That’s because sexist arguments that male brains are superiorly wired for logic and mathematics can be used to offer men more opportunities and training than women. </p>
<p>This is despite the fact that modern research shows there <a href="https://theconversation.com/are-male-and-female-brains-really-different-54092">isn’t such a thing</a> as a distinctly male or female brain. Most brains <a href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1509654112">are a mosaic</a> of what we think of as feminine and masculine features. And the more mixed our brains, <a href="https://theconversation.com/male-vs-female-brains-having-a-mix-of-both-is-common-and-offers-big-advantages-new-research-153242">the better our mental health</a>. </p>
<p>The brain also changes a lot depending on our environment – if we are constantly encouraged or discouraged to do certain things, such as nurturing, this will affect our brain wiring – a process called <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/neuroplasticity">neuroplasticity</a>.</p>
<p>Research has also shown that when people are reminded of a negative gender stereotype, such as women not being good at maths or men not being good at emotions, <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-terrifying-power-of-stereotypes-and-how-to-deal-with-them-101904">they actually perform worse</a> on tasks measuring such ability. Men also <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/05/the-confidence-gap/359815/">have higher levels of general confidence</a> than women, which is a reflection of society and can be an advantage in mindsports. </p>
<p>In my research, I interviewed 52 top bridge players (20 women and 32 men) from Europe and the US. We discovered that some bridge players, both men and women, believed that female brains are simply better suited to emotion, nurturing and multi-tasking than to mental toughness and competitiveness.</p>
<p>We discovered that many <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14927713.2022.2160787">used outdated neuroscientific arguments</a> about the gendered brain as a purely biological organ, fixed in its processes and isolated from the external world. There seemed to be a general acceptance that male players are inevitably “better”. </p>
<p>The damage of such widespread beliefs is down to a general lack of knowledge of contemporary neuroscience. Neurosexist arguments and gendered stereotyping, whether intentional or not, create social barriers. These can have negative consequences on participation and inclusion in bridge and other mindsports. </p>
<p>Players themselves may also inadvertently engage in casual sexism and discriminatory language. In the competitive bridge environment, for example, “<a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/16078055.2022.2051068">playing like a man</a>” provides the most status for women. Such dialogue can become normalised “banter”, leading to less respect or recognition of the expertise of top female bridge players.</p>
<p>The Bamsa research suggests that men’s dominance in elite mindsport can ultimately be explained through historic and structural <a href="https://bridgemindsport.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/BAMSA-Bridging-Brains-Poster.pdf">opportunities that privilege men</a> rather than brain differences. For example, women may be constrained by factors such as childcare and other caring duties, which reduces time to practice, play and concentrate. </p>
<p>Research on chess has similarly shown that the underperformance of female chess players can be <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.440">largely attributed to gender stereotypes</a> and socialisation. </p>
<h2>The paradox of women-only events</h2>
<p>Given the <a href="https://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/26652/">everyday sexism</a> that exists in the worlds of bridge, chess and beyond, women-only events are important spaces. These can help women develop and compete in a less pressured arena relatively free of discrimination and the male gaze. </p>
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<p>The women-only game can be considered a valuable space given wider constraints and expectations of society. However, at the same time, the existence of the women-only game serves to reinforce deeply entrenched ideas about women’s abilities to play top-level tournaments. To get rid of women’s bridge or chess would be to remove a needed women-only space, but to keep it reinforces difference and skill-based inequality. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/16078055.2022.2051068">paradox of the women’s game</a> is that it both enables and constrains women, it is simultaneously both the problem and the solution. Given the complexity of the issue, there is no simple fix to the conundrum. What is clear is that stereotyping and sexism are unlikely to encourage younger women to dedicate the necessary time and effort to becoming an elite player. </p>
<p>Possible solutions include a gender policy at the world level, raising awareness and unconscious-bias training. The new Bamsa project is focusing on developing mindsport education in schools. The future continuity of bridge relies on it being inclusive and welcoming (as well as competitive and challenging). </p>
<p>As a <a href="https://bridgemindsport.org/home/research/bridging-gender/">result of the Bamsa research</a>, the European Bridge League has recently also <a href="https://sites.google.com/view/wbc-onlinetraining/policy">developed a gender policy</a> that raises awareness of gender-based obstacles, suggests best practices and outlines what disciplinary action should be taken if the policy is breached. It is anticipated that this can be extended globally via the World Bridge Federation.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/223873/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Samantha Punch has collaborated on this research with Jessica Cleary - University of Stirling, Dr Elizabeth Graham - University of Stirling, Dr Charlotte McPherson - King's College London, Dr Ashley Rogers - University of Stirling and Dr Miriam Snellgrove - University of Glasgow. She receives research funding for the project Bridge: A MindSport for All from a Keep Bridge Alive Crowdfund Campaign within the global bridge community (players, clubs and bridge organisations): <a href="https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/u5c0e5e7810869">https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/u5c0e5e7810869</a> </span></em></p>Male domination in bridge means there can be a lack of recognition of the structural barriers for women.Samantha Punch, Professor of Sociology, University of StirlingLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2048232023-05-17T16:24:50Z2023-05-17T16:24:50ZChatGPT can’t think – consciousness is something entirely different to today’s AI<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/525711/original/file-20230511-10496-d2f8t7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=16%2C0%2C5631%2C3988&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/low-polygon-brain-wireframe-mesh-on-686888194">Illus_man / Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>There has been shock around the world at the rapid rate of progress with <a href="https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt">ChatGPT</a> and other artificial intelligence created with what’s known as large language models (LLMs). These systems can produce text that seems to display thought, understanding and even creativity.</p>
<p>But can these systems really think and understand? This is not a question that can be answered through technological advance, but careful philosophical analysis and argument tells us the answer is no. And without working through these philosophical issues, we will never fully comprehend the dangers and benefits of the AI revolution.</p>
<p>In 1950, the father of modern computing, Alan Turing, <a href="https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/activities/ieg/e-library/sources/t_article.pdf">published a paper</a> which laid out a way of determining whether a computer thinks. This is now called “the Turing test”. Turing imagined a human being engaged in conversation with two interlocutors hidden from view: one another human being, the other a computer. The game is to work out which is which. </p>
<p>If a computer can fool 70% of judges in a five-minute conversation into thinking it’s a person, the computer passes the test. Would passing the Turing test – something which now seems imminent – show that an AI has achieved thought and understanding? </p>
<h2>Chess challenge</h2>
<p>Turing dismissed this question as hopelessly vague, and replaced it with a pragmatic definition of “thought”, whereby to think just means passing the test.</p>
<p>Turing was wrong, however, when he said the only clear notion of “understanding” is the purely behavioural one of passing his test. Although this way of thinking now dominates cognitive science, there is also a clear, everyday notion of “understanding” that’s tied to consciousness. To understand in this sense is to consciously grasp some truth about reality. </p>
<p>In 1997, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_versus_Garry_Kasparov">Deep Blue AI beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov</a>. On a purely behavioural conception of understanding, Deep Blue had knowledge of chess strategy that surpasses any human being. But it was not conscious: it didn’t have any feelings or experiences. </p>
<p>Humans consciously understand the rules of chess and the rationale of a strategy. Deep Blue, in contrast, was an unfeeling mechanism that had been trained to perform well at the game. Likewise, ChatGPT is an unfeeling mechanism that has been trained on huge amounts of human-made data to generate content that seems like it was written by a person.</p>
<p>It doesn’t consciously understand the meaning of the words it’s spitting out. If “thought” means the act of conscious reflection, then ChatGPT has no thoughts about anything. </p>
<h2>Time to pay up</h2>
<p>How can I be so sure that ChatGPT isn’t conscious? In the 1990s, neuroscientist Christof Koch <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23831830-300-consciousness-how-were-solving-a-mystery-bigger-than-our-minds/">bet philosopher David Chalmers a case of fine wine</a> that scientists would have entirely pinned down the “neural correlates of consciousness” in 25 years. </p>
<p>By this, he meant they would have identified the forms of brain activity necessary and sufficient for conscious experience. It’s about time Koch paid up, as there is zero consensus that this has happened.</p>
<p>This is because consciousness can’t be observed by looking inside your head. In their attempts to find a connection between brain activity and experience, neuroscientists must rely on their subjects’ testimony, or on external markers of consciousness. But there are multiple ways of interpreting the data.</p>
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<img alt="Chess player" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/525841/original/file-20230512-27-bghacs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/525841/original/file-20230512-27-bghacs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/525841/original/file-20230512-27-bghacs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/525841/original/file-20230512-27-bghacs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/525841/original/file-20230512-27-bghacs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/525841/original/file-20230512-27-bghacs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/525841/original/file-20230512-27-bghacs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Unlike computers, humans consciously understand the rules of chess and the underlying strategy.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/concentrated-beautiful-girl-playing-chess-on-1740304379">LightField Studios / Shutterstock</a></span>
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<p><a href="https://philarchive.org/rec/MICCPA-6">Some scientists</a> believe there is a close connection between consciousness and reflective cognition – the brain’s ability to access and use information to make decisions. This leads them to think that the brain’s prefrontal cortex – where the high-level processes of acquiring knowledge take place – is essentially involved in all conscious experience. Others deny this, <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncel.2019.00302/full">arguing instead that</a> it happens in whichever local brain region that the relevant sensory processing takes place. </p>
<p>Scientists have good understanding of the brain’s basic chemistry. We have also made progress in understanding the high-level functions of various bits of the brain. But we are almost clueless about the bit in-between: how the high-level functioning of the brain is realised at the cellular level.</p>
<p>People get very excited about the potential of scans to reveal the workings of the brain. But fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) has a very low resolution: <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nature06976">every pixel</a> on a brain scan corresponds to 5.5 million neurons, which means there’s a limit to how much detail these scans are able to show.</p>
<p>I believe progress on consciousness will come when we understand better how the brain works.</p>
<h2>Pause in development</h2>
<p>As I argue in my forthcoming book <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/why-the-purpose-of-the-universe-9780198883760?lang=en&cc=jp">“Why? The Purpose of the Universe”</a>, consciousness must have evolved because it made a behavioural difference. Systems with consciousness must behave differently, and hence survive better, than systems without consciousness. </p>
<p>If all behaviour was determined by underlying chemistry and physics, natural selection would have no motivation for making organisms conscious; we would have evolved as unfeeling survival mechanisms. </p>
<p>My bet, then, is that as we learn more about the brain’s detailed workings, we will precisely identify which areas of the brain embody consciousness. This is because those regions will exhibit behaviour that can’t be explained by currently known chemistry and physics. Already, <a href="http://www.wiringthebrain.com/2019/09/beyond-reductionism-systems-biology.html">some neuroscientists</a> are seeking potential new explanations for consciousness to supplement the basic equations of physics. </p>
<p>While the processing of LLMs is now too complex for us to fully understand, we know that it could in principle be predicted from known physics. On this basis, we can confidently assert that ChatGPT is not conscious. </p>
<p>There are many dangers posed by AI, and I fully support the recent call by tens of thousands of people, including tech leaders Steve Wozniak and Elon Musk,<a href="https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/"> to pause</a> development to address safety concerns. The potential for fraud, for example, is immense. However, the argument that near-term descendants of current AI systems will be super-intelligent, and hence a major threat to humanity, is premature. </p>
<p>This doesn’t mean current AI systems aren’t dangerous. But we can’t correctly assess a threat unless we accurately categorise it. LLMs aren’t intelligent. They are systems trained to give the outward appearance of human intelligence. Scary, but not that scary.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/204823/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Philip Goff does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Of the risks posed by AI, overtaking human intelligence isn’t an immediate concern.Philip Goff, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Durham UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1992212023-02-08T06:05:58Z2023-02-08T06:05:58ZChess players perform worse when air quality is poor – and other high-skilled workers could be affected too<p>Humans are exposed to air pollution almost everywhere. The <a href="https://www.who.int/">World Health Organization</a> estimate that 99% of the world’s population breathe in polluted air each day. Chess players competing indoors are no exception – and it can affect their performance.</p>
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<p><em>You can listen to more articles from The Conversation, narrated by Noa, <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/audio-narrated-99682">here</a>.</em></p>
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<p>A <a href="https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/epdf/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4643">recent study</a> conducted by researchers from <a href="https://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/">Maastricht University</a> (Netherlands) and the <a href="https://www.mit.edu/">Massachusetts Institute of Technology</a> (USA) analysed the quality of chess moves across multiple German chess tournaments. They found that chess experts perform worse when there is more particulate matter (PM2.5) in the air. </p>
<p>Some of the threats air pollution poses to human health are already known. For example, bad air <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lanpub/PIIS2468-2667(16)30023-8.pdf">increases the risk</a> of suffering heart disease, strokes and certain cancers. But the recent research implies that poor air quality may be linked to a reduction in cognitive functioning.</p>
<p>This carries implications for anyone who makes decisions under pressure in polluted areas and may increase the global economic cost associated with air pollution. The <a href="https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/36501">World Bank</a> estimates this cost to be US$8.1 trillion (£6.7 trillion) each year.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/london-underground-polluted-with-particles-small-enough-to-enter-the-human-bloodstream-new-research-196600">London Underground polluted with particles small enough to enter the human bloodstream -- new research</a>
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<h2>Keeping air pollution in check</h2>
<p>The researchers studied the performance of 121 chess players across three separate tournaments between 2017 and 2019. They assessed more than 30,000 chess moves using computer software which identified optimal decisions and flagged significant errors.</p>
<p>A range of factors can interfere with a player’s performance. These include traffic noise, temperature and air pollutants including PM2.5 and CO₂. The authors investigated the impact of each and ruled out every factor apart from PM2.5.</p>
<p>Each tournament lasted eight weeks, so by measuring PM2.5 concentrations inside the tournament venue it was possible to determine how variations in air quality were related to changes in player performance. Throughout the tournaments, concentrations of PM2.5 varied from 14 to 70 micrograms (μg) per cubic metre of air. Exposure to such concentrations is common in many cities around the world and is classified as moderate to unhealthy by the US <a href="https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2016-04/documents/2012_aqi_factsheet.pdf">Environmental Protection Agency</a>.</p>
<p>For a modest increase in PM2.5 (10 μg per cubic metre of air), chess players were 26.3% more likely to make an error. The computer analysis judged the errors they made were 10.8% worse that an optimal move would have been. </p>
<p>But the impact of air quality on play increased when players were under more pressure. The tournaments required 40 moves to be made within 110 minutes, which induced higher time pressure in the game’s later stages. For the same increase in PM2.5, chess players made larger errors later in the game. In the final ten moves, when maximum concentration is needed, the size of the errors increased by 20.2% for players in the lowest quality air compared with players in normal air.</p>
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<img alt="People play chess at a chess tournament." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/508507/original/file-20230206-19-ostvv5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/508507/original/file-20230206-19-ostvv5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=340&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/508507/original/file-20230206-19-ostvv5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=340&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/508507/original/file-20230206-19-ostvv5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=340&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/508507/original/file-20230206-19-ostvv5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=428&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/508507/original/file-20230206-19-ostvv5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=428&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/508507/original/file-20230206-19-ostvv5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=428&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Chess players made larger errors under time pressure.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/soller-mallorca-spain-march-24-2018-1090257839">zixia/Shutterstock</a></span>
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<h2>Making us less intelligent</h2>
<p>The idea that cleaner air leads to sharper thinking among chess players is consistent with growing evidence linking air quality to short-term cognitive performance.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00036846.2016.1139679?casa_token=o253PShsRqQAAAAA%3ALlX2254mq0jSl16U8qyeWqVVsUnleosz5HTN0c7f6mT_LKtjhlqFOPwlA636hLxmBVN8IFVfVA93hg">Analysis</a> of daily air pollution data in China revealed a negative relationship between air quality and stock returns from 2005 to 2014. This effect was weaker for companies which had taken measures to address poor air quality. The authors of the study linked poor air quality to creating a depressed mood among investors. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-44561-0">Research</a> that I co-authored in 2016 into the effects of short-term indoor and outdoor PM2.5 exposure also revealed that exposure to burning candles and commuter traffic negatively impacts cognitive functioning. The participants took three cognitive tests both before and after an hour of PM2.5 exposure and performed significantly worse on average in the post-exposure testing. </p>
<p>Epidemiological evidence also suggests that <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935122016899?via%3Dihub">exposure to high levels</a> of air pollution at critical points in a person’s life (particularly at a young age) can be detrimental to brain health and lead to dementia or Alzheimer’s disease later in life. </p>
<p>While the factors affecting cognition and dementia are not yet fully understood, this evidence met many of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradford_Hill_criteria">Bradford Hill guidelines</a> for causality. These criteria evaluate epidemiological evidence to determine whether there is a causal relationship.</p>
<p>Technology is changing the global labour market and jobs are becoming increasingly sophisticated as a result. Between 1995 and 2015, the proportion of high-skilled occupations as a share of total employment <a href="https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/empl_outlook-2017-7-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/empl_outlook-2017-7-en">increased</a> by roughly 5% in North America and almost 8% across Europe. At the same time, the share of middle-skilled occupations in total employment declined in both regions.</p>
<p>But those who work in high-tech industries such as data science are also required to make complex decisions under pressur. The workplace performance of these professionals will likely also be affected by poor air quality. Chess experts, who are <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1525/si.2003.26.2.263">studied</a> for their ability to make complex decisions under stressful conditions could therefore be the canary in the coal mine for workplace productivity among highly skilled professionals. </p>
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<img alt="A man sitting at a desk with his head in his hands." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/508508/original/file-20230206-25-70igw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/508508/original/file-20230206-25-70igw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/508508/original/file-20230206-25-70igw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/508508/original/file-20230206-25-70igw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/508508/original/file-20230206-25-70igw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/508508/original/file-20230206-25-70igw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/508508/original/file-20230206-25-70igw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Those who work in high-tech industries are required to use the skills demanded of chess players.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/frustrated-middle-aged-businessman-sitting-office-146587283">sirtravelalot/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Air pollution poses such a threat to strategic thinking under pressure that chess players often <a href="https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/sport/others/magnus-carlsen-wesley-so-and-hikaru-nakamura-back-for-airthings-masters/articleshow/79739284.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst">monitor the air quality</a> of their surroundings. But the mechanism through which air pollution affects their (and everyone else’s) cognition remains largely unclear. Research must determine precisely which pollutants are most damaging to cognitive health so that a global recognised safe air quality level can be established.</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Imagine weekly climate newsletter" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/434988/original/file-20211201-21-13avx6y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/434988/original/file-20211201-21-13avx6y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/434988/original/file-20211201-21-13avx6y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/434988/original/file-20211201-21-13avx6y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/434988/original/file-20211201-21-13avx6y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/434988/original/file-20211201-21-13avx6y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/434988/original/file-20211201-21-13avx6y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption"></span>
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</figure>
<p><strong><em>Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?</em></strong>
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<hr><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/199221/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Francis Pope receives funding from ‘Hazard Identification Platform to Assess the Health Impacts from Indoor and Outdoor Air Pollutant Exposures, through Mechanistic Toxicology’ grant funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC, NE/W002035/1). </span></em></p>Air pollution causes chess players to make more errors – this may have implications for high-skilled professionals.Francis Pope, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, University of BirminghamLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1914132022-10-13T15:43:12Z2022-10-13T15:43:12ZWhy Canada should invest more in teaching kids how to play chess<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/488605/original/file-20221006-12-urtylf.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3840%2C2160&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The government should invest in chess to foster more Canadian success at international competitions</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Chess has recently been in the news far more than usual. First, there was the runaway success of the Netflix miniseries <em>The Queen’s Gambit</em>. That made chessboards the new toilet paper as retailers and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/02/queens-gambit-ignites-sales-for-spanish-chessboard-maker">manufacturers struggled to meet the demand</a>. Now there’s a high-profile <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/oct/04/hans-niemann-chess-com-cheating-investigation-magnus-carlsen">cheating scandal</a> rocking the chess world. </p>
<p>But amid those headlines, the best recent chess news for Canadians is the quieter story of Shawn Rodrigue-Lemieux, a Québec teen who recently <a href="https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/quebec-s-shawn-rodrigue-lemieux-becomes-world-chess-champion-1.6073479">won the world under-18 chess championship</a>: a first for a Québecer and only the second time for a Canadian.</p>
<p>Unlike the cheating scandal and the fictional depiction of chess in <em>The Queen’s Gambit</em>, the story of Rodrigue-Lemieux is unequivocally good and real. It should inspire and motivate us as a nation to invest more in chess so that his accomplishment leads to more Canadian success at international competitions. </p>
<p>Success at the highest levels of chess costs money. Investing in chess as a sport and as a mandatory subject in schools would be money well spent.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489206/original/file-20221011-10401-5xogic.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A large room filled with people sitting at tables playing chess." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489206/original/file-20221011-10401-5xogic.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489206/original/file-20221011-10401-5xogic.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=372&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489206/original/file-20221011-10401-5xogic.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=372&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489206/original/file-20221011-10401-5xogic.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=372&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489206/original/file-20221011-10401-5xogic.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=468&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489206/original/file-20221011-10401-5xogic.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=468&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489206/original/file-20221011-10401-5xogic.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=468&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Participants compete in the 44th Chess Olympiad in Mamallapuram, India on July 29, 2022.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Chess as a sport</h2>
<p>This year <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/sport-organizations/national/funding.html">Sport Canada has supported</a> hockey in Canada with nearly $7 million. It has given an additional $1.5 million toward individual hockey players through its athlete assistance program. But Sport Canada isn’t just generous to hockey. It’s giving more than $300,000 to bowling; $5.2 million to curling; $200,000 to surfing; over $1 million to cricket; almost $700,000 to ringette; about $250,000 to skateboarding; and more than $500,000 to archery.</p>
<p>What does chess get from Sport Canada? Nothing.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/funding/sport-support/accountability-framework.html">According to Sport Canada</a>, chess does not qualify for sport funding for the simple reason that chess is not a sport. But chess satisfies every single criterion for being a sport, except one: it is not considered a physical activity. It is merely a “game of skill,” a board game like Monopoly or Scrabble, that requires mental effort but no physical, bodily effort. </p>
<p>Sport Canada’s position on chess may be shared by many Canadians, but it is mistaken and out of step with the position of many other nations for at least two reasons.</p>
<p>First, in 1999, the International Olympic Committee recognized chess as a sport. Chess was even featured as an exhibition event at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. There was an effort to get <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/article-should-chess-be-included-in-the-olympic-games/">chess into the 2024 Paris Olympics, but this was rejected</a>. </p>
<p>When the time comes and chess is featured at the Olympics, Canada will not be ready to compete unless we start funding chess now.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489063/original/file-20221010-19-h87jk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A man wearing a grey suit moves a piece on a chess board." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489063/original/file-20221010-19-h87jk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489063/original/file-20221010-19-h87jk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489063/original/file-20221010-19-h87jk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489063/original/file-20221010-19-h87jk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489063/original/file-20221010-19-h87jk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489063/original/file-20221010-19-h87jk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489063/original/file-20221010-19-h87jk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Magnus Carlsen competes at the 2018 World Chess Championship in London.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Second, when chess is played at the highest levels, it is indeed a physical activity, contrary to the naïve position of Sport Canada. In a 2014 <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b04mb80d">interview with the BBC</a>, the greatest chess player of all time and current world champion, Magnus Carlsen revealed: “For me chess is first and foremost a sport and then secondly an art and a science.” </p>
<p>Carlsen credited two of his wins against former world champion, Vishy Anand, to his superior athleticism rather than to his superior chess playing. The games were long ones and, according to Carlsen, “were very much decided in the fifth and sixth hours by physical strength.”</p>
<h2>Investing in chess</h2>
<p>The wisest way for Canada to invest in chess would be to follow the examples of other nations, <a href="https://www.thelocal.es/20150212/chess-set-to-become-school-subject-in-spain/">including Spain</a>, <a href="https://bigthink.com/thinking/chess-should-be-required-in-us-schools/">Armenia</a>, and <a href="https://agenda.ge/en/news/2022/1826">Georgia</a>, that have made chess a mandatory subject in elementary or high school.</p>
<p>The case for including chess among school curricula is usually based on the benefits for improving math skills. But this is not the only benefit of chess.</p>
<p>Chess is a prime example of an interdisciplinary activity. The best chess players throughout history have had one thing in common: they saw in chess something far more serious than a game. The first official champion, Wilhelm Steinitz, declared that chess is a science, and <a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7251810M/The_modern_chess_instructor.">wrote a treatise on the principles of this science</a>. The next champion, Emanuel Lasker, saw chess as a perfect <a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL6981278M/Struggle">model of every human struggle</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489062/original/file-20221010-23-yvk1pd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A woman and three young children sit around a table with a chess board. The woman holds a chess piece in her hand while the children raise their arms." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489062/original/file-20221010-23-yvk1pd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489062/original/file-20221010-23-yvk1pd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489062/original/file-20221010-23-yvk1pd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489062/original/file-20221010-23-yvk1pd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489062/original/file-20221010-23-yvk1pd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489062/original/file-20221010-23-yvk1pd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489062/original/file-20221010-23-yvk1pd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Teaching chess is school can help children to see the unity of all the other disciplines they learn at school.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Another champion, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRCvqr7XJAo">Alexander Alekhine</a>, thought chess was an art, an opinion that was corroborated by one of the world’s most famous artists, Marcel Duchamp, <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/P/bo44310477.html">who quit making art to focus on chess</a>. Computer scientists frequently turn to chess as a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/04/deep-thinking-where-machine-intelligence-ends-human-creativity-begins-garry-kasparov-review">test for artificial intelligence</a>. And former world champion Garry Kasparov has assimilated all of these insights and <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781427202291/howlifeimitateschess">written a book</a> arguing that chess is a model of all aspects of life.</p>
<p>Teaching chess in Canadian schools would train children to see the unity of all the other disciplines they learn at school. It would challenge them to use their minds, and yes, even their bodies, to learn, compete and have fun. While chess is in the spotlight, we should not miss this opportunity to build on the enthusiasm for chess that is present in Canada.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/191413/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Hickson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Chess affords young people a host of interdisciplinary skills, Canada should invest in teaching them how to play it.Michael Hickson, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Trent UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1913582022-09-28T16:27:15Z2022-09-28T16:27:15ZChess: how to spot a potential cheat<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487050/original/file-20220928-12-8njjx1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=23%2C0%2C5152%2C3453&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/black-white-photo-picture-chess-board-505874380">Hutsuliak Dmytro/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>A few years ago, the chess website <a href="https://www.chess.com/">Chess.com</a> temporarily <a href="https://www.twitch.tv/gmhikaru/clip/BlitheDrabSwordJKanStyle-5yUuq5mQoGpjKl2N">banned</a> US grandmaster <a href="https://ratings.fide.com/profile/2093596">Hans Niemann</a> for playing chess moves online that the site suspected had been suggested to him by a computer program. It had reportedly previously <a href="https://www.chessdom.com/niemanns-mentor-whom-carlsen-mentions-in-the-interview-was-banned-from-chess-com-for-cheating/">banned</a> his mentor Maxim Dlugy.</p>
<p>And at the <a href="https://theweekinchess.com/chessnews/events/9th-sinquefield-cup-2022">Sinquefield Cup</a> earlier this month, world champion <a href="https://ratings.fide.com/profile/1503014">Magnus Carlsen</a> resigned without comment after playing a poor game against 19-year-old Niemann. He has since said this was because he believes <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/sep/27/magnus-carlsen-hans-niemann-chess-cheating">Niemann has continued to cheat</a> recently. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Image of Hans Niemann." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486570/original/file-20220926-14-o1ik9u.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486570/original/file-20220926-14-o1ik9u.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=790&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486570/original/file-20220926-14-o1ik9u.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=790&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486570/original/file-20220926-14-o1ik9u.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=790&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486570/original/file-20220926-14-o1ik9u.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=993&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486570/original/file-20220926-14-o1ik9u.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=993&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486570/original/file-20220926-14-o1ik9u.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=993&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hans Niemann.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">wikipedia</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Another participant, the Russian Grandmaster Ian Nepomniachtchi, <a href="https://twitter.com/GrandChessTour/status/1566867536809021441?cxt=HHwWgsC-2aPu0L4rAAAA">called</a> Niemann’s performance “more than impressive”. While Nieman has admitted to sometimes having cheated in previous online games, he <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/sep/09/chess-hans-niemann-hits-back-over-cheating-controversy-in-st-louis">has strongly denied</a> ever cheating at a live chess tournament.</p>
<p>But how does Chess.com, the world’s biggest chess website, decide that a player has probably cheated? It can’t show the world the code it uses, or else would-be cheaters would know exactly how to avoid detection. The website states:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Though legal and practical considerations prevent Chess.com from revealing the full set of data, metrics and tracking used to evaluate games in our fair-play tool, we can say that at the core of Chess.com’s system is a statistical model that evaluates the probability of a human player matching an engine’s top choices, and surpassing the confirmed clean play of some of the greatest chess players in history.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Luckily, research can shed light on which approach the website may be using.</p>
<h2>Humans v AI</h2>
<p>When AI company <a href="https://www.deepmind.com/">DeepMind</a> developed the program AlphaGo, which could play the strategy game Go, <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nature16961%7D">it was taught to predict which moves a human would make</a> from any given position.</p>
<p>Predicting human moves is a supervised learning problem, the bread and butter of machine learning. Given lots of examples of positions from human games (the dataset) and an example of a human move from each such position (the label), machine learning algorithms can be trained to predict labels at new data points. So DeepMind taught its AI to estimate the probability that a human would make any given move from any given position.</p>
<p>AlphaGo <a href="https://theconversation.com/googles-latest-go-victory-shows-machines-are-no-longer-just-learning-theyre-teaching-78410">famously beat human rival</a> Lee Sedol in 2017. One of the AI’s famous moves in the game was “Move 37”. As lead researcher David Silver noted in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y">the documentary AlphaGo</a>, “AlphaGo said there was a 1/10,000 probability that Move 37 would have been played by a human player.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Image of Sedol's reaction to Move 37." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486545/original/file-20220926-19-lm3emz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486545/original/file-20220926-19-lm3emz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=331&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486545/original/file-20220926-19-lm3emz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=331&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486545/original/file-20220926-19-lm3emz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=331&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486545/original/file-20220926-19-lm3emz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=416&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486545/original/file-20220926-19-lm3emz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=416&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486545/original/file-20220926-19-lm3emz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=416&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sedol’s reaction to Move 37.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">youtube</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>So according to that machine learning model of human Go players, if you saw a person play Move 37, it would be evidence that they didn’t come up with the idea themselves. But of course, it wouldn’t be proof. Any human <em>could</em> make that move.</p>
<p>To become very confident that someone cheats at a game, you have to look at lots of moves. For example, researchers have investigated how lots of moves from a player can be <a href="https://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2118&context=etds">analysed collectively to detect anomalies</a>.</p>
<p>Chess.com openly uses machine learning to predict which moves might be made by a human in any given position. In fact, it has different models of individual famous chess players, and you <a href="https://www.chess.com/play/computer">can actually play against them</a>. Presumably, similar models are used to detect cheating. </p>
<p>A recent study suggested that, in addition to predicting how likely a human would be to make a certain move, it’s also important <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.01606.pdf">to account for how good that move is</a>. This matches Chess.com’s statement that it evaluates whether moves “surpass … confirmed clean play” from the greats.</p>
<p>But how do you measure which moves are better than others? In theory, a chess position is either “winning” (you can guarantee a win), “losing” (the other player can) or “drawing” (neither can), and a good move would be any move that doesn’t make your position worse. But realistically, although computers are much better at calculating and picking future moves than humans, for many positions not even they can tell for sure whether a position is winning, losing or drawing. And they certainly could never prove it – a proof would generally require too many calculations, examining every leaf of an exponential game tree.</p>
<p>So what people and computers do is use “<a href="https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/heuristics">heuristics</a>” (gut guesses) to assess the “value” of different positions – estimating which player they think will win. This can also be cast as a machine learning problem where the dataset is lots of board positions and the labels are who won – which trains the algorithm to predict who will win from a given position.</p>
<p>Typically, machine learning models used for this purpose do some thinking about the next few likely moves, consider what positions are accessible to both players, and then use “gut feeling” about those future positions to inform their evaluation of the current position.</p>
<p>But who wins from a given position depends on how good the players are. So the model’s evaluation of a particular game will depend on who was playing the games that made it into the training dataset. Typically, when chess commentators talk about the “objective value” of different positions, they mean who is likely to win from a given position when both sides are being played by the very best chess AIs available. But this measure of value isn’t always the most useful when considering a position that human players will have to carry out in the end. So it’s not clear exactly what Chess.com (or we) should consider to be a “good move”.</p>
<p>If I were cheating at chess and made a few moves suggested by a chess engine, it might not even help me win. Those moves might be setting up a brilliant attack that would never occur to me, so I would squander it unless I asked the chess engine to play the rest of the game for me. (Lichess.org tells me I’ve played 3,049 <a href="https://www.chess.com/terms/blitz-chess">Blitz games </a>at the time of writing, and my not-very-good <a href="https://www.chess.com/terms/elo-rating-chess">ELO rating</a> of 1632 means you can expect me to miss good tactics left and right.)</p>
<p>Detecting cheating is hard. If you’re playing online and you’re wondering if your opponent is cheating, you really aren’t going to be able to tell with any measure of certainty – because you haven’t seen millions of human games played with radically varying styles. It’s a problem where machine learning models trained with huge amounts of data have a big advantage. Ultimately, they may be critical for the ongoing integrity of chess.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/191358/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael K. Cohen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>You need an AI and lots of data to work out whether there’s any foul play in a chess game.Michael K. Cohen, Doctoral Candidate in Engineering, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1667242021-10-05T12:27:06Z2021-10-05T12:27:06ZWhy improvisation is the future in an AI-dominated world<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/423426/original/file-20210927-13-po5o8w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=93%2C85%2C1590%2C1063&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Robotic orchestra conductor 'Yumi' performs on stage with the Orchestra Filarmonica di Lucca in Italy in 2017.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/robotic-orchestra-conductor-yumi-performs-on-stage-with-the-news-photo/846676692?adppopup=true">Laura Lezza/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="http://yanko.lib.ru/books/bio/miles.htm">In his autobiography</a>, Miles Davis complained that classical musicians were like robots.</p>
<p>He spoke from experience – he’d studied classical music at Juilliard and recorded with classical musicians even after becoming a world-renowned jazz artist.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.richpellegrin.com/">As a music professor at the University of Florida</a>, which is transforming itself into an “<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/tiriasresearch/2020/07/21/nvidia-and-university-of-florida-supercharge-education-with-ai-supercomputer/?sh=380436783128">AI university</a>,” I often think about Davis’ words, and the ways in which musicians have become more machinelike over the past century. At the same time, I see how machines have been getting better at mimicking human improvisation, in all aspects of life.</p>
<p>I wonder what the limits of machine improvisation will be, and which human activities will survive the rise of intelligent machines. </p>
<h2>The rise of machine improvisation</h2>
<p>Machines have long excelled at activities involving consistent reproduction of a fixed object – think identical Toyotas being mass-produced in a factory.</p>
<p>More improvised activities are less rule-based, more fluid, chaotic or reactive, and are more process-oriented. AI has been making significant strides in this area.</p>
<p>Consider the following examples:</p>
<p>The trading pits of Wall Street, Tokyo and London were once filled with the vibrant chaos of traders shouting and signaling orders, reacting in real time to fluidly changing conditions. These trading pits have mostly <a href="https://www.wsj.com/video/end-of-era-trading-pits-close/1C73A831-DCCA-489C-99AE-087D8CFCBD11.html">been replaced by algorithms</a>.</p>
<p>Self-driving technology may soon replace human drivers, automating our fluid decision-making processes. Autonomous vehicles currently stumble where greater mastery of improvisation is required, such as <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-big-problem-with-selfdriving-cars-is-people">dealing with pedestrians</a>.</p>
<p>Much live social interaction has <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/22/heres-how-many-hours-american-workers-spend-on-email-each-day.html">been replaced by</a> the sterile activity of carefully composing emails or social media posts. Predictive email text will continue to evolve, bringing an increasingly transactional quality to our relationships. (“Hey Siri, email Amanda and congratulate her on her promotion.”)</p>
<p>IBM’s computer Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, but it took 20 more years for <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/computer-beats-go-champion-for-first-time/">AI to defeat top players of the board game go</a>. That’s because go has a far greater number of possible move choices at any given time, and virtually no specific rules – it requires more improvisation. Yet humans eventually became no match for machine: In 2019, former world go champion Lee Sedol <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/27/20985260/ai-go-alphago-lee-se-dol-retired-deepmind-defeat">retired from professional play</a>, citing AI’s ascendancy as the reason.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/423196/original/file-20210924-13-vaj0p3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Man holds head in hands before enthralled audience." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/423196/original/file-20210924-13-vaj0p3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/423196/original/file-20210924-13-vaj0p3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423196/original/file-20210924-13-vaj0p3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423196/original/file-20210924-13-vaj0p3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423196/original/file-20210924-13-vaj0p3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423196/original/file-20210924-13-vaj0p3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423196/original/file-20210924-13-vaj0p3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Chess enthusiasts watch world chess champion Garry Kasparov at the start of the sixth and final match against IBM’s Deep Blue computer in 1997.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/chess-enthusiasts-watch-world-chess-champion-garry-kasparov-news-photo/511682700?adppopup=true">Stan Honda/AFP via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Music becomes more machinelike</h2>
<p>Machines are replacing human improvisation at a time when classical music has abandoned it.</p>
<p>Before the 20th century, nearly all of the major figures of Western art music excelled at composition, performance and improvisation. Johann Sebastian Bach was mostly known as an organist, with his first biographer <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35041">describing his organ improvisations</a> as “more devout, solemn, dignified and sublime” than his compositions. </p>
<p>But the 20th century saw the splintering of the performer-composer-improviser tradition into specialized realms. </p>
<p>Performers faced the rise of recording techniques that flooded consumers with fixed, homogeneous and objectively correct versions of compositions. Classical musicians had to consistently deliver technically flawless live performances to match, sometimes reducing music to a sort of Olympics.</p>
<p>Classical pianist Glenn Gould was both a source and product of this state of affairs – he despised the rigidity and competitiveness of live performance and retired from the stage at the age of 31, but retreated to the studio to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/arts/music/glenn-gould-bach-goldberg-variations.html">painstakingly assemble</a> visionary Bach interpretations that were impossible to perform in one take.</p>
<p>Composers mostly abandoned the serious pursuit of improvisation or performance. Modernists became increasingly enthralled with procedures, algorithms and mathematical models, mirroring contemporary technological developments. The ultra-complex compositions of high modernism required machinelike accuracy from performers, but many postmodern minimalist scores also demanded robotic precision.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/423377/original/file-20210927-15-11qeake.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Musical notes crowd a page." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/423377/original/file-20210927-15-11qeake.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/423377/original/file-20210927-15-11qeake.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=454&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423377/original/file-20210927-15-11qeake.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=454&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423377/original/file-20210927-15-11qeake.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=454&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423377/original/file-20210927-15-11qeake.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=571&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423377/original/file-20210927-15-11qeake.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=571&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423377/original/file-20210927-15-11qeake.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=571&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An excerpt from Brian Ferneyhough’s 1982 solo piano composition, ‘Lemma-Icon-Epigram,’ reflecting the complexity of high-modernist music.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">University of Florida Art and Architecture Library</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><audio preload="metadata" controls="controls" data-duration="14" data-image="" data-title="A performance of the excerpt from 'Lemma-Icon-Epigram.'" data-size="343270" data-source="Metier" data-source-url="" data-license="" data-license-url="">
<source src="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/2280/ferneyhough-excerpt.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
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<div class="audio-player-caption">
A performance of the excerpt from ‘Lemma-Icon-Epigram.’
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Metier</span><span class="download"><span>335 KB</span> <a target="_blank" href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/2280/ferneyhough-excerpt.mp3">(download)</a></span></span>
</div></p>
<p>Improvisation ceased almost entirely to be a part of classical music, but flourished in a new art form: jazz. Yet jazz struggled to gain parity, particularly in the U.S., its country of origin, due in large part to systemic racism. The classical world even has its own version of the “<a href="https://lithub.com/how-the-one-drop-rule-became-a-tool-of-white-supremacy/">one-drop rule</a>”: Works containing improvisation or written by jazz composers are often <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/02/07/one_drop_rule_of_jazz_wayne_shorter_duke_ellington_and_other_black_composers.html">dismissed as illegitimate</a> by the classical establishment.</p>
<p>A recent <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/25/arts/music/classical-music-orchestra-improvisation.html">New York Times article</a> called on orchestras to open themselves up to improvisation and collaborate with jazz luminaries such as saxophonist <a href="https://www.arts.gov/honors/jazz/roscoe-mitchell">Roscoe Mitchell</a>, who has composed many orchestral works. But college and university music programs have segregated and marginalized jazz studies, leaving orchestral musicians bereft of training in improvisation. Instead, musicians in an orchestra are seated according to their objectively ranked ability, and their job is to replicate the motions of the principal player.</p>
<p>They are the machines of the music world. In the future, will they be the most disposable? </p>
<h2>Davis perfects the art of imperfection</h2>
<p>The march of AI continues, but will it ever be able to engage in true improvisation? </p>
<p>Machines easily replicate objects, but improvisation is a process. In pure musical improvisation, there’s no predetermined structure and no objectively correct performance.</p>
<p>And improvisation isn’t merely instantaneous composition; if it were, then AI would collapse the distinction between the two due to its speed of calculation. </p>
<p>Rather, improvisation has an elusive, human quality resulting from the tension between skill and spontaneity. Machines will always be highly skilled, but will they ever be able to stop calculating and switch to an intuitive mode of creation, like a jazz musician going from the practice room to the gig?</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Man in sunglasses dressed in purple playing trumpet." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/423734/original/file-20210929-15-mwee22.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/423734/original/file-20210929-15-mwee22.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423734/original/file-20210929-15-mwee22.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423734/original/file-20210929-15-mwee22.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423734/original/file-20210929-15-mwee22.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=672&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423734/original/file-20210929-15-mwee22.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=672&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423734/original/file-20210929-15-mwee22.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=672&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Miles Davis.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/american-jazz-trumpeter-and-composer-miles-davis-performs-news-photo/96983263?adppopup=true">David Redfern/Redferns via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Davis reached a point at Juilliard where he had to decide on his future. He connected deeply with classical music and was known to walk around with Stravinsky scores in his pocket. He would later praise composers from Bach to Stockhausen and record jazz interpretations of compositions by Manuel de Falla, Heitor Villa-Lobos and Joaquín Rodrigo. </p>
<p>Yet there were many reasons to abandon the classical world for jazz. Davis recounts playing “about two notes every 90 bars” in the orchestra. This stood in stark contrast to the extraordinary challenge and stimulation of late-night jam sessions with musicians like <a href="https://www.npr.org/transcripts/132133171/">Thelonious Monk</a> and <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1976/03/01/bird-whitney-balliett">Charlie Parker</a> .</p>
<p><a href="http://yanko.lib.ru/books/bio/miles.htm">He experienced the reality of racism</a> and “knew that no white symphony orchestra was going to hire [him].” (By contrast, Davis regularly hired white players, like Lee Konitz, Bill Evans and John McLaughlin.)</p>
<p>And he was the antithesis of a machine. </p>
<p>But in jazz, Davis was able to transform his technical struggles with the trumpet into a haunting, iconic sound. His wrong notes, missed notes and cracked notes became wheezes, whispers and sighs expressing the human condition. Not only did he own these “mistakes,” he also <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/742559">actively courted them</a> with a risky approach that prioritized color over line and expression over accuracy.</p>
<p>His was the art of imperfection, and therein lies the paradox of jazz. Davis left Juilliard after three semesters, but became one of the single most important musical figures of the 20th century.</p>
<p><audio preload="metadata" controls="controls" data-duration="52" data-image="" data-title="Miles Davis embraced the trumpet's squelches and wheezes." data-size="1247943" data-source="Miles Davis/YouTube" data-source-url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdrAzpYdOYs" data-license="" data-license-url="">
<source src="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/2286/miles-davis-excerpt.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio>
<div class="audio-player-caption">
Miles Davis embraced the trumpet’s squelches and wheezes.
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdrAzpYdOYs">Miles Davis/YouTube</a><span class="download"><span>1.19 MB</span> <a target="_blank" href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/2286/miles-davis-excerpt.mp3">(download)</a></span></span>
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<p>Today the ground has shifted. </p>
<p>[<em>Over 110,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletter to understand the world.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=100Ksignup">Sign up today</a>.]</p>
<p>Juilliard has a thriving jazz program led by another trumpeter versed in both classical music and jazz – <a href="https://www.juilliard.edu/music/faculty/marsalis-wynton">Wynton Marsalis</a>, who has received two classical Grammy awards for his solo work. And while the narrative of “the robots coming for our jobs” is cliché, these displacements are happening quickly, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/06/business/the-robots-are-coming-for-phil-in-accounting.html">accelerated greatly</a> by the COVID-19 pandemic. </p>
<p>We are hurtling toward a time when actual robots could conceivably replace Davis’ classical “robots” – perhaps some of the 20 violinists in a symphony orchestra – if only at first as a gimmick.</p>
<p>However, we may soon discover that jazz artists are irreplaceable.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/166724/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rich Pellegrin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Machines have been getting better at mimicking improvisation. But can this distinctly human process serve as a bulwark against the mechanization of life and art?Rich Pellegrin, Assistant Professor of Music Theory and Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Center for Arts, Migration, and Entrepreneurship, University of FloridaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1564702021-03-11T16:36:01Z2021-03-11T16:36:01Z‘The Queen’s Gambit’ lures viewers with a post-#MeToo utopia<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/388878/original/file-20210310-17-1wxfstl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=511%2C17%2C1405%2C942&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Beth in 'The Queen's Gambit,' is surrounded by a community of male allies in awe of her brilliance.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Netflix)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>If you haven’t heard already, <em>The Queen’s Gambit</em> on Netflix is a <a href="https://about.netflix.com/en/news/the-queens-gambit-netflix-most-watched-scripted-limited-series">phenomenal success</a>. After its release last October, it became the No. 1 Netflix show in 63 countries and has prompted meteoric increases in the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/06/us/queens-gambit-chess-popularity-trnd/index.html">sales of chess sets and books</a>. At <a href="https://www.goldenglobes.com/tv-show/queens-gambit">this year’s Golden Globe Awards</a>, it won for best limited series or TV movie and its star, Anya Taylor-Joy, won for best actress in the same category.</p>
<p>The show is largely set in the 1960s and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/nov/12/check-her-out-how-netflix-hit-the-queens-gambit-thrills-with-fashion">recreates a captivating esthetic</a> from that decade. The hero is Beth Harmon, a young chess prodigy who, despite time in an orphanage and an addiction to prescription drugs, enters and eventually conquers the world of chess — one that is inhabited entirely by men. </p>
<p>Some viewers and commentators have <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/queens-gambit-sexism/2020/11/24/d5c0c0f2-2daa-11eb-bae0-50bb17126614_story.html">revelled in what is absent from Beth’s trajectory</a>: toxic masculinity and <a href="https://www.macleans.ca/culture/the-best-thing-about-the-queens-gambit-theres-no-rape/">sexual violence</a>. Aside from hostile looks and gruff responses from the over-confident men she defeats early on, Beth is surrounded by a <a href="https://www.bustle.com/entertainment/the-queens-gambit-benevolent-masculine-energy">community of male allies</a> who train her in chess and provide emotional support, allowing her to fulfil her potential.</p>
<p>Beth’s birth and adoptive mothers have their ambitions and ultimately their lives cut short by gender-based limitations and the ensuing damage. By contrast, Beth inhabits a parallel, post-<a href="https://metoomvmt.org/">#MeToo</a> society. Beth’s post-#MeToo world is worth celebrating — but the way the show imagines it won’t make it any easier for us to achieve.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CDrieqwSdgI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘The Queen’s Gambit’ trailer.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Designed for mass consumption</h2>
<p>From our perspective as scholars <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Frankfurt-School">who have studied social criticism generated by the Frankfurt School for Social Research</a>, shows designed for mass popular appeal always contain ideological and utopian components. This is especially true in post-Second World War advanced or <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/late-capitalism/524943/">late capitalist</a> societies, where participating in mass consumer culture is perceived to be an authentic source of individual freedom and identity.</p>
<p>Leading Frankfurt School figures from the middle of the 20th century, such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/3143-minima-moralia">emphasized that</a> one way ideology functions is to distort social reality. Such distortions often misrepresent <a href="http://cup.columbia.edu/book/pathologies-of-reason/9780231146265">society’s pathologies</a> as problems that do not need to be solved through collective political action.</p>
<p>For example, in <em>The Queen’s Gambit</em>, overcoming addiction is presented as a matter of will power. Beth’s reliance on prescription drugs (and later alcohol) helps her to visualize chess at an elite level but leaves her, briefly, at rock bottom — until an old friend appears at her doorstep and helps turn Beth around simply by urging her to live straight. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, the sexism Beth experiences is real yet somehow inconsequential. There is no harassment, no assault, no doors that won’t open or ceilings that won’t shatter. Given the absence of persistent social complications, it is little wonder that Beth lacks a political consciousness in a time when second-wave feminism <a href="https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/94chw7cg9780252033285.html">was taking off</a> as fast as the Beatles.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A girl and man playing chess." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/388883/original/file-20210310-13-cnzskv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/388883/original/file-20210310-13-cnzskv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/388883/original/file-20210310-13-cnzskv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/388883/original/file-20210310-13-cnzskv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/388883/original/file-20210310-13-cnzskv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/388883/original/file-20210310-13-cnzskv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/388883/original/file-20210310-13-cnzskv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mr. Shaibel, the janitor at Beth’s orphanage, initially refuses to teach Beth how to play chess. After she learns by spying on him, he is astonished at her skill and ushers her into a wider world of chess competition.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Phil Bray/Netflix)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Featuring utopia</h2>
<p>If Beth’s path to the top seems historically implausible, what helps to keep viewers’ interest? This is where a show’s utopian features can compensate. Few people would watch any scripted drama that did not have something that acts as a lure, something that many viewers do not have but that they want. Utopia functions here as a <a href="https://cup.columbia.edu/book/political-uses-of-utopia/9780231179591">critical reflection</a> on what exists.</p>
<p>In this case, especially for women, the utopia is the (unbelievable) meritocracy that Beth enjoys. From the janitor who teaches Beth chess at her orphanage, to the state and national champions she defeats, these men experience her talent as a revelation. Their initial skepticism turns into astonishment and then reverence. These “conversions,” so to speak, that the men experience, are bewildering because they misrepresent men both then and now.</p>
<p><em>The Queen’s Gambit</em> may at first appear to <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/donald-trump-inauguration-nationalism">trade on nostalgia</a> by recreating a past that never existed. But nostalgia of this type is inherently conservative, appealing to people’s sense of the familiar and their desire for apparently simpler times during periods of disruption. Much more than a nostalgic reimagining of gender relations in the 1960s, this show is in fact forward-looking. It offers a utopian vision of what women’s lives could be if all men were good.</p>
<p>Crucially, however, we must always be alert to whether the utopian aspect of any show misrepresents social reality in a way that has detrimental political consequences. In this case, the show presents a <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9781935408543/undoing-the-demos">neo-liberal vision</a> of how radical social change occurs: the notion that self-interested individuals have free agency and can easily adapt their behaviour independent of social relations or the institutions of our society. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A young woman in front of a line of young men playing chess." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/388860/original/file-20210310-13-1k6nj9w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/388860/original/file-20210310-13-1k6nj9w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/388860/original/file-20210310-13-1k6nj9w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/388860/original/file-20210310-13-1k6nj9w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/388860/original/file-20210310-13-1k6nj9w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/388860/original/file-20210310-13-1k6nj9w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/388860/original/file-20210310-13-1k6nj9w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Benny (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), far right, a chess prodigy, is briefly Beth’s lover but foremost champions her ambition and gifts when he strategizes behind the scenes to collaboratively help her beat the Russians.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Phil Bray/Netflix)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Recognizing equal dignity</h2>
<p>This particular utopia suggests what women need to succeed is for individual men to be good, to overcome the all-too-typical moral failings that sexism involves. But this amounts to <a href="http://humanityjournal.org/issue7-3/moralism-and-its-discontents/">moralism</a> by implying that the primary means to progress, including gender-based equality, involves correcting the defects in specific people rather than reconstructing the institutions in which individuals are rooted. The illusion of meritocracy succeeds because Beth ends up living apart from <a href="https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745399881/social-reproduction-theory/">major institutions</a> in which male domination is reproduced: the family, the school, the workplace.</p>
<p>Also, very few women (or men) are like Beth, who is exceptional. Can everyday women expect men in their lives to dramatically revise their sexist attitudes like the men surrounding Beth? The #MeToo utopia answers: Why shouldn’t they? </p>
<p>Utopia means “no place,” not necessarily forever, but at least for now. What men need to do is recognize women as possessing equal dignity — and exceptionalism is no requirement for this. What is required is to reconstruct the power dynamics inside the institutions that we all inhabit. Good men can help, but more of them have to be made. Until we can radically transform human relations within the family, the school and the workplace, too many women will need to find ways to be exceptional.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/156470/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Grant receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Elizabeth Vlossak has in the past received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.</span></em></p>Can everyday women expect men to dramatically revise their sexist attitudes like the men surrounding the chess whiz in ‘The Queen’s Gambit’? The MeToo utopia answers: Why shouldn’t they?John Grant, Associate Professor of Political Science, King's University College, Western UniversityElizabeth Vlossak, Associate Professor of History, Brock UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1506372020-12-13T22:16:15Z2020-12-13T22:16:15ZWhat’s behind the gender imbalance in top-level chess?<p>Unlike the wildly popular Netflix chess-themed series <a href="https://www.netflix.com/au/title/80234304">The Queen’s Gambit</a>, female players have struggled to climb to the top of the real-life chess world. Just 37 of the more than 1,600 international chess <a href="https://ratings.fide.com/download_lists.phtml">grandmasters</a> are women. The current top-rated female, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hou_Yifan">Hou Yifan</a>, is ranked <a href="https://ratings.fide.com/profile/8602980">89th</a> in the world, while the reigning women’s world champion <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ju_Wenjun">Ju Wenjun</a> is <a href="https://ratings.fide.com/profile/8603006">404th</a>. </p>
<p>Why? There are certainly <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01828.x">fewer</a> <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17331269/">female</a> chess players to begin with, but it <a href="https://chess24.com/en/read/news/the-gender-gap-in-top-level-chess">appears</a> <a href="https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2009.2257">unlikely</a> participation can explain the whole story.</p>
<p>The argument about chess’s gender gap often follows the classic nature-versus-nurture debate. On one side are those who believe men are “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/20/nigel-short-uk-grandmaster-men-hardwired-better-chess-players-women">hardwired</a>” to play chess, such as former World Championship challenger <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Short">Nigel Short</a>. </p>
<p>His comments <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/11690553/Nigel-Short-shrill-feminists-have-turned-me-into-the-pantomine-villain-of-chess.html">caused a media storm in the United Kingdom</a>. It’s true women have been shown to exhibit <a href="https://doi.org/10.1162/JEEA.2009.7.2-3.649">higher risk aversion</a> and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qju009">lower competitiveness</a> across many domains, <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927537110000588">including chess</a>, possibly driven by differences in <a href="https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0907352106">testosterone</a>. However, <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268113000395">evidence is mixed</a> on whether or how these traits affect performance over the chess board. </p>
<h2>‘We are capable of the same fight as any man’</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371466/original/file-20201126-23-yb47d7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371466/original/file-20201126-23-yb47d7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371466/original/file-20201126-23-yb47d7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=693&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371466/original/file-20201126-23-yb47d7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=693&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371466/original/file-20201126-23-yb47d7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=693&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371466/original/file-20201126-23-yb47d7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=871&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371466/original/file-20201126-23-yb47d7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=871&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371466/original/file-20201126-23-yb47d7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=871&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hungary’s Judit Polgár is generally considered the strongest female chess player of all time.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0">Stefan64, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On the other side are those who argue the gender gap in chess is mainly due to societal and cultural pressures that put women off the game. A commonly cited example is Hungary’s <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r">Judit Polgár</a>, considered the strongest female player of all time, and the only woman ever to be ranked in the world’s top ten. Her psychologist father <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/articles/200507/the-grandmaster-experiment">believed geniuses are created</a>, not born. His three daughters, home-schooled in chess from the age of three, each achieved groundbreaking success in the game.</p>
<p>Judit Polgár reached a peak ranking of eighth in the world and shared the same view as her father when she retired in 2015, saying:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We are capable of the same fight as any man. It’s not a matter of gender, it’s a matter of being smart.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>The stereotype threat effect</h2>
<p>Despite Judit Polgár’s success, stereotypes about female chess players remain. Her older sister Susan, a former women’s world champion, noted:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When men lose against me, they always have a headache… I have never beaten a healthy man.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The American Bobby Fischer, on whom The Queen’s Gambit’s lead character is largely based, once <a href="https://twitter.com/olimpiuurcan/status/969224340297302021">said</a> women are “terrible chess players”, later opining that “I don’t think they should mess into intellectual affairs; they should keep strictly to the home”. </p>
<p>Another former world champion, Garry Kasparov, <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12/02/garry-kasparov-wrong-women-playing-chess/">said</a> in a 1989 issue of Playboy Magazine that “there is real chess and women’s chess”.</p>
<p>These sorts of beliefs may induce a “<a href="https://www.apa.org/research/action/stereotype">stereotype threat</a>” that can explain part of the performance gap.</p>
<p>Stereotype threat is where minorities underperform solely because they’re aware of a stereotype that people of their group do worse. Confidence flags, interest wanes and a vicious cycle of self-fulfilling prophesy follows. The stereotype threat effect has been observed in experiments involving women and <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022103198913737">mathematics performance</a> and in studies on <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1048984315001332#bb0375">lower representation</a> of women in leadership positions.</p>
<p>In one <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ejsp.440">study</a>, researchers pitted male and female chess players against each other online. The sexes performed equally when identities were anonymous, but when the sex of the opponents was known, female players performed worse against male players and better against other female players. </p>
<p>Using a dataset of more than 180,000 players and 8 million rated tournament games, my colleagues and I <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797620924051?journalCode=pssa">recently found evidence</a> to support a stereotype threat effect for female chess players. Female players tend to perform worse against male opponents than against female opponents, even after accounting for chess strength. </p>
<p>The performance drop is roughly equivalent to a woman giving her male opponent the advantage of the first move in every single game. </p>
<h2>The winds of change</h2>
<p>There is still much to discover about what play the biggest roles in driving the gender performance and participation gaps in chess, what policies can be used to narrow them, and what these insights tell us about other male-dominated fields. </p>
<p>What we do know, however, is the chess world is starting to change. In 2001, only 6% of internationally rated players were female. By 2020 this had <a href="https://chess.stackexchange.com/a/23337/17214">risen to more than 15%</a>. </p>
<p>Part of this may be due to “affirmative action” policies, such as chess league mandates that clubs include at least one female player in their (typically eight-player) teams. This not only increases female earnings but also has a trickle-down effect for female participation. </p>
<p>Two economists <a href="https://www.sciencespo.fr/liepp/en/content/positive-effects-affirmative-action-case-study-france.html">recently looked</a> at the effect of this policy in the French chess league. The study, which is yet to undergo peer review, found not only that the share of female chess players in France significantly increased in subsequent years, but that the ratings gap for elite male and female players also narrowed.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371475/original/file-20201126-15-1qq2sdc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A girl plays chess in a public park." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371475/original/file-20201126-15-1qq2sdc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371475/original/file-20201126-15-1qq2sdc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371475/original/file-20201126-15-1qq2sdc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371475/original/file-20201126-15-1qq2sdc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371475/original/file-20201126-15-1qq2sdc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371475/original/file-20201126-15-1qq2sdc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371475/original/file-20201126-15-1qq2sdc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A recent study found mandating clubs include at least one female player in their teams in the French league found the share of female chess players in France increased in subsequent years and the gender gap in chess performance narrowed.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Attitudes are starting to change, too. After his <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/av/magazine-35483650">famous loss</a> to <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r">Judit Polgár</a> in 2002 — the first time a female player had beaten a reigning world champion in a rated game — Kasparov was asked about his <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12/02/garry-kasparov-wrong-women-playing-chess/">past opinions</a> about women’s chess. His reply: “I don’t believe that now.” </p>
<p>The current world champion, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Carlsen">Magnus Carlsen</a>, said in a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/nov/21/magnus-carlsen-chess-interview-queens-gambit-beth-harmon-netflix">recent interview</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Chess societies have not been very kind to women and girls over the years. Certainly, there needs to be a bit of a change in culture.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Could The Queen’s Gambit spark that change? The show is Neflix’s <a href="https://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/web-series/the-queens-gambit-becomes-netflix-most-watched-scripted-limited-series-7063689">most-watched scripted limited series</a>, reaching number 1 in more than 60 countries. </p>
<p>Chess-related Google searches have <a href="https://www.republicworld.com/entertainment-news/web-series/the-queens-gambit-sets-worldwide-viewership-record-for-netflix.html">soared</a> since its debut. And past <a href="https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.4.4.1">research</a> has shown popular television can have a significant impact on real-world outcomes related to gender. </p>
<p>As to whether we’ll see a “Netflix Effect” on the chess gender gap, only time will tell.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/150637/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Smerdon was awarded the title of international grandmaster in 2009 and has represented Australia in seven chess Olympiads.</span></em></p>Stereotype threat is where minorities underperform solely because they’re aware of a stereotype that people of their group do worse.David Smerdon, Assistant Professor, School of Economics, The University of QueenslandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1513702020-12-08T13:14:42Z2020-12-08T13:14:42ZIn ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ and beyond, chess holds up a mirror to life<p>In the closing sequence of “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10048342/">The Queen’s Gambit</a>,” the chess-playing heroine, Beth Harmon, defeats her archrival Vasily Borgov at the Moscow Invitational. The next day she impulsively skips her flight home to join a group of adoring chess players in what appears to be Moscow’s famous <a href="https://www.moscovery.com/sokolniki-park/">Sokolniki Park</a>. The symbolism of this moment is clear. Dressed in a <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-8987717/Netflix-reveals-meaning-Beth-Harmons-outfits-Queens-Gambit.html">blazing white coat and hat</a>, Beth has become a chess queen with the power to move freely through a field of men.</p>
<p>If this use of chess to represent life feels familiar, it is largely thanks to the medieval world. As I argue in my book “<a href="https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14222.html">Power Play: The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Late Middle Ages</a>,” the game’s early European players turned the game into an allegory for society and changed it to mirror their world. Since then, poets and writers have used it as an allegory for love, duty, conflict and accomplishment.</p>
<h2>The game’s medieval roots</h2>
<p>When chess arrived in Europe through Mediterranean trade routes of the 10th century, players altered the game to reflect their society’s political structure. </p>
<p>In its original form, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Oxford-Companion-Chess-Second/dp/0198661649">chess was a game of war</a> with pieces representing different military units: horsemen, elephant-riding fighters, charioteers and infantry. These armed units protected the “shah,” or king, and his counselor, the “firz,” in the game’s imagined battle. </p>
<p>But Europeans quickly transformed the “shah” to a king, the “vizier” to the queen, the “elephants” to bishops, the “horses” to knights, the “chariots” to castles and the “foot soldiers” to pawns. With these changes, the two sides of the board no longer represented the units in an army; they now stood in for Western social order.</p>
<p>The game gave concrete expression to the medieval worldview that every person had a designated place. Moreover, it revised and improved the very common <a href="http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng330/three_estates.htm">“three-estate” model</a>: those who fought (knights), those who prayed (clergy) and those who worked (the rest). </p>
<p>Then there was the transformation of the queen. Although chess rules across medieval Europe had some variations, most initially granted the queen the power to move only one square. This changed in the 15th century, when the chess queen gained unlimited movement in any direction. </p>
<p>Most players would agree that this change made the game faster and more interesting to play. But also, and as the late Stanford historian Marylin Yalom argued in “<a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/birth-of-the-chess-queen-marilyn-yalom?variant=32122469023778">The Birth of the Chess Queen</a>,” the queen’s elevation to the strongest piece appeared first in Spain during the time when the powerful Queen Isabella held the throne. </p>
<h2>A ‘mating’ dance</h2>
<p>With <a href="https://chaucer.lib.utsa.edu/omeka/items/show/274705">a powerful female figure</a> now on the board, jokes about “mating” abounded, and poets often used chess as a metaphor for sex. </p>
<p>Take the 13th-century epic poem “<a href="https://carleton.ca/chum/wp-content/uploads/Huon-for-Hums-3200.pdf">Huon de Bordeaux</a>.” Wanting to expose his newly hired servant, Huon, as a nobleman, King Yvoryn urges him to play chess against his prodigiously talented daughter. </p>
<p>“If thou can mate her,” Yvoryn says, “I promise that thou shalt have her one night in thy bed, to do with her at thy pleasure.” If Huon loses, Yvoryn will kill him. </p>
<p>Huon does not play chess well. But this turns out not to matter because he looks like a medieval version of “Queen’s Gambit” breakout star <a href="https://www.marieclaire.com/culture/a34510174/who-is-townes-the-queens-gambit-jacob-fortune-lloyd/">Jacob Fortune-Lloyd</a>. Dizzy with desire and desperate to sleep with this heartthrob, Yvoryn’s daughter plays badly and loses the game. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/373384/original/file-20201207-13-1f9670l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A young man and woman play chess while two other women look on." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/373384/original/file-20201207-13-1f9670l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/373384/original/file-20201207-13-1f9670l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=349&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/373384/original/file-20201207-13-1f9670l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=349&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/373384/original/file-20201207-13-1f9670l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=349&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/373384/original/file-20201207-13-1f9670l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=439&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/373384/original/file-20201207-13-1f9670l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=439&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/373384/original/file-20201207-13-1f9670l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=439&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An image of two young lovers playing chess from Alfonso X’s 13th-century ‘Book of Chess, Dice and Tables.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://jnsilva.ludicum.org/HJT2012/BookofGames.pdf">Charles Knutson</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the 14th-century poem “<a href="https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/hahn-sir-gawain-avowyng-of-arthur-introduction">The Avowyng of King Arthur</a>,” chess also stands in for sex. At one key moment, King Arthur summons a noble lady to play chess; together they “sat themselves together on the side of the bed” and “began to play until dawn that was day.” The repeated “mating” on the board not-so-subtly hints at a night of lovemaking.</p>
<p>It also shows up to this end in “The Queen’s Gambit.” In an echo of Huon’s game, Beth plays with her friend and love interest, Townes, in his hotel room. Their match, however, is interrupted when it becomes clear that Townes doesn’t share Beth’s feelings. Later in the story, Beth plays with Harry Beltik. Their first kiss takes place over the board and prefaces their sexual consummation. </p>
<h2>Chess as ‘life in miniature’</h2>
<p>But much deeper and more interesting are the medieval allegories that use chess to reinforce societal obligations and ties between citizens. </p>
<p>No author did this more comprehensively than 13th-century Dominican friar Jacobus de Cessolis. In his treatise “<a href="https://www.textmanuscripts.com/medieval/cessolis-liber-de-moribus-60910">The Book of the Morals of Men and the Duties of Nobles and Commoners on the Game of Chess</a>,” Jacobus imagines chess as a way to teach personal accountability. </p>
<p>In four short sections, Jacobus moves through the gameplay and pieces, describing the ways each one contributes to a harmonious social order. He goes so far as to distinguish pawns by trade and to connect each to its “royal” partner. The first pawn is a farmer who is tied to the castle because he provides food to the kingdom. The second pawn is a blacksmith, who makes armor for the knight. The third is an attorney, who helps the bishop with legal matters. And so on.</p>
<p>Jacobus’ work became one of the most popular of the Middle Ages and, according to chess historian <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/A-History-of-Chess/H-J-R-Murray/9781632202932">H.J.R. Murray</a>, at one point rivaled the number of Bible copies in circulation. Even though Jacobus in his prologue implies that his book is most useful for a king, the rest of his treatise makes clear that all people – and the piece they most closely resemble – can benefit by reading his work, learning the game and mastering the lessons that come with it. </p>
<p>Jacobus’ allegory becomes one of the central messages of “The Queen’s Gambit.” Beth reaches her full potential only after she learns to collaborate with other players. Just like the pawn she converts in her <a href="https://vandevliet.me/the-queens-gambit-the-final-game-harmon-vs-borgov/">final game</a>, Beth becomes a figurative queen only with the help of others.</p>
<p>[<em>Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/weekly-highlights-61?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=weeklybest">Sign up for our weekly newsletter</a>.]</p>
<p>But this is not the only modern work that deploys chess in this fashion. “<a href="https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/star-wars-holochess-game-no-headset">Star Wars</a>,” “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sm_-vJNCHk">Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone</a>” and “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za8TuwshXnA">Blade Runner</a>,” to name just a few, use versions of the game at key moments to show a character’s growth or to stand in as a metaphor for conflict.</p>
<p>So the next time you see a headline like “<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-01/trump-nears-checkmate-stage-in-last-gasp-bid-to-undo-election">Trump Nears Checkmate</a>” and “<a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gang-of-10-obamas-checkmate/">Gang of 10: Obama’s Checkmate</a>,” or see an ad for <a href="https://spycentre.com/products/checkmate-home-infidelity-test-kit">a “Checkmate” infidelity test</a>, you can thank – or curse – the medieval world.</p>
<p>Grandmaster Garry Kasparov’s observation ultimately holds true. “Chess,” <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RemmwytmEXs">he once quipped</a>, “is life in miniature.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/151370/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jenny Adams has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). She has received no support from for-profit organizations.</span></em></p>Ever since players tweaked the game to reflect the medieval social order, poets and writers have used chess as an allegory for love, duty, conflict and accomplishment.Jenny Adams, Associate Professor of English, UMass AmherstLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1511812020-12-02T13:28:54Z2020-12-02T13:28:54ZAI makes huge progress predicting how proteins fold – one of biology’s greatest challenges – promising rapid drug development<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/372322/original/file-20201201-15-s2hltf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=5%2C2%2C973%2C431&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A simple chain of amino acids folds into a complex three-dimensional structure.</span> </figcaption></figure><p><strong>Takeaways</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><p><strong>A “deep learning” software program from Google-owned lab DeepMind showed great progress in solving one of biology’s greatest challenges – understanding protein folding.</strong> </p></li>
<li><p><strong>Protein folding is the process by which a protein takes its shape from a string of building blocks to its final three-dimensional structure, which determines its function.</strong></p></li>
<li><p><strong>By better predicting how proteins take their structure, or “fold,” scientists can more quickly develop drugs that, for example, block the action of crucial viral proteins.</strong> </p></li>
</ul>
<hr>
<p>Solving what biologists call “the protein-folding problem” is a big deal. Proteins are the workhorses of cells and are present in all living organisms. They are made up of long chains of amino acids and are vital for the structure of cells and communication between them as well as regulating all of the chemistry in the body. </p>
<p>This week, the Google-owned artificial intelligence company <a href="https://www.deepmind.com">DeepMind</a> demonstrated a deep-learning program called <a href="https://deepmind.com/blog/article/alphafold-a-solution-to-a-50-year-old-grand-challenge-in-biology">AlphaFold2</a>, which experts are calling a <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03348-4">breakthrough</a> toward solving the grand challenge of <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-03348-4">protein folding</a>. </p>
<p>Proteins are long chains of amino acids linked together like beads on a string. But for a protein to do its job in the cell, it must “fold” – a process of twisting and bending that transforms the molecule into a complex three-dimensional structure that can interact with its target in the cell. If the folding is disrupted, then the protein won’t form the correct shape – and it won’t be able to perform its job inside the body. This can lead to disease – as is the case in a common disease like Alzheimer’s, and rare ones like cystic fibrosis.</p>
<p>Deep learning is a computational technique that uses the often hidden information contained in vast datasets to solve questions of interest. It’s been used widely in fields such as games, speech and voice recognition, autonomous cars, science and medicine.</p>
<p>I believe that tools like AlphaFold2 will help scientists to design new types of proteins, ones that may, for example, help break down plastics and fight future viral pandemics and disease. </p>
<p><a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=RpiSPiwAAAAJ&hl=en">I am a computational chemist</a> and author of the book <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781633886407/The-State-of-Science-What-the-Future-Holds-and-the-Scientists-Making-It-Happen">The State of Science</a>. My students and I study the structure and properties of <a href="https://www.conncoll.edu/ccacad/zimmer/GFP-ww/GFP-1.htm">fluorescent proteins</a> using protein-folding computer programs based on classical physics. </p>
<p>After decades of study by thousands of research groups, these protein-folding prediction programs are very good at calculating structural changes that occur when we make small alterations to known molecules. </p>
<p>But they haven’t adequately managed to predict how proteins fold from scratch. Before deep learning came along, the protein-folding problem seemed impossibly hard, and it seemed poised to frustrate computational chemists for many decades to come.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/372313/original/file-20201201-23-12msmry.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/372313/original/file-20201201-23-12msmry.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/372313/original/file-20201201-23-12msmry.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/372313/original/file-20201201-23-12msmry.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/372313/original/file-20201201-23-12msmry.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/372313/original/file-20201201-23-12msmry.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=641&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/372313/original/file-20201201-23-12msmry.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=641&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/372313/original/file-20201201-23-12msmry.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=641&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A chain of amino acids goes through several folding steps, which occurs through hydrogen bonds between amino acids in different regions of the protein, before arriving at the final structure. The example shown here is hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells that transports oxygen to body tissues.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/225_Peptide_Bond-01.jpg">Anatomy & Physiology, Connexions website</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Protein folding</h2>
<p>The sequence of the amino acids – which is encoded in DNA – defines the protein’s 3D shape. The shape determines its function. If the structure of the protein changes, it is unable to perform its function. Correctly predicting protein folds based on the amino acid sequence could revolutionize drug design, and explain the causes of new and old diseases. </p>
<p>All proteins with the same sequence of amino acid building blocks fold into the same three-dimensional form, which optimizes the interactions between the amino acids. They do this within milliseconds, although they have an astronomical number of possible configurations available to them – <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20110523080407/http://www-miller.ch.cam.ac.uk/levinthal/levinthal.html">about 10 to the power of 300</a>. This massive number is what makes it hard to predict how a protein folds even when scientists know the full sequence of amino acids that go into making it. Previously predicting the structure of protein from the amino acid sequence was impossible. Protein structures were experimentally determined, a time-consuming and expensive endeavor. </p>
<p>Once researchers can better predict how proteins fold, they’ll be able to better understand how cells function and how misfolded proteins cause disease. Better protein prediction tools will also help us design drugs that can target a particular topological region of a protein where chemical reactions take place. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/372314/original/file-20201201-23-86jeuv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/372314/original/file-20201201-23-86jeuv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/372314/original/file-20201201-23-86jeuv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/372314/original/file-20201201-23-86jeuv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/372314/original/file-20201201-23-86jeuv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/372314/original/file-20201201-23-86jeuv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/372314/original/file-20201201-23-86jeuv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">What’s your move?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/robot-hand-chessboard-royalty-free-image/1255171787?adppopup=true">style-photography/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>AlphaFold is born from deep-learning chess, Go and poker games</h2>
<p>The success of DeepMind’s protein-folding prediction program, called <a href="https://deepmind.com/research/case-studies/alphafold">AlphaFold</a>, is not unexpected. Other deep-learning programs written by <a href="https://deepmind.com/about">DeepMind</a> have demolished the world’s best chess, Go and poker players.</p>
<p>In 2016 <a href="https://www.chessprogramming.org/Stockfish">Stockfish-8</a>, an open-source chess engine, was the world’s computer chess champion. It evaluated 70 million chess positions per second and had centuries of accumulated human chess strategies and decades of computer experience to draw upon. It played efficiently and brutally, mercilessly beating all its human challengers without an ounce of finesse. Enter deep learning. </p>
<p>On Dec. 7, 2017, Google’s deep-learning chess program <a href="http://doi.org/10.1126/science.aar6404">AlphaZero</a> thrashed Stockfish-8. The chess engines played 100 games, with AlphaZero winning 28 and tying 72. It didn’t lose a single game. AlphaZero did only 80,000 calculations per second, as opposed to Stockfish-8’s 70 million calculations, and it took just four hours to learn chess from scratch by playing against itself a few million times and optimizing its neural networks as it learned from its experience. </p>
<p><a href="https://web.stanford.edu/%7Esurag/posts/alphazero.html">AlphaZero</a> didn’t learn anything from humans or chess games played by humans. It taught itself and, in the process, derived strategies never seen before. In a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaw2221">commentary</a> in Science magazine, former world chess champion Garry Kasparov wrote that by learning from playing itself, AlphaZero developed strategies that “reflect the truth” of chess rather than reflecting “the priorities and prejudices” of the programmers. “It’s the embodiment of the cliché ‘work smarter, not harder.’” </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gg7WjuFs8F4?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">How do proteins fold?</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>CASP – the Olympics for molecular modelers</h2>
<p>Every two years, the world’s top computational chemists test the abilities of their programs to predict the folding of proteins and compete in the <a href="https://predictioncenter.org">Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction</a> (CASP) competition. </p>
<p>In the competition, teams are given the linear sequence of amino acids for about 100 proteins for which the 3D shape is known but hasn’t yet been published; they then have to compute how these sequences would fold. In 2018 AlphaFold, the deep-learning rookie at the competition, beat all the traditional programs – but barely. </p>
<p>Two years later, on Monday, it was announced that Alphafold2 had won the 2020 competition by a healthy margin. It whipped its competitors, and its predictions were comparable to the existing experimental results determined through gold standard techniques like X-ray diffraction crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy. Soon I expect AlphaFold2 and its progeny will be the methods of choice to determine protein structures before resorting to experimental techniques that require painstaking, laborious work on expensive instrumentation.</p>
<p>One of the reasons for AlphaFold2’s success is that it could use the <a href="https://www.rcsb.org/">Protein Database</a>, which has over 170,000 experimentally determined 3D structures, to train itself to calculate the correctly folded structures of proteins. </p>
<p>The potential impact of AlphaFold can be appreciated if one compares the number of all published protein structures – approximately 170,000 – with the 180 million DNA and protein sequences deposited in the <a href="https://www.uniprot.org">Universal Protein Database</a>. AlphaFold will help us sort through treasure troves of DNA sequences hunting for new proteins with unique structures and <a href="https://deepmind.com/blog/article/alphafold-a-solution-to-a-50-year-old-grand-challenge-in-biology">functions</a>.</p>
<h2>Has AlphaFold made me, a molecular modeler, redundant?</h2>
<p>As with the chess and Go programs – AlphaZero and AlphaGo – we don’t exactly know what the AlphaFold2 algorithm is doing and why it uses certain correlations, but we do know that it works. </p>
<p>Besides helping us predict the structures of important proteins, understanding AlphaFold’s “thinking” will also help us gain new insights into the mechanism of protein folding.</p>
<p>[<em>Deep knowledge, daily.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=deepknowledge">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter</a>.]</p>
<p>One of the most common fears expressed about AI is that it will lead to large-scale unemployment. AlphaFold still has a significant way to go before it can consistently and successfully predict protein folding. </p>
<p>However, once it has matured and the program can simulate protein folding, computational chemists will be integrally involved in improving the programs, trying to understand the underlying correlations used, and applying the program to solve important problems such as the protein misfolding associated with many diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cystic fibrosis and Huntington’s disease. </p>
<p>AlphaFold and its offspring will certainly change the way computational chemists work, but it won’t make them redundant. Other areas won’t be as fortunate. In the past robots were able to replace humans doing manual labor; with AI, our cognitive skills are also being challenged.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/151181/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marc Zimmer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Scientists in an artificial intelligence lab have made a breakthrough in solving the problem of how proteins fold into their final three-dimensional shape. The work could speed up creation of drugs.Marc Zimmer, Professor of Chemistry, Connecticut CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1506382020-11-25T22:41:06Z2020-11-25T22:41:06ZThe Queens(land) gambit: a brief history of chess in Australia<p>The new Netflix miniseries <a href="https://www.netflix.com/au/title/80234304">The Queen’s Gambit</a> has received <a href="https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_queens_gambit">rave reviews</a> around the world. Surprisingly for a chess-themed show, it received a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com.au/magnus-carlsen-world-best-chess-player-queens-gambit-sexism-2020-11">warm reception</a> by the global chess community, which is usually highly critical of portrayals of tournament chess in film. </p>
<p>The experiences of star character Beth Harmon loosely <a href="https://www.menshealth.com/entertainment/a34516612/queens-gambit-true-story/">correlate to those of Bobby Fischer</a>, a US chess prodigy and arguably the most talented player in history. Fischer rose to fame in the 1950s, becoming the youngest ever US Champion at age 14 and breaking the record for the youngest international grandmaster one year later.</p>
<p>His meteoric rise ignited an explosion of popularity in the Western world for the historically Soviet-dominated game. Fischer’s victory in the World Chess Championship in 1972 against the Russian-born Boris Spassky came in the midst of the Cold War and captured the attention of the general population around the world. </p>
<p>This famous match is <a href="https://www.menshealth.com/entertainment/a34516612/queens-gambit-true-story/">emulated in the final episode of The Queen’s Gambit</a>, in which the American Harmon plays her own Soviet nemesis in Russia. </p>
<p>But chess in Australia during the 1960s, the period of The Queen’s Gambit, was a far cry from the popularity of the game in the US. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/checkmate-top-chess-players-live-longer-96019">Checkmate: top chess players live longer</a>
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<h2>Chess in Australia in the 1950s and ‘60s</h2>
<p>Australia had no recognised chess grandmasters at the time. Its geographic isolation presented logistical and financial obstacles to chess improvement. </p>
<p>It proved almost prohibitively difficult for Australian players to acquire chess learning materials and travel abroad to tournaments. </p>
<p>The chess scene was largely dominated by two men, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Koshnitsky">Gary Koshnitsky</a> and <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/purdy-cecil-john-seddon-11466">Cecil Purdy</a>. Koshnitsky was born in Kishinev, in what’s now Moldova but was then part of the Russian Empire. He emigrated to Australia as a child, where he went on to become Australian champion. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371202/original/file-20201125-16-v6je6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371202/original/file-20201125-16-v6je6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371202/original/file-20201125-16-v6je6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371202/original/file-20201125-16-v6je6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371202/original/file-20201125-16-v6je6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371202/original/file-20201125-16-v6je6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371202/original/file-20201125-16-v6je6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371202/original/file-20201125-16-v6je6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Gary Koshnitsky went on to become Australian champion.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Cathy Rogers</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>Purdy was <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/purdy-cecil-john-seddon-11466">born in Egypt</a> but his family eventually moved to Australia, and he taught himself chess as a teen. He won the inaugural World Correspondence Chess Championship, in which individual moves were sent and received by post in the early 1950s, and earned titles of international chess master and international grandmaster of correspondence play during the same <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/purdy-cecil-john-seddon-11466">decade</a>. (He <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/purdy-cecil-john-seddon-11466">collapsed</a> while playing a chess tournament in 1979 and died that day. Reportedly, but probably apocryphally, his last words were about his final game: “I have a win, but it will take some time.”)</p>
<p>Purdy and Koshnitsky wrote a book titled <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5505174-chess-made-easy">Chess Made Easy</a>. It was hugely popular worldwide, selling <a href="https://digital.collections.slsa.sa.gov.au/nodes/view/2265">600,000 copies</a> in Australia alone.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371206/original/file-20201125-17-m0i4z8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371206/original/file-20201125-17-m0i4z8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371206/original/file-20201125-17-m0i4z8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=749&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371206/original/file-20201125-17-m0i4z8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=749&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371206/original/file-20201125-17-m0i4z8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=749&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371206/original/file-20201125-17-m0i4z8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=942&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371206/original/file-20201125-17-m0i4z8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=942&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371206/original/file-20201125-17-m0i4z8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=942&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Purdy and Koshnitsky’s book was enormously popular.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://digital.collections.slsa.sa.gov.au/nodes/view/2265">The State Library of South Australia</a></span>
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<h2>Australia’s first grandmasters</h2>
<p>Things started to pick up in the 1970s and '80s, primarily in Melbourne, where the third-largest chess library in the world, the <a href="https://www.slv.vic.gov.au/search-discover/explore-collections-theme/sport-games/chess">MV Anderson Collection at the State Library of Victoria</a>, was hosted. It was, and still is, enormously helpful as a place for chess players to acquire knowledge and meet other players.</p>
<p>The Melbourne chess scene helped develop Australia’s first two chess <a href="https://www.chess.com/article/view/how-to-become-a-chess-grandmaster">grandmasters</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Rogers_(chess_player)">Ian Rogers</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darryl_Johansen">Darryl Johansen</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371205/original/file-20201125-18-1d2adru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371205/original/file-20201125-18-1d2adru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371205/original/file-20201125-18-1d2adru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=911&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371205/original/file-20201125-18-1d2adru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=911&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371205/original/file-20201125-18-1d2adru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=911&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371205/original/file-20201125-18-1d2adru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1145&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371205/original/file-20201125-18-1d2adru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1145&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371205/original/file-20201125-18-1d2adru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1145&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Ian Rogers was Australia’s top player for a quarter of a century.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Graeme Gardiner</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>The title of grandmaster is awarded by the world chess federation (also known as Fédération Internationale des Échecs or <a href="https://www.fide.com/">FIDE</a>). To earn it, a player must achieve three grandmaster “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_(chess)">norms</a>” (based on an outstanding performance in an international chess tournament), each of which typically requires beating several players of master level in a single event. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371204/original/file-20201125-24-10316uq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371204/original/file-20201125-24-10316uq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371204/original/file-20201125-24-10316uq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=751&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371204/original/file-20201125-24-10316uq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=751&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371204/original/file-20201125-24-10316uq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=751&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371204/original/file-20201125-24-10316uq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=944&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371204/original/file-20201125-24-10316uq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=944&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371204/original/file-20201125-24-10316uq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=944&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Australian grandmaster, Darryl Johansen.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Graeme Gardiner</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>For some, this meant living out of suitcases in Europe for periods of the 1980s and giving up the option of a regular job and steady income to pursue chess careers. </p>
<p>Rogers and Johansen blazed a trail for other Australian chess players to follow. There was substantial growth in the chess community and particularly in the development of the junior ranks during the 1990s. </p>
<p>Another significant factor was the introduction of “chess in schools” businesses in the late 1990s. Coupled with the formation of a national competition for schools, this led to a dramatic increase in the number of Australian children learning chess, a trend that continues today.</p>
<h2>A tipping point for Australian chess</h2>
<p>Despite these developments, it was still some time before an Australian player was again able to break into the grandmaster ranks. </p>
<p>When one of us (David Smerdon) <a href="https://dsmerdon.wordpress.com/about-me/">achieved a grandmaster norm in 2006</a>, it ended a drought of 13 years. </p>
<p>This coincided with a tipping point for Australian chess. By 2009, the number of Australian grandmasters had doubled from two to four, and by 2020 it had <a href="https://ratings.fide.com/topfed.phtml?tops=0&ina=2&country=AUS">risen to ten</a>. </p>
<p>In recent years, a number of individual and team achievements paint a promising picture for the future. At the 2016 chess Olympiad in Azerbaijan, an Australian earned a draw against the reigning World Champion in a rated game for the first time.</p>
<p>And in October this year, the <a href="https://www.fide.com/news/790">Australian team sensationally won the Asian Nations Cup</a>, beating top seed India (ranked fourth in the world) in the final.</p>
<p>The championship was held online due to COVID restrictions; chess has been one of the few sports largely unscathed by the pandemic, and in fact has significantly increased its membership during 2020.</p>
<h2>Queens and Kings</h2>
<p>The steep increase in popularity of internet chess has helped level the playing field for traditionally less prominent chess nations in Australia, Asia and Africa. </p>
<p>This is personified in another success of chess on the screen: the 2016 film <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4341582/">Queen of Katwe</a>. It tells the true story of a 10 year old Ugandan girl, Phiona Mutesi, who learned chess in the slums of Kampala. Mutesi would eventually go on to represent her country at the 2010 chess Olympiad in Siberia, and has proved an inspiration for chess-playing girls in Uganda and other African nations. </p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The 2016 film Queen of Katwe tells the true story of a 10 year old Ugandan girl, Phiona Mutesi, who learned chess in the slums of Kampala.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4341582/">IMDb</a></span>
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<p>Not all the elements in The Queen’s Gambit reflect reality. No female player worldwide has ever played in a chess World Championship match, and only one (<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r">Judit Polgár</a>) has been ranked in the world’s top ten.</p>
<p>Men dominate participation rates as well: <a href="https://chessvi.com/chess-articles/few-women-chess-players/">only 15%</a> of the players with international chess ratings are female.</p>
<p>Many hope the unexpected success of the Netflix series may spark a boom for women’s chess not unlike Fischer’s impact on chess in the West.</p>
<p>Though women’s chess in Australia is still waiting for its own tipping point, there are promising signs. In 2017, a Queensland woman, <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/beating-stigma-on-and-off-the-chessboard-girls-and-women-in-australian-chess-20171205-gzyru7.html">Heather Richards</a>, achieved the first victory by an Australian female over a grandmaster since the turn of the century (unfortunately, the victim was one of us - David Smerdon).</p>
<p>Hopefully, it is only a matter of time before we see the emergence of our own Australian Beth Harmon or our own Queen of Queensland.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/most-people-think-playing-chess-makes-you-smarter-but-the-evidence-isnt-clear-on-that-119469">Most people think playing chess makes you 'smarter', but the evidence isn't clear on that</a>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/150638/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Smerdon was awarded the title of international grandmaster in 2009 and has represented Australia in seven chess Olympiads.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Graeme Gardiner has no relevant affiliations to disclose. He beat his coauthor, Grandmaster David Smerdon the last time they played, although Smerdon was about eight years old at the time. They have not played since. As Graeme puts it, "he was a far superior player to me by the age of nine or ten."</span></em></p>Chess in Australia during the 1960s, the period of The Queen’s Gambit, was a far cry from the popularity of the game in the US. It was hard to get chess learning materials or travel to tournaments.David Smerdon, Assistant Professor, School of Economics, The University of QueenslandGraeme Gardiner, PhD Student, University of Southern QueenslandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1437902020-09-02T19:22:24Z2020-09-02T19:22:24ZChess is taking over the online video game world – and both are changing from this unlikely pairing<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/356139/original/file-20200902-14-jdu941.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=28%2C0%2C4677%2C3010&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Chess is exploding in popularity on the video game streaming site Twitch.tv</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/playing-chess-online-news-photo/481205681?adppopup=true"> B. Aa. Sætrenes/Moment Mobile via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>As a global pandemic continues to determine a new normal, tens of thousands of viewers have been tuning in to watch people play chess on a livestreaming website called <a href="https://www.twitch.tv/">Twitch.tv</a>. An American chess grandmaster, Hikaru Nakamura, along with a number of celebrities of the video game world, is leading a renaissance in the ancient game. </p>
<p>While viewers eagerly await Nakamura’s streams to begin, they are treated to a slideshow of memes involving Nakamura’s face superimposed into scenes from pop culture. First a reference to a well-known Japanese animation, next a famous upside-down kiss with Spiderman and finally, Nakamura’s characteristic grin is edited onto the Mona Lisa herself.</p>
<p>From Aug. 21 to Sept. 6, Twitch and <a href="https://www.chess.com/home">Chess.com</a> are hosting a tournament, called Pogchamps, where some of the most popular gaming streamers in the world compete in a <a href="https://www.chess.com/news/view/chess-com-announces-next-pogchamps">chess tournament with US$50,000 on the line</a>.</p>
<p>The current renaissance in chess is happening at the confluence of livestreaming technology, video game culture and one grandmaster’s exceptional skills as both a chess player and entertainer. What is emerging is an unexpectedly good pairing between chess and a digital generation that is showing how influential gamers can be.</p>
<p>The game of kings is <a href="https://www.fide.com/images/stories/NEWS_2012/FIDE/120806_YouGovPressRelease.pdf">more popular than ever</a>, with over 605 million players worldwide, and now, memes are involved.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355899/original/file-20200901-14-qjnn1u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The purple logo of Twitch on a wall." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355899/original/file-20200901-14-qjnn1u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355899/original/file-20200901-14-qjnn1u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355899/original/file-20200901-14-qjnn1u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355899/original/file-20200901-14-qjnn1u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355899/original/file-20200901-14-qjnn1u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355899/original/file-20200901-14-qjnn1u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355899/original/file-20200901-14-qjnn1u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Twitch.tv is a streaming website where millions of people watch content ranging from video games to conversation to chess.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/AP-Explains-What-is-Twitch/724709121a9c4e64a41e4161e93dbc76/42/0">AP Photo/Christophe Ena, File</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Chess explodes on Twitch.tv</h2>
<p>Twitch.tv is a live-video streaming website that was started in 2011 as a platform for users to watch other people play video games. In recent years, Twitch has grown to become the cultural hub of the gaming community. It now hosts tens of thousands of creators who broadcast live to a global audience of around <a href="https://www.twitch.tv/p/press-center/">17.5 million viewers a day</a>.</p>
<p>Since 2015, chess viewership has experienced exponential growth on Twitch. Then, a mere 59 people were watching chess streams at any given time. Today, that number averages 4,313. At the time of writing this, viewers have consumed close to <a href="https://sullygnome.com/game/chess/2020">38 million hours of chess</a> in 2020 alone.</p>
<p>At the helm of this explosion is Grandmaster <a href="https://ratings.fide.com/profile/2016192">Hikaru Nakamura</a>. Nakamura is a <a href="https://www.chess.com/news/view/nakamura-wins-5th-u-s-championship">five-time U.S. chess champion</a> and a <a href="https://ratings.fide.com/profile/2016192">top 10 ranked chess player in the world</a>. </p>
<p>In addition to his traditional competitive career, in 2015, Nakamura began streaming chess on Twitch. At first, he was relatively unnoticed, but in 2019, when he started dedicating upwards of 30 hours per week to streaming, Nakamura became known as <a href="https://www.twitch.tv/gmhikaru">GMHikaru</a> to his growing fanbase online. In 2020, those fans have already watched an astonishing <a href="https://twitchtracker.com/gmhikaru/statistics">9.95 million hours</a> of Nakamura’s channel. At times, over 45,000 viewers have watched a single game. </p>
<p>Why is this flood of interest in chess happening now?</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355901/original/file-20200901-16-19zd4pc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Hikaru Nakamura in a suit at a chess tournament." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355901/original/file-20200901-16-19zd4pc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355901/original/file-20200901-16-19zd4pc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355901/original/file-20200901-16-19zd4pc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355901/original/file-20200901-16-19zd4pc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355901/original/file-20200901-16-19zd4pc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355901/original/file-20200901-16-19zd4pc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355901/original/file-20200901-16-19zd4pc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hikaru Nakamura is a top-ranked grandmaster and, more recently, one of the most popular streamers on Twitch.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=hikaru+nakamura&title=Special:Search&go=Go&ns0=1&ns6=1&ns12=1&ns14=1&ns100=1&ns106=1&searchToken=6z3fto9j1npcu6hfrkjuu26nb#%2Fmedia%2FFile%3ANakamura_Hikaru_%2829290269410%29.jpg">Andreas Kontokanis via Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A surprising fit</h2>
<p>Nakamura is a great player and a jovial person, but there are many thousands of modern, high-production video games being played by charismatic and skilled streamers on Twitch. Viewers on Twitch have discovered a profound interest in learning the fundamental mechanics of a board game from the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/chess/History">sixth century</a>.</p>
<p>Nakamura has attracted the interest of other massively popular streamers with millions of followers – <a href="https://www.twitch.tv/xqcow">xQc</a>, <a href="https://www.twitch.tv/forsen">forsen</a>, <a href="https://www.twitch.tv/nymn">Nymm</a> and <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53277733">the late Reckful</a>, to name a few. These collaborations with celebrities of the gaming world have been a huge boost to chess’s popularity as Nakamura plays games against these streamers while blindfolded or foregoing the use of the queen. These games illustrate for the new fans and top streamers the skills, cunning and joy that are rapidly coming to be associated with chess. “Hikaru is literally the discipline in action,” comments Devin Nash, a popular Twitch analyst.</p>
<p>This popularity culminated in a chess tournament called <a href="https://www.chess.com/news/view/chess-com-announces-next-pogchamps">Pogchamps</a>. In June, 16 of Twitch’s top streamers played in a round robin chess tournament after being coached by a number of world-class chess players, including Nakamura. The event was so popular with both the streamers and fans – at one point more than 150,000 people were watching – that a second Pogchamps was immediately scheduled. The second tournament <a href="https://www.twitch.tv/chess">is running through September 6</a> and features streamers like xQc and even Hafthor Julius Bjornsson – the actor who played The Mountain in “Game of Thrones.” </p>
<p>[<em>Insight, in your inbox each day.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=insight">You can get it with The Conversation’s email newsletter</a>.]</p>
<h2>Bridging two worlds</h2>
<p>There are a few pieces involved in this world of online chess: the streaming technology of Twitch, Nakamura, the online gaming community and the game of chess itself. Just as in the board game, no single piece in this evolving landscape of chess is alone driving the popularity. As Nakamura, gamers and the chess world collide, each piece is changing the others.</p>
<p>My <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/project/Gamer-or-citizen-live-video-politics-in-a-digital-age">research</a> focuses on understanding the economic and cultural significance of video game communities. This year has proven what many who study video games have long claimed: that online gaming is significant far beyond the confines of video games. Today, music artists are shaking the foundations of their industry by <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/twitch-music-business-economics-1001225/">migrating onto Twitch</a> to great success. Doctors and medical researchers as well are strengthening their ties with gaming and gamers: for instance, raising $3.1 million for the <a href="https://www.preventcancer.org/fundraisers/awesome-games-done-quick/">Prevent Cancer Foundation</a> in collaboration with Twitch in early 2020.</p>
<p>Beyond these headlines, I focus specifically on how streamers like Nakamura create micro-communities with their own cultural norms and spheres of influence. The strong human connections that develop in these spaces <a href="https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/30079/6/Brookwell_Ilya_201111_MA_thesis.pdf">extend beyond the digital world</a>. In the case of Nakamura and chess, the results are new ways of playing chess, a new meme-filled language surrounding chess and, as gamers continue to watch chess in huge numbers, an illustration of how gamers connect with each other and parts of the offline world in meaningful ways.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355904/original/file-20200901-14-15pw86l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A group of young people standing under purple lights in front of a Twitch booth at a vide game convention." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355904/original/file-20200901-14-15pw86l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355904/original/file-20200901-14-15pw86l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355904/original/file-20200901-14-15pw86l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355904/original/file-20200901-14-15pw86l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355904/original/file-20200901-14-15pw86l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355904/original/file-20200901-14-15pw86l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355904/original/file-20200901-14-15pw86l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Twitch culture is irreverent, young and technocentric, a far cry from the august image of chess.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/people-wait-in-line-at-booth-for-twitch-the-official-news-photo/540277550?adppopup=true">Frederic J. Brown/Stringer/AFP via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A clash of cultures</h2>
<p>But not everyone is accepting of this cultural shift. Twitch viewers are mostly males in their <a href="https://twitchtracker.com/statistics">early 20s</a> and are, in general, a notoriously irreverent bunch. This is partly how they gain the reputation as <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/video-games/video-game-addiction-mental-health-disorder-world-health-organization-says-n1010441">disillusioned and dysfunctional</a>.</p>
<p>As chess has grown in this community, an established elite guided by a few longtime chess players and commentators see the trend as <a href="https://www.sportingnews.com/us/other-sports/news/surge-in-chess-popularity-creating-friction-among-grandmasters/zjzp5k5kog911q529rfx5wr7b">detrimental to a once noble contest</a>.</p>
<p>Ben Finegold, a prominent U.S. grandmaster, refers to the streamers with whom Nakamura has collaborated as <a href="https://uk.sports.yahoo.com/news/surge-chess-popularity-creates-drama-225313742.html">“negative talent.”</a> Unlike a “normal person who has talent” in chess, says Finegold, users on Twitch ought to be ignored lest they diminish the good name of a traditional chess community.</p>
<p>Some at the head of traditional chess, however, disagree. David Llada, the chief marketing and communications officer for the International Chess Federation, acknowledges the <a href="https://www.chesstech.org/2020/is-pogchamps-a-good-way-to-promote/">damage of insular thinking</a>: “Our main sin is that chess people tend not to think ‘outside the chess board.’ They don’t pay enough attention to the world around them.”</p>
<p>Whatever the old guard of chess believes, this ancient game has found a new, passionate and receptive audience. A digital generation on Twitch has built bridges between worlds not only for chess but for the musical and medical worlds as well. The memes are here to stay. What is next for online gaming and the game of kings remains to be seen, but neither will likely be the same.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/143790/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>I receive funding from the University of California Riverside. I am the principal investigator of an ongoing ethnographic study of gamers in their community on Twitch. In my work, I explore gamers as citizens and ask how gamers are political in light of their activities on live-streams. Follow me live on Twitch at twitch.tv/professor_vr to become part of the conversation.</span></em></p>The video game community on Twitch has taken a massive interest in chess. The young, irreverent gamers and the ancient world of chess are both transforming as their cultures collide.Ilya Brookwell, Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, University of California, RiversideLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1419622020-07-14T12:35:24Z2020-07-14T12:35:24ZWhy does white always go first in chess?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346395/original/file-20200708-47-mexhsj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=8%2C8%2C5569%2C3679&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The white-moves-first rule became standard in the late 1800s.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/cropped-hand-of-man-playing-chess-against-white-royalty-free-image/889548238?adppopup=true&uiloc=thumbnail_similar_images_adp&uiloc=thumbnail_similar_images_adp">Nupat Arjkla / EyeEm / Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Editor’s note: Protests over racism have <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VxYtqgvKME">rekindled a longstanding discussion</a> about whether chess promotes white privilege with its rule that the first move always goes to the player with the white pieces. In this Q&A, Daaim Shabazz, an international business professor and <a href="https://www.thechessdrum.net/">chess journalist</a>, offers insight into whether there’s any merit to the idea that the rule is meant to uphold white privilege.</em></p>
<h2>Who decided that white should always go first?</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.chessgames.com/player/johann_jacob_loewenthal.html">Johann Löwenthal</a>, a British master, put forth one of the first proposals of record to give white the obligatory first move. At the <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Book_of_the_First_American_Chess_Con/vP1dAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0">First American Chess Congress</a>, held in New York in 1857, Löwenthal sent two letters to the secretary of the New York Chess Club, Frederick Perrin. </p>
<p>On page 84 of the congress’s proceedings, it refers to one of the letters by citing “the advisableness of always giving the first move, in published games, to the player of the white pieces…” This rule was not immediately adopted, and tournament organizers maintained flexibility on the first move. In the <a href="https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=S90WAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PP1">Fifth American Chess Congress</a> in 1880, it was written on page 164 of the Code of Chess Laws, “The right of first move must be determined by lot. The player having the first move must always play with the white men.”</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346159/original/file-20200707-194396-1vaq6f9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346159/original/file-20200707-194396-1vaq6f9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=709&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346159/original/file-20200707-194396-1vaq6f9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=709&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346159/original/file-20200707-194396-1vaq6f9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=709&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346159/original/file-20200707-194396-1vaq6f9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=891&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346159/original/file-20200707-194396-1vaq6f9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=891&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346159/original/file-20200707-194396-1vaq6f9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=891&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Steinitz wrote in 1889 that the player with the white pieces should move first.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=Wilhelm+Steinitz&title=Special:Search&go=Go&ns0=1&ns6=1&ns12=1&ns14=1&ns100=1&ns106=1&searchToken=4kqfsu61t6ti4y6bxz5qs0a8m#%2Fmedia%2FFile%3ASteinitz1866.jpg">www.wikicommons.com</a>, <a class="license" href="http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en">FAL</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wilhelm-Steinitz">Wilhelm Steinitz</a>, the first world champion, repeated this idea in his 1889 book, <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Modern_Chess_Instructor_Elementary_e.html?id=aH9BAAAAIAAJ">“The Modern Chess Instructor</a>,” where he wrote on page XII: “The players draw by lot for move and choice of color. In all international and public Chess matches and tournaments, however, it is the rule for the first player to have the white men.” </p>
<p>Thus, there was a growing consensus that white should move first.</p>
<h2>Was that decision rooted in racism?</h2>
<p>I am not aware of any direct evidence. However, chess players were not only part of the intelligentsia, but also men of their times. On page X in the proceedings of the <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Book_of_the_Sixth_American_Chess_Con/0nYCAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0">Sixth American Chess Congress in 1889</a>, Steinitz poetically extolled the virtues of chess as being among the “intellectual pastimes of civilized nations.” This is a time when Europeans generally did not regard Africa as a place of civilization. For instance, five years earlier at the <a href="https://www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/6031c3a2-ada9-42b4-8045-52006e2a2b07/the-berlin-conference-of-1884-1885/">Berlin Conference of 1884</a>, Europeans had begun to execute their colonial plan and “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/lril/lrv002">aim at instructing the natives and bringing home to them the blessings of civilization</a>.” </p>
<p>Further, in the 19th century, there was an <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-blackface-111404">awful period</a> of satirizing and dehumanizing Blacks through darkened minstrel caricatures. There existed <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-did-white-become-a-metaphor-for-all-things-good-140674">the perception</a> that white was associated with that which was positive, and black was associated with that which was negative. Recent social science research shows that <a href="https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8c99/de7887c52ca2e0567214f522bf8ba17c7f82.pdf">this perception still holds</a>.</p>
<h2>Does the rule give white an advantage?</h2>
<p>It is my view that chess players, including grandmasters, overstate white’s first-move advantage. </p>
<p>Russian grandmaster <a href="https://en.chessbase.com/post/70-birthday-evgeny-sveshnikov">Evgeny Sveshnikov</a> stated back in 1994 that a player should <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Black_is_Back/prZFDQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=black+is+back+adorjan&printsec=frontcover">win with white and be content to draw with black</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346933/original/file-20200710-189212-te20sd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346933/original/file-20200710-189212-te20sd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346933/original/file-20200710-189212-te20sd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346933/original/file-20200710-189212-te20sd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346933/original/file-20200710-189212-te20sd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346933/original/file-20200710-189212-te20sd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346933/original/file-20200710-189212-te20sd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346933/original/file-20200710-189212-te20sd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">One chess theorist held that black is lost from the start when this move is played.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As early as 1939, American master Weaver Adams <a href="https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/white-to-play-and-win-8">claimed white is winning after the very first move</a>, at least when that first move was the pawn to the e4 square – that is, the square three spaces in front of white’s king. But he ended up losing a match to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1973/01/19/archives/al-horowitz-former-columnist-and-chess-champion-dies-at-65-writer.html">I.A. Horowitz</a>, who wanted to prove a point by taking black in every game.</p>
<p>Since A.D. 1475, <a href="https://www.chessgames.com/chessstats.html">white’s overall winning percentage has been approximately 55%</a> in nearly 1 million games. This includes percentage of total wins plus half the percentage of drawn games. Is this result because of the first move itself? Steinitz seemed to suggest otherwise when he stated on page XXXII in his classic book, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=aH9BAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">“Modern Chess Instructor</a>,” “by best play on both sides, a draw ought to be the legitimate result.” </p>
<h2>How would things change if black moved first?</h2>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346473/original/file-20200708-35-1m0vdeq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346473/original/file-20200708-35-1m0vdeq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346473/original/file-20200708-35-1m0vdeq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346473/original/file-20200708-35-1m0vdeq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346473/original/file-20200708-35-1m0vdeq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346473/original/file-20200708-35-1m0vdeq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346473/original/file-20200708-35-1m0vdeq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346473/original/file-20200708-35-1m0vdeq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Magnus Carlsen and Anish Giri, two of the world’s top players, played a game in 2019 which the player with the black pieces moved first to call attention to racial inequality.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.moveforequality.com/press">#MoveForEquality</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 2019, Magnus Carlsen and Anish Giri – who as of July were the <a href="https://ratings.fide.com/top.phtml?list=men">number 1 and number 10 players</a> in the world, respectively – promoted a <a href="https://en.chessbase.com/post/carlsen-and-giri-campaign-for-racial-equality#:%7E:text=3%2F21%2F2019%20%E2%80%93%20%22,the%20Elimination%20of%20Racial%20Discrimination.">#MoveforEquality campaign</a> as a way of acknowledging social inequalities. In their game, black moved first and the line was, “We broke a rule in chess today, to change minds tomorrow.” It was billed as an anti-racist statement, but some took it as a suggestion to change the rules of chess to black having the first move.</p>
<p>If black moved first, it would take some getting used to for players who are accustomed to white going first. This would be especially true for the opening moves, since the white and black chess armies are positioned slightly differently. For instance, as white, the queen is on the left-hand side. As black, the queen is on the right-hand side.</p>
<p>As it exists now, the lighter color always moves first. Some see this as analogous to racial privileges in society. The late Frances Cress-Welsing, a psychiatrist, made a chess analogy in her “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fDIhqf4yrs">Cress Theory of Color Confrontation</a>,” noting that the psychology of white having the first move was as the natural aggressor against black forces. </p>
<p>Socially speaking, an ideal solution would be to give both colors a 50% chance to move first. That is the way it was in <a href="http://history.chess.free.fr/shatranj.htm">shatranj</a>, a precursor to modern-day chess. Instead of picking which player gets the favorable color, something like a coin toss would determine which color gets to move first. Of course, this would be “equal opportunity” but result in a totally different approach to playing chess.</p>
<h2>What are the psychological effects of white going first?</h2>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346472/original/file-20200708-3987-16q1u4j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346472/original/file-20200708-3987-16q1u4j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346472/original/file-20200708-3987-16q1u4j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346472/original/file-20200708-3987-16q1u4j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346472/original/file-20200708-3987-16q1u4j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346472/original/file-20200708-3987-16q1u4j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346472/original/file-20200708-3987-16q1u4j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346472/original/file-20200708-3987-16q1u4j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Beginners learn early on about the rule that white always gets the first move.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/young-girl-playing-chess-with-royalty-free-image/844424108?adppopup=true">MoMo Productions/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There are several psychological factors at play. A beginner of chess learns the power of “white first” very quickly. They will see that an opponent will prefer the white pieces if given a choice. They feel a sense of empowerment even when they are playing a stronger opponent. For this reason, players who play white may be more motivated to win. Conversely, we have been conditioned to believe that black should be content with a draw.</p>
<p>This relegation of black to an inferior status has been reinforced in many ways. The early chess books focused on how to exploit the white advantage over black. It was an attempt to show the power of the first-move privilege. </p>
<p>When one looks at chess books, the <a href="https://archive.org/details/64_Great_Chess_Games/page/n37/mode/2up">diagrams are generally positioned to be from the white army’s perspective</a>. This is even true for books focusing on strategic systems for black. However, the seminal “Black is OK” series by Hungarian grandmaster András Adorján feature <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Black_is_Back/prZFDQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=black+is+back+adorjan&printsec=frontcover">diagrams from the black perspective</a> and provides a theoretical framework for why black has adequate resources. </p>
<p>In many of the chess puzzles, it was common to see each problem presented as white who has the winning sequence. In fact, <a href="https://www.thechessdrum.net/blog/2020/04/19/the-mystery-of-theophilus-thompson-solved/">Theophilus Thompson (1855-1881)</a>, the first Black player of note, had authored such a <a href="https://www.thechessdrum.net/blog/2014/04/21/theophilus-thompsons-book-recreated/">book of chess puzzles</a>.</p>
<p>To a great extent, books are still published in this fashion. I believe that strategic literature for a black response will continue to increase, and the game will move closer to a 50-50 result in the “white first” format. There are a great many systems where black seeks to be the aggressor. </p>
<p>Chess is more of a conversation where both sides engage in a battle of ideas. Someone has to initiate the conversation, but throughout the flow of the game, a unique story unfolds. In my view, it is not about who starts first, but what the essence of the story ends up being.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/141962/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Daaim Shabazz does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Ever since the late 1800s, it has been standard for white to go first in chess. Has the time come to get rid of that rule?Daaim Shabazz, Associate Professor of International Business, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1361152020-04-10T19:37:47Z2020-04-10T19:37:47Z3 things to consider before you let your child play chess online<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/327064/original/file-20200410-69938-1io21jf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=11%2C5%2C3982%2C2628&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Chess websites abound for those interested in taking up the royal game.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/two-kids-boys-playing-online-and-surfing-in-royalty-free-image/816171780?adppopup=true">romrodinka/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Editor’s note: The school closures forced by COVID-19 have parents and students searching for ways to make the best of their time indoors. Here, Alexey Root, a former U.S. Women’s Chess Champion who teaches online courses about chess in education, offers tips for parents and caregivers of children who are interested in playing chess online.</em></p>
<h2>1. Put safety first</h2>
<p>Doing things online comes with safety concerns. Chess is no different. Therefore, some common online safety advice applies to chess players of all ages: Use a fake username rather than your real name. Hide personal information, such as where you live, where you work or where you go to school. Keep interactions online rather than agreeing to meet in person.</p>
<p>Additionally, children who play or learn chess online should be supervised by parents. Parents should block their children from sharing personal messages and photos with online chess opponents. Some chess websites offer child-safety features, such as disabling all chats. Nonetheless, unsupervised children may figure out how to circumvent those features. There is no substitute for parental supervision.</p>
<h2>2. Study the basics</h2>
<p>For beginners, I would recommend studying three things: basic endgame checkmates, opening principles and tactics.</p>
<p>One example of a basic endgame checkmate is checkmating with a king and queen against a king. Learning that checkmate is important, because if one is a queen ahead, one should know how to win with that advantage. Search for “basic endgame checkmates” to find instruction and bots to practice against.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/327061/original/file-20200410-151414-150wgq8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/327061/original/file-20200410-151414-150wgq8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/327061/original/file-20200410-151414-150wgq8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327061/original/file-20200410-151414-150wgq8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327061/original/file-20200410-151414-150wgq8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327061/original/file-20200410-151414-150wgq8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1135&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327061/original/file-20200410-151414-150wgq8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1135&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327061/original/file-20200410-151414-150wgq8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1135&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Every player should know how to win when it’s a king and queen against a queen.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/checkmate-royalty-free-image/172857034?adppopup=true">AlexVeluscek/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Opening principles should guide your first 10 moves. They include controlling the center of the board, “developing” your knights and bishops – that is, getting them into play – and castling. Castling is where a king moves two squares toward a rook, and that rook then hops over the king, landing near the middle of the board. That two-part maneuver makes the king more secure and the rook more active. Openings are probably the hardest thing for beginners to study online, since there are many initial moves that fit opening principles.</p>
<p>Beginners should also practice tactics, which are moves that result in immediate, tangible gains. Tactics are easy to find online. Most chess websites offer tactics problems that are tailored to your level. Get a tactics problem right, and the site gives you a harder one to solve. Get a problem wrong, and your next problem will be easier.</p>
<h2>3. Stress fair play</h2>
<p>In chess, success is often defined as winning a game, winning a tournament, or gaining points for your chess rating, which is how chess players measure their skill level compared to others. <a href="https://en.chessbase.com/post/promoting-fair-play-among-child-chess-players">Players cheat</a> in online tournaments even when there is no prize money at stake, usually to try to raise their ratings. </p>
<p>If a chess player cheats online, there are often consequences. Many chess-playing websites have robust cheating-detection mechanisms. Players’ accounts are routinely penalized rating points or even banned if cheating is detected.</p>
<p>To encourage fair play, call to mind the old expression: “It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.” For example, rather than defining success as whether a child won or lost, look at the time spent on each move of the game. Many online sites will measure that time. Praise children for taking an appropriate amount of time on each move. When you redefine chess success as thinking, instead of just winning, it’s an important step toward fair play.</p>
<p>[<em>You’re smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation’s authors and editors.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=youresmart">You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/136115/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alexey W. Root does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Playing chess online offers a variety of ways for children to get good at the royal game, but it also comes with a few pitfalls. An expert in chess education provides some advice.Alexey W. Root, Lecturer in Education, University of Texas at DallasLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1292932020-01-03T20:58:49Z2020-01-03T20:58:49ZWhy there’s a separate World Chess Championship for women<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/308384/original/file-20200102-11919-ep6giu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Ju Wenjun, the reigning Women's World Chess Champion, will defend her title against Aleksandra Goryachkina, of Russia this month. Photo from an earlier encounter in September 2019.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">David Llada</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Editor’s Note: The Women’s World Chess Championship match is from <a href="https://www.fide.com/calendar/50113">January 3-26, 2020</a>. The first six games will be played in Shanghai, China and the remaining six games, plus any tiebreak games, will be played in Vladivostok, Russia. The match features Women’s World Champion Ju Wenjun of China against challenger Aleksandra Goryachkina, of Russia. Here, Alexey Root, a lecturer teaching courses about chess in education at The University of Texas at Dallas, answers questions about the Women’s World Chess Championship.</em></p>
<h2>1. When did the Women’s World Chess Championship begin?</h2>
<p>The Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE) was established in 1924 and, in 1927, held the first Women’s World Championship and the Men’s Olympiad. <a href="https://www.mark-weeks.com/aboutcom/aa03c08.htm">According to Mark Weeks</a>, who served as the Chess Guide for About.com, FIDE organized just these two events for its first two decades. Eventually, FIDE gained control of other prestigious chess events, most notably the World Chess Championship. </p>
<p>The present <a href="https://www.fide.com/news/143">Women’s World Chess Championship cycle</a> parallels the World Chess Championship cycle. The World Chess Championship cycle is open to both men and women, though only men have reached its final stage, a two-person match for the champion’s title. Preliminary stages include the Candidates Tournament, an eight-player double round robin where the winner becomes the challenger for a title match.</p>
<h2>2. In most sports, such as tennis, golf, basketball and the like, there are separate categories or leagues for women because men tend to have some sort of inherent physical advantage. Why is there a separate championship for women in chess when chess is about decisions as opposed to muscle mass and physical speed?</h2>
<p>Most chess tournaments are open, to all ages, all genders, and all nationalities. In the United States, the annual “<a href="https://new.uschess.org/national-events-calendar/">U.S. Open</a>” is one example. However, segregated championships exist, by age (junior championships), geography (state chess championships), by gender, and even by profession (U.S. Armed Forces Open Chess Championship). These segregated tournaments allow those playing to get media attention, benefit financially, and make friends with people with whom they share some similar characteristics. Separate tournaments don’t speak to whether there are advantages or disadvantages.</p>
<p>Likewise, separate tournaments for girls and women don’t mean that girls and women are more or less capable than boys and men at chess. However, there may be less interest in chess among girls and women compared to boys and men. Based on 2019 statistics, <a href="https://www.chess.com/news/view/team-battles-femme-batale-north-america-vs-europe-tuesday">14.6% of US Chess members are female</a>, and that is a new, record-high percentage. Thus logically, and in reality, a smaller base of females means fewer women than men at the top of the chess rating list, as one <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6598839_Sex_Differences_in_Intellectual_Performance_Analysis_of_a_Large_Cohort_of_Competitive_Chess_Players">study found</a>. Offering occasional female-only tournaments may make chess more attractive to girls and women, for the financial, social, and publicity reasons mentioned above.</p>
<h2>3. What would happen if there was no separate world chess championship for women?</h2>
<p>The Women’s World Chess Championship match is the culmination of a two-year cycle of events. Those events financially help the current top women players to concentrate on chess exclusively, as there is prize money for each event in the cycle. If the cycle were abolished, then it would be much harder for those women players to make money from playing in chess tournaments. Women would also become relatively invisible in media stories about chess.</p>
<p>A four-time Women’s World Chess Champion, Hou Yifan, is <a href="https://ratings.fide.com/top.phtml?list=men">ranked at #75</a> among men and women combined. Though she is the highest-rated woman on the list of active chess players, as #75 she likely would not qualify for the Candidates Tournament in the World Chess Championship cycle and the prize money and media attention associated with it. Sponsorship money might also be lost to the chess world, as some sponsors <a href="https://new.uschess.org/women/womens-girls-regional-event-guidelines/">specifically target chess for girls and women</a>.</p>
<p>However, segregated tournaments for girls and women are not universally supported. For example, Judit Polgár, the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Judit-Polgar">highest-rated woman of all time who at her peak in 2005 was ranked #8 in the world</a>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/30/chess-grandmaster-women-only-tournament-play-men">wrote</a> that she makes it a point to never separate girls and boys – nor award special prizes for girls – in the children’s tournaments that she organizes. “Meanwhile, national federations use their resources, and public subsidies are creating more female-only competitions,” Polgár wrote. “It is high time to consider the consequences of this segregation – because in the end, our goal must be that women and men compete with one another on an equal footing.”</p>
<p>To get to equal footing, however, separate championships may provide a leg up. <a href="https://chess24.com/en/embed-tournament/fide-womens-world-championship-2020">The prize fund for the Women’s World Chess Championship match is 500,000 Euros</a>, and you can follow the championship’s games at this same link. Perhaps that prize money will enable the two competitors to invest in more chess training for themselves so that maybe, someday, they can compete also in the World Chess Championship. </p>
<p>[ <em>Like what you’ve read? Want more?</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=likethis">Sign up for The Conversation’s daily newsletter</a>. ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/129293/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alexey W. Root does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>As the Women’s World Chess Championship takes place in China and Russia this month, Alexey Root, an expert on chess in education, weighs in on the benefits of having a separate championship for women.Alexey W. Root, Lecturer in Education, University of Texas at DallasLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1272902019-12-18T13:51:32Z2019-12-18T13:51:32Z5 ways chess can make you a better law student and lawyer<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/306196/original/file-20191210-95165-1oc422q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Legal battles require the same skills seen at the highest levels of chess.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/young-lawyer-playing-chess-train-his-1196627311">Elnur/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4233011">Paul Morphy</a> was a 19th-century New Orleans chess prodigy who was the de facto world chess champion during much of his short life. He rarely lost when he played throughout Europe and the United States. He was also a lawyer who graduated from what is now Tulane Law School. As a student, he was said to have memorized the Louisiana Civil Code in English and French. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/306198/original/file-20191210-95111-1l2e5b2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/306198/original/file-20191210-95111-1l2e5b2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/306198/original/file-20191210-95111-1l2e5b2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=847&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/306198/original/file-20191210-95111-1l2e5b2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=847&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/306198/original/file-20191210-95111-1l2e5b2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=847&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/306198/original/file-20191210-95111-1l2e5b2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1064&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/306198/original/file-20191210-95111-1l2e5b2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1064&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/306198/original/file-20191210-95111-1l2e5b2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1064&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Paul Morphy in New York in 1859.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paul_Morphy_standing_New_York_1859.jpg">WikiMedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>His father was a prominent Louisiana judge.</p>
<p>There are other talented chess-playing lawyers, though none, in my view, as brilliant at chess as Morphy. Three 20th century champions all <a href="https://www.quora.com/Chess-Would-Paul-Morphy-in-his-short-prime-be-competitive-with-the-Grandmasters-of-today">agree </a>that Morphy was among the greatest chess players of any era.</p>
<p>The general view is that <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Paul_Morphy.html?id=hdsPr9XiJ6wC">he would have the chess grandmaster title</a>, the highest title in the world of chess, if he were alive today.</p>
<p>As a <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=1UdCHtYAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">law professor</a> and <a href="http://www.uschess.org/datapage/ratings_graph.php?memid=12542397">high-level amateur player</a>, I believe that playing chess is great training to be a successful law student and lawyer. Here are five reasons why.</p>
<h2>1. Intellectually rigorous</h2>
<p>Much like law school, chess is intellectually rigorous. Playing chess at the highest level is so hard that Microsoft founder Bill Gates <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/crosswords/chess/magnus-carlsen-picks-up-where-he-left-off.html">lost after only nine moves</a> in an exhibition blitz game with the current world champion, Norwegian Grandmaster <a href="https://www.chess.com/players/magnus-carlsen">Magnus Carlsen</a>. One might have expected Gates to last longer given his genius. </p>
<p>A chess player must concentrate for as many as five or six hours in serious tournaments, and a single lapse can cause a loss. Learning to concentrate is also invaluable for law school.</p>
<p>Aspiring law students often take undergraduate classes that are part of a “pre-law” program. Government or criminal justice majors are typical since they involve some focus on the legal system. These are important intellectual fields. </p>
<p>Yet, <a href="https://leiterlawschool.typepad.com/leiter/2008/04/which-undergrad.html">informal studies</a> suggest that students who major in especially difficult areas, such as philosophy or mathematics, perform better on the <a href="https://www.lsac.org/lsat">LSAT</a> – the exam required for entrance into law school. Just as math and logic serve lawyers well in the courtroom as they fashion their arguments, so, too, is it with chess players on the chessboard as they make their moves.</p>
<h2>2. Requires identifying issues</h2>
<p>Students who perform well on law school exams and the bar exam must succeed at “issue spotting.” That is to say, unlike undergraduate exams, which may require the student to summarize what they have learned, law school exams require students to figure out what legal issues are buried within the facts of a given case. Then the student should apply the right legal principles to the facts. The student often must draw analogies and see patterns. Lawyers must also spot issues and draw analogies when their clients present problems.</p>
<p>Similarly, good chess players survey the chess board, with a clock ticking, and must find a strong move among many possible <a href="https://www.chess.com/article/view/quotthink-like-a-grandmasterquot-by-alexander-kotov">candidate moves</a>. They will <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Improve_Your_Chess_Pattern_Recognition.html?id=UyVBCwAAQBAJ">look for patterns</a>, such as typical methods of attacking a king. Sometimes, the move will be a tactical strike, such as the bold sacrifice of a queen leading to checkmate. Those players who cannot see many possibilities will not win many games. Both the chess player and lawyer must discover the key aspects of a situation.</p>
<h2>3. Strategies essential</h2>
<p>Strong performance in law and chess involves <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Modern_Chess_Strategy.html?id=aClc5YZ13GMC">strategizing effectively</a>. Chess may therefore be <a href="https://www.law.com/newyorklawjournal/2019/10/08/chess-is-a-serious-game-but-reading-about-it-is-a-delight/?slreturn=20191110111106">law’s most common metaphor</a>. </p>
<p>Success requires the ability to plan, envision how one’s opponent will respond, and then figure out how to reply. As a former litigator, I not only had to think about what to do, but I also had to assess whether my adversary would have an effective contrary plan. I also had to know the weaknesses in my case. Similarly, a strong chess player will know the problems in their position.</p>
<h2>4. Principles and rules apply</h2>
<p>Both law and chess have rules, general principles, and exceptions or loopholes. The law is often codified as a statute. Likewise, chess has rules, though they often lack the ambiguity of statutes. Beginning chess players then learn accepted principles. For instance, they are taught that during the opening part of the game, they should get certain pieces into play, use those pieces and pawns to control the center of the board, place their prized king in a safe position by making a special move known as “<a href="https://www.chess.com/article/view/how-to-castle-in-chess">castling</a>,” and keep moves by their valuable queen in reserve. Yet strong chess players may violate these principles, for <a href="https://chessimprover.com/9-lessons-to-learn-from-bill-gates-9-move-loss-to-magnus-carlsen/">surprise or other purposes</a>. </p>
<p>Prosecutors also have common approaches. In criminal cases with multiple defendants, prosecutors are trained to go after the “small fish” first, and then use those successes to land the “big fish.” This is like capturing the pawns before checkmating the king in chess. The <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/news/2019/08/29/criminal-kingpin-or-just/">press even uses these chess terms in describing criminal cases</a>. </p>
<h2>5. Takes competitive zeal</h2>
<p>Success in both law and chess requires competitive instincts. Indeed, chess has a <a href="https://www.chess.com/article/view/chess-ratings---how-they-work">rating system for players</a> and law school has <a href="https://www.bcgsearch.com/bcgguide/decoding_class_rankings_what_should_therecruiter_Look_for.php">class rank for students</a>. Chess requires a will to win strong enough to <a href="https://abovethelaw.com/2015/06/3-things-law-students-and-young-lawyers-can-learn-from-chess-grandmaster-garry-kasparov/">maintain concentration</a>.</p>
<p>Chess players often experience ups and downs during single games, as well as tournaments. They must cope with adversity, including losing. Similarly, a single law school exam can be the only basis for the student’s class grade, so everything is at stake at once, though the student has likely worked all semester. Lawsuits can also take years and require persistence. My cases and trials were always roller coasters with good and bad days.</p>
<p>Another similarity is that the chess player and lawyer must be well prepared. In chess, one can often find an opponent’s games <a href="https://database.chessbase.com/?lang=en">online</a> and see their playing style. In law, one can learn about the judge who will be hearing a case and alter one’s approach accordingly.</p>
<p>Admittedly chess is just a game so most people play it for fun, whereas practicing law is a profession. Few chess players will reach the heights of Paul Morphy. Nevertheless, as one who has played chess at high levels and litigated federal and state court cases, I believe that chess develops important intellectual, emotional and competitive skills that are very useful in the legal field.</p>
<p>[ <em>Like what you’ve read? Want more?</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=likethis">Sign up for The Conversation’s daily newsletter</a>. ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/127290/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mark Kende is a member of the United States Chess Federation and the American Bar Association. </span></em></p>The same skills and talents that enable chess players to dominate the board will also serve aspiring lawyers well in the courtroom, a law scholar argues.Mark Kende, Professor of Law, Drake UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1255812019-10-21T18:26:24Z2019-10-21T18:26:24ZWhy your cat is lousy at chess yet way smarter than even the most advanced AI<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/297893/original/file-20191021-56215-1wq7k71.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C227%2C4000%2C2431&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Cat or Mac, which one is the smartest? </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://unsplash.com/photos/g3B53PbBfwU">Sereja Ris/Unsplash</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>If you share your home with a dog or a cat, look at it carefully and you will get a good overview of everything we don’t know how to do in artificial intelligence.</p>
<p>“But my cat does nothing all day except sleep, eat and wash herself,” you may think. And yet your cat knows how to walk, run, jump (and land on her feet), hear, see, watch, learn, play, hide, be happy, be sad, be afraid, dream, hunt, eat, fight, flee, reproduce, educate her kittens – and the list is still very long.</p>
<p>Each of these actions requires processes that are not directly “intelligence” in the most common sense but are related to cognition and animal intelligence. All animals have their own cognition, from the spider that weaves its web to the guide dogs that help people find their way. Some can even communicate with us. Not by speech, of course, but cats and dogs don’t hesitate to use body language and vocalisation – meowing, barking, wagging their tails – to get what they want.</p>
<p>Let’s look again at your cat. When she comes carelessly to rub up against you or sits in front of her bowl or in front of a door, the message is quite clear. She is looking for a caress, is hungry or wants to go out (then get in, then out, then in…). She has learned to interact with you to achieve her goals.</p>
<h2>Walking, a complex problem</h2>
<p>Among all these cognitive skills, there are only a handful that we are beginning to know how to reproduce artificially. For example, bipedal locomotion – walking with two legs. It might be easy and natural to us, but it is actually something extremely complicated for robotics and it took decades of intensive research to build and program a robot that more or less walks properly on its own two legs. That is, without falling because of small pebble under its foot or when a person simply walked by a little too close. </p>
<p>Remember that it takes a baby an average of one full year to learn how to walk, demonstrating the complexity of what may seem like a “simple” problem. And I’m only talking about walking, not hopscotch or, say, soccer. </p>
<p>Today, one of the biggest challenges in autonomous robotics is to design and built two-legged robots that can successfully play one of the most popular human team sports. The <a href="https://www.robocup.org/">Robocup 2020</a>, which brings together nearly 3,500 researchers and 3,000 bipedal robots, will take place next year in Bordeaux, France. There you’ll be able to observe them playing soccer, and while great strides have been made (literally), they remain distinctly clumsy and a long way from the thrills of the human World Cup.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Robocup 2018, Nao-Team HTWK versus B-Human.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Identifying isn’t understanding</h2>
<p>What about object recognition? Today we know how to create computer algorithms that can do that, don’t we? While it is true that some can now name the content of almost any image, this does not relate to intelligence or cognition. </p>
<p>To understand this, you have to look at how these algorithms work. <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/supervised-learning">Supervised learning</a>, which remains the most popular method, consists of presenting images and a label describing the content of the image to the program. The total number of images is generally much higher than the number of labels. Each label is associated with a very large number of images representing the object in different situations, under different angles of view, under different lights, etc. </p>
<p>For example, for an AI program to be able to recognise cats, up to one million images must be presented. By doing so, it will build an internal visual representation of the object by calculating a kind of average of all the images. But this representation is ultimately only a simple description that is not anchored in any reality. Humans can recognise a cat from its purr, the feel of its fur against the leg, the delicate scent of a litter box that’s overdue for a cleaning. All these and a hundred more say “cat” to us, but mean nothing to even the most sophisticated AI program.</p>
<p>To do so, an algorithm would need a body that allows it to experience the world. But then, could it understand what a drink is if it’s never thirsty? Could it understand fire if it’s never been burned? Could it understand the cold if it never shudders? When an algorithm “recognises” an object, it doesn’t understand at all – really, not at all – the nature of that object. It only proceeds by cross-checking with examples previously presented. This explains why there have been a number of <a href="https://theconversation.com/driverless-cars-are-already-here-but-the-roads-arent-ready-for-them-93456">autonomous-car crashes</a>. While roadways are a highly constrained form of the world, they remain visually and functionally complex – vulnerable users such as pedestrians and cyclists can too easily be overlooked, or one street element mistaken for another. And the consequences of AI’s shortcomings have <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/uber-driverless-fatality.html">sometimes been fatal</a>.</p>
<h2>The sensible experience of the world</h2>
<p>What about humans? Try the experience of showing a real puppy to a child and she will be able to recognise any other puppy (even if she doesn’t know the word yet). Parents, by designating and naming things, will help the child develop language based on concepts that she has experienced before. But this learning, which may seem easy, even obvious, to us is not.</p>
<p>This is beautifully illustrated by the life of Helen Keller, who lost her hearing, sight and power of speech at the age of two. Her educator, Anne Sullivan, tried for a long time to teach her the words by drawing signs on the palm of Helen’s hand and then touching the corresponding object. Anne Sullivan’s efforts were initially unsuccessful because Helen did not have the entry points for this strange dictionary. Until the day that Anne took Helen to a well, let water run over her hand and…</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! … Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life.“</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Those are the words of Helen Keller herself. She wrote them a few years later in her book <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/328398/the-story-of-my-life-by-helen-keller/"><em>The Story of My Life</em></a> (1905). For her, on that precise day, the symbols were forever grounded in reality. </p>
<p>While spectacular progress has been made in the field of <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-machine-learning-76759">machine learning</a>, grounding the digital symbols into the real world remains completely unresolved. And without the resolution of this problem, which is necessary but probably not a sufficient, there will be no general artificial intelligence. So there are still a lot of things that we are far from knowing how to do with artificial intelligence. And remember, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_Brooks">"elephants don’t play chess”</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/125581/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nicolas P. Rougier has received funding from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) and the Nouvelle Aquitaine region.</span></em></p>If artificial intelligence can amaze us with its prowess, there are many areas where it falls flat when compared to human and animal intelligence.Nicolas P. Rougier, Chargé de Recherche en neurosciences computationelles, Université de BordeauxLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1239002019-10-09T13:05:42Z2019-10-09T13:05:42ZGames blamed for moral decline and addiction throughout history<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/295835/original/file-20191007-121079-kwgzgo.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C5%2C1737%2C1092&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Did ancient Egyptian parents worry their kids might get addicted to this game, called senet?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SenetBoard-InscribedWithNameOfAmunhotepIII_BrooklynMuseum.png">Keith Schengili-Roberts/Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Video games are often blamed for <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-video-games-jobs-emploment-20160923-story.html">unemployment</a>, <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/8/26/20754659/video-games-and-violence-debate-moral-panic-history">violence in society</a> and <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/gaming/fortnite-lawsuit-gaming-addiction-epic-games-a9146486.html">addiction</a> – including by <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/08/video-game-violence-became-partisan-issue/595456/">partisan politicians raising moral concerns</a>. </p>
<p>Blaming video games for social or moral decline might feel like something new. But fears about the effects of recreational games on society as a whole are centuries old. History shows a cycle of apprehension and acceptance about games that is very like events of modern times.</p>
<p>From <a href="https://www.academia.edu/8210038/The_Egyptian_Game_of_Senet_and_the_Migration_of_the_Soul">ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs</a>, historians know that the oldest examples of board games trace back to the game of <a href="https://www.mastersofgames.com/rules/senet-rules.htm">senet</a> around 3100 B.C. </p>
<p>One of the earliest known written descriptions of games dates from the fifth century B.C. The <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/dialogues-of-the-buddha/oclc/506265870">Dialogues of the Buddha</a>, purport to record the actual words of the Buddha himself. In them, he is reported to say that “some recluses…while living on food provided by the faithful, <a href="https://sacred-texts.com/bud/dob/dob-01tx.htm">continue addicted to games and recreations</a>; that is to say…games on boards with eight or with 10, rows of squares.”</p>
<p>That reference is widely recognized as describing a <a href="https://archive.org/details/AHistoryOfChess/page/n39">predecessor to chess</a> – a much-studied game with an abundant literature in <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2016.08.002">cognitive science</a> and <a href="https://www.routledge.com/The-Psychology-of-Chess-1st-Edition/Gobet/p/book/9781138216655">psychology</a>. In fact, chess has been <a href="https://go.galegroup.com/ps/anonymous?id=GALE%7CA13489514">called an art form</a> and even used as a <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/white-king-and-red-queen-how-the-cold-war-was-fought-on-the-chessboard/oclc/759836279">peaceful U.S.-Soviet competition during the Cold War</a>.</p>
<p>Despite the Buddha’s concern, chess has not historically raised concerns about addiction. Scholars’ attention to chess is focused on mastery and the wonders of the mind, not the potential of being addicted to playing. </p>
<p>Somewhere between the early Buddhist times and today, worries about game addiction have given way to scientific understanding of the cognitive, social and emotional <a href="http://doi.org/10.1037/a0034857">benefits of play</a> – rather than its detriments – and even viewing chess and other games as teaching tools, for <a href="https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00762">improving players’ thinking</a>, <a href="https://doi.org/10.5209/rev_SJOP.2012.v15.n2.38866">social-emotional development</a> and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2016.02.002">math skills</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/295840/original/file-20191007-121071-18qnhue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/295840/original/file-20191007-121071-18qnhue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/295840/original/file-20191007-121071-18qnhue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295840/original/file-20191007-121071-18qnhue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295840/original/file-20191007-121071-18qnhue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295840/original/file-20191007-121071-18qnhue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295840/original/file-20191007-121071-18qnhue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295840/original/file-20191007-121071-18qnhue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A die among other playing pieces from the Akkadian Empire, 2350-2150 B.C., found at Khafajah in modern-day Iraq.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Games and politics</h2>
<p>Dice, an ancient invention developed in many <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20080614053946/http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=5668&sectionid=351020108">early cultures</a>, found their way to ancient Greek and Roman culture. It helped that both societies had believers in numerology, an almost religious link between the divine and numbers. </p>
<p>So common were games of dice in Roman culture that <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/651038">Roman emperors wrote about their exploits in dice games such as Alea</a>. These gambling games were <a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017383500003119">ultimately outlawed</a> during the rise of Christianity in Roman civilization, because they allegedly promoted immoral tendencies.</p>
<p>More often than not, the concerns about games were used as a political tool to manipulate public sentiment. As <a href="https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/unlvgalj3&div=16">one legal historian puts</a> it, statutes on dice games in ancient Rome were only “sporadically and selectively enforced … what we would call ‘sports betting’ was exempted.” The rolling of dice was prohibited because it was gambling, but wagering on the outcomes of sport were not. Until of course, sports themselves came under fire. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/kings-book-of-sports-a-history-of-the-declarations-of-king-james-i-and-king-charles-i-as-to-the-use-of-lawful-sports-on-sundays/oclc/4788417">history of the “Book of Sports,”</a> a 17th-century compendium of declarations of King James I of England, demonstrates the next phase of fears about games. The royal directives outlined what sports and leisure activities were appropriate to engage in after Sunday religious services.</p>
<p>In the early 1600s, the book became the subject of a religious tug-of-war between Catholic and Puritan ideals. Puritans complained that the Church of England needed to be purged of more influences from Roman Catholicism – and liked neither the idea of play on Sundays nor how much people liked doing it.</p>
<p>In the end, English Puritans had the book burned. As a Time magazine article put it, “<a href="https://www.si.com/vault/1962/01/08/590449/the-bizarre-history-of-american-sport">Sport grew up through Puritanism</a> like flowers in a macadam prison yard.” Sports, like board games of the past, were stifled and the subject of much ire in the past and present. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KeFjYDRMggc?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Retro Report explains the pinball-machine bans of the mid-20th century.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Pinball in the 20th century</h2>
<p>In the middle part of the 20th century, one particular type of game emerged as a frequent target of politician concern – and playing it was even outlawed in cities across the country. </p>
<p>That game was pinball. But the parallels with today’s concerns about video games are clear.</p>
<p>In her history of moral panics about elements of popular culture, historian Karen Sternheimer observed that the invention of the coin-operated pinball game coincided with “<a href="https://www.routledge.com/Pop-Culture-Panics-How-Moral-Crusaders-Construct-Meanings-of-Deviance/Sternheimer/p/book/9780415748063">a time when young people</a> – and unemployed adults – had a growing amount of leisure time on their hands.” </p>
<p>As a result, she wrote, “<a href="https://www.routledge.com/Pop-Culture-Panics-How-Moral-Crusaders-Construct-Meanings-of-Deviance/Sternheimer/p/book/9780415748063">it didn’t take long for pinball to show up</a> on moral crusaders’ radar; just five years spanned between the invention of the first coin-operated machines in 1931 to their ban in Washington, D.C., in 1936.”</p>
<p>New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia argued that pinball machines were “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/01/the-mayor-who-took-a-sledgehammer-to-nycs-pinball-machines/267309/">from the devil</a>” and brought moral corruption to young people. He famously used a sledgehammer to destroy pinball machines confiscated during the city’s ban, which <a href="https://guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/longest-ban-in-gaming-history">lasted from 1942 to 1976</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/295847/original/file-20191007-121051-1meovop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/295847/original/file-20191007-121051-1meovop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/295847/original/file-20191007-121051-1meovop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=672&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295847/original/file-20191007-121051-1meovop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=672&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295847/original/file-20191007-121051-1meovop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=672&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295847/original/file-20191007-121051-1meovop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=845&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295847/original/file-20191007-121051-1meovop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=845&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295847/original/file-20191007-121051-1meovop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=845&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An early pinball machine, before the innovation of flippers to keep the ball in play longer.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flipper1948.jpg">Huhu/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>His complaints sound very similar to modern-day concerns that <a href="https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2017/03/30/the-link-between-video-games-and-unemployment">video games contribute to unemployment</a> at a time when millennials are one of the most <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/payout/2017/07/21/the-underemployment-phenomenon-no-one-is-talking-about/">underemployed generations</a>.</p>
<p>[<em>The Conversation’s science, health and technology editors pick their favorite stories.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/science-editors-picks-71/?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=science-favorite">Weekly on Wednesdays</a>.]</p>
<p>Even the cost of penny arcade pinball machines raised political alarms about wasting children’s money, in much the way that politicians declare they have <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/12/loot-boxes-in-games-are-gambling-and-should-be-banned-for-kids-say-uk-mps/">problems with small purchases and electronic treasure boxes</a> in video games.</p>
<p>As far back as the Buddha’s own teachings, moral leaders were warning about <a href="https://sacred-texts.com/bud/dob/dob-01tx.htm">addicting games and recreations</a> including “throwing dice,” “games with balls” and even “turning somersaults,” recommending the pious hold themselves “aloof from such games and recreations.”</p>
<p>Then, as now, play was caught in society-wide discussions that really had nothing to do with gaming – and everything to do with keeping or creating an established moral order.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/123900/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lindsay Grace does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Somewhere between the early Buddhist times and today, worries about game addiction have given way to scientific understanding of the benefits of play, rather than its detriments.Lindsay Grace, Knight Chair in Interactive Media; Associate Professor of Communication, University of MiamiLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1194692019-07-10T20:16:25Z2019-07-10T20:16:25ZMost people think playing chess makes you ‘smarter’, but the evidence isn’t clear on that<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/282611/original/file-20190704-126360-5mctrf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">We found students who played chess didn't show significant improvements in their standardised test scores.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">from shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Chess has long been an important part of school culture. Many people believe <a href="https://woochess.com/en/blog/10-benefits-of-teaching-kids-to-play-chess">chess has a range of cognitive benefits</a> including improved memory, IQ, problem solving skills and concentration. </p>
<p>But there is very little evidence supporting these conclusions. We conducted two studies (still unpublished) that found educators and parents believe chess has many educational benefits. But children in our study who played chess did not show significant improvements in standardised test scores compared to children who didn’t play.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/if-machines-can-beat-us-at-games-does-it-make-them-more-intelligent-than-us-60555">If machines can beat us at games, does it make them more intelligent than us?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Most people think chess improves learning</h2>
<p>The <a href="https://eprints.usq.edu.au/36711/">first study</a> looked at the perceptions of educators and parents regarding the benefits of playing chess. </p>
<p>In 2016, 314 participants – which included school principals, teachers, chess-coordinators and parents in parts of Queensland and NSW – filled out an anonymous, online survey.</p>
<p>Participants were asked to state how much they agreed or disagreed with 34 statements about the benefits of playing chess, such as: learning chess helps children develop critical thinking abilities.</p>
<p>Most participants either agreed or strongly agreed with most of the statements for chess benefits. For instance, almost 80% (249 out of 313) strongly agreed learning chess had educational benefits for children.</p>
<p>Another 87% (269 out of 310) strongly agreed learning chess helps children develop problem solving abilities. And 59% (184 out of 314) strongly agreed learning chess has benefits for Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander Children.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/282618/original/file-20190704-126369-broelv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/282618/original/file-20190704-126369-broelv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/282618/original/file-20190704-126369-broelv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=486&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/282618/original/file-20190704-126369-broelv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=486&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/282618/original/file-20190704-126369-broelv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=486&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/282618/original/file-20190704-126369-broelv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=611&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/282618/original/file-20190704-126369-broelv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=611&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/282618/original/file-20190704-126369-broelv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=611&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Some questions in the survey and the answers given by participants.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The survey also included a space for comments. Some comments from participants included:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Chess is a great activity for all children to be involved in. It is one of a number of activities that schools can offer that assist in the academic, social and emotional development of children. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>One parent said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Since starting classes [my son] has become a full-time student and is managing social situations a lot better than before. Chess has pushed him to think in different ways.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>But does it?</h2>
<p>Previous studies that explored whether chess improves children’s cognitive abilities have had mixed results.</p>
<p>Some studies have found playing chess was linked to better thinking abilities. For instance, a significant 2012 <a href="https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED551703">New York study</a> found that children in a group that had learnt either chess or music performed slightly better than children in the group who learnt neither. </p>
<p>But the study also noted the improvement in the chess group was not statistically significant.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-to-use-music-to-fine-tune-your-child-for-school-86776">How to use music to fine tune your child for school</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>A 2017 trial of more than 4,000 children in England <a href="http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/early/2017/06/01/jhr.53.4.0516.7952R.abstract">found no evidence</a> that chess instruction had any effect on children’s mathematics, reading or science test scores.</p>
<p>We wanted to test if there was, in fact, a positive correlation between learning to play chess and learners’ verbal, numerical and abstract (visual) reasoning skills. The study explored this in Year 1 to Year 5 students in a private school in Queensland.</p>
<p>In particular, the study examined whether a range of chess-related and non-chess related variables affected the standardised test scores of the chess group as compared to the control groups.</p>
<p>The study consisted of 203 students (with approval of their parents) who opted into the study. They made up four groups (based on the same approach as the 2012 New York study mentioned above). The groups were made of: </p>
<ul>
<li>46 students who learnt to play chess </li>
<li>48 students who learnt to play music</li>
<li>37 students who learnt to play chess and music</li>
<li>72 students who neither learnt chess nor music</li>
</ul>
<p>Weekly chess lessons were given to 83 students for six months: 24 from Year 1, 20 from Year 2, 8 from Year 3, 18 from Year 4 and 13 from year 5. </p>
<p>Weekly music lessons were given to 85 students for six months: 16 from year 1, 15 from year 2, 12 from year 3, 23 from year 4 and 19 from year 5.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/283446/original/file-20190710-44457-gfqogs.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/283446/original/file-20190710-44457-gfqogs.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/283446/original/file-20190710-44457-gfqogs.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/283446/original/file-20190710-44457-gfqogs.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/283446/original/file-20190710-44457-gfqogs.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/283446/original/file-20190710-44457-gfqogs.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/283446/original/file-20190710-44457-gfqogs.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/283446/original/file-20190710-44457-gfqogs.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Many schools have chess programs, and there are state and nation wide competitions.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We used standardised tests to measure whether there was any significant change in the scores of the different groups. </p>
<p>Year 1 and 2 students were tested using the Raven’s Progressive Matrices (<a href="https://www.assessment-training.com/raven-s-progressive-matrices-test?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIgq_g4tGp4wIVzIBwCh0fzwF8EAAYASAAEgLdN_D_BwE">RPM</a>) tests, which are multiple-choice intelligence tests of abstract reasoning. </p>
<p>Grade 3, 4 and 5 students were tested using the ACER (Australian Council of Educational Research) General Ability Tests (<a href="https://www.acer.org/au/agat/year-levels">AGAT</a>), used to assess learners’ reasoning skills in three areas: verbal, numerical and abstract (visual).</p>
<p>There were small improvements in the standardised test scores of the chess and music groups but these were not statistically significant.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-good-move-to-master-maths-check-out-these-chess-puzzles-20200">A good move to master maths? Check out these chess puzzles</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Our findings don’t mean learning to play chess has no benefits for cognitive skills. There are many different types of thinking and measures of intelligence we do not yet fully understand. This is especially relevant in a world where conceptual thinking has become such a vital skill. </p>
<p>The different ways of thinking associated with the benefits of chess may include creative thinking, critical thinking, logical thinking, intuition, logical reasoning, systemic thinking, strategic thinking, foresight, convergent thinking, analytical thinking, problem solving and concentration.</p>
<p>Further research should aim to explore which type of thinking chess may improve, if we are to agree with the positive views of academics, educators, parents and players.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/119469/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Graeme Gardiner, now retired, who has recently completed his Masters Research degree at the University of Southern Queensland, is a former President of the Australian Chess Federation (1999-2003) and founder and former owner of Gardiner Chess (2001-2015). He was also a staff member at Somerset College, where the main study was carried out, from 1989-2001. Graeme does regular voluntary work at the college, and occasional paid duties at inter-school chess tournaments.
</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gail Ormsby and Luke van der Laan do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Previous studies that explored whether chess improves children’s cognitive abilities have had mixed results. We found playing chess wasn’t linked to better standardised test scores.Graeme Gardiner, PhD Student, University of Southern QueenslandGail Ormsby, Researcher, University of Southern QueenslandLuke van der Laan, Senior Lecturer (Foresight) and Director; Professional Studies, University of Southern QueenslandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1123792019-03-25T10:43:33Z2019-03-25T10:43:33ZA chess program helped this 8-year-old raise $240,000 and get his family out of a homeless shelter – here’s what to look for in a chess program for your child<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/265174/original/file-20190321-93032-70kq05.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Third-grader Tanitoluwa Adewumi was crowned as a New York State Scholastic chess champion on March 10.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gofundme.com/just-tani">GoFundMe</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Before he won the primary (K-3) championship section of the <a href="http://chessevents.com/nyscholastics/">New York State Scholastic Championships</a> earlier this month, 8-year-old Tanitoluwa Adewumi was living in a New York City homeless shelter with his family, who came to the United States from Nigeria as refugees.</p>
<p>But after The New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/16/opinion/sunday/chess-champion-8-year-old-homeless-refugee-.html">told the story</a> of how Tanitoluwa – or “Tani,” as he is called – <a href="https://nyssc-197622.appspot.com/web/pcc_Standings.html">went undefeated</a>, despite only playing chess for about a year, the P.S. 116 third-grader catapulted to <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tani-adewumi-homeless-third-grader-refugee-takes-chess-world-by-storm/">national fame</a>.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1106994321121837056"}"></div></p>
<p>Since then, thousands of people have collectively given more than US$240,000 to a <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/just-tani">GoFundMe page</a> that told the story of his family’s plight. Someone <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/opinion/sunday/homeless-chess-champion-tani.html">gave the family an apartment</a> rent-free for a year. And former President Bill Clinton invited Tani and his family to visit his Harlem office, <a href="https://twitter.com/BillClinton/status/1108099328718057473">tweeting to Tani</a>: “You exemplify a winning spirit – in chess and in life.”</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1108099328718057473"}"></div></p>
<p>Learning chess through the P.S. 116 chess program changed Tani’s life. </p>
<p>I’m a former U.S. Women’s Chess Champion and the author of “<a href="https://www.abc-clio.com/ABC-CLIOCorporate/product.aspx?pc=F2132P">Children and Chess: A Guide for Educators</a>.” Here are three of the top considerations for parents searching for a chess program for their child. </p>
<h2>1. Safety and structure</h2>
<p>The number one feature for a chess program (or any program) must be safety. Even though a chess game is played one-on-one, there should <a href="https://www.scouting.org/health-and-safety/gss/gss01/#a">never be one-on-one contact, out of the view of others</a>, between a chess teacher and a child. </p>
<p>Beyond safety, look for a chess program that structures children’s time. For example, an instructor introduces a chess concept. Then paired students practice that chess concept while the instructor monitors each student’s progress. That cycle of teaching and practice repeats with another chess concept. Each class should also have free chess play, often toward the end after students have practiced the chess concepts. </p>
<p>But not every class period will have instruction, practice and free play. If your child likes to compete, look for a chess program that offers ladders or tournaments that enable students to see where they rank. Competitions can take place among the students within the chess program only or may additionally involve players from outside of the chess program. Competitions mean winning, losing, and dealing with the emotions that accompany those results. Investigate how the chess program addresses the emotional side of chess.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/265029/original/file-20190321-93032-xw97ie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/265029/original/file-20190321-93032-xw97ie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/265029/original/file-20190321-93032-xw97ie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265029/original/file-20190321-93032-xw97ie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265029/original/file-20190321-93032-xw97ie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265029/original/file-20190321-93032-xw97ie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265029/original/file-20190321-93032-xw97ie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265029/original/file-20190321-93032-xw97ie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Spectators watch as two young people battle it out in a game of chess in Washington, D.C.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jamaal Abdul-Alim</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>2. Instructor’s knowledge</h2>
<p>If your child aspires to be a chess master, then he or she needs an instructor with chess expertise. <a href="http://www.uschess.org/content/blogsection/14/195/">United States Chess Federation (US Chess) ratings</a> and <a href="https://ratings.fide.com/">World Chess Federation ratings</a> indicate knowledge of chess. For example, a chess expert (rated 2000-2199) is in the top 4 percent to 1.5 percent of players rated by US Chess. One of Tani’s chess teachers at P.S. 116, Shawn Martinez, who has a US Chess master title, has a current US Chess rating of 2188.</p>
<p>When Martinez was a middle school student, he learned to play chess at I.S. 318. The film <a href="http://brooklyncastle.com/">“Brooklyn Castle”</a> tells the story of the I.S. 318 chess program, which has won multiple national championship titles. Elizabeth Spiegel, one of three chess coaches at I.S. 318, is also an expert. Her US Chess rating is 2052.</p>
<h2>3. Try before you buy</h2>
<p>When Elizabeth Spiegel won the 2019 “Chess Educator of the Year” award from The University of Texas at Dallas, where I am employed as a lecturer, she <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__CPZu4ckjM&feature=youtu.be">recommended</a> that children have trial lessons with several different chess coaches. She also advised that parents sit in on each lesson and talk with their child afterward about which instructor works best for the child.</p>
<p>Chess programs vary. Some programs aim for children to socialize and play chess with each other for fun. There may not be an emphasis on ratings or trophies. Other chess programs may promise that each child will gain a certain number of rating points in a specified time period. Parents should pick a program that seems to align with their goals and their children’s goals. After talking with other parents and children who are involved with the program, give the program a try.</p>
<p>If the fit is poor, switch to a different program. If the fit is good, then your child has played his or her first moves in what could be a lifetime of enjoying chess.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/112379/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alexey W. Root does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>For 8-year-old Tanitoluwa Adewumi, a chess program ended up being a ticket out of a homeless shelter. A chess education expert explains what to look for in a chess program for your child.Alexey W. Root, Lecturer in Education, University of Texas at DallasLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1110412019-02-11T11:45:40Z2019-02-11T11:45:40Z5 ways to develop children’s talents<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/258025/original/file-20190208-174883-v8ljpe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Early starts are key to developing children's talents, experts say.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/little-boy-playing-chesssmart-kidfashion-children5-209594251">Eugene Partyzan from www.shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Some people think talent is born. The often-told <a href="https://www.biography.com/people/wolfgang-mozart-9417115">story</a> of Mozart playing piano at 3 and composing at 5 reinforces such beliefs. </p>
<p>But here’s the rest of that story: Mozart’s father was a successful <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leopold-Mozart">musician, composer and instructor</a>. He was devoted to teaching Mozart and helping him practice hard and achieve perfection.</p>
<p>Despite all this, Mozart did not produce his <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=AOIF3rtM8nUC&pg=PA212&lpg=PA212&dq=hayes+10+year+rule&source=bl&ots=72sj0djtOL&sig=ACfU3U1zIFOB4l-ydNuz0pAQpHTS2SorCg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi_2d2sma3gAhUGiqwKHfzHAK4Q6AEwAnoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=hayes%2010%20year%20rule&f=false">first masterwork</a> until his early 20s – after about 15 years of arduous practice and top-notch instruction.</p>
<p>Talent, I argue, is not born, it’s made – and parents can make a big difference.</p>
<h2>Conditions for success</h2>
<p>Although some might believe that talent is rare, psychologist Benjamin Bloom <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/15009/developing-talent-in-young-people-by-dr-benjamin-bloom/9780345315090/">said otherwise</a> after he investigated top performers in six talent domains: “What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn if provided with the appropriate conditions of learning.”</p>
<p>Those appropriate conditions include five things: an early start, expert instruction, deliberate practice, a center of excellence, and singleness of purpose.</p>
<p>Children can’t ignite and stoke these talent factors on their own. Instead, as I argue in my 2019 book, “<a href="https://www.abc-clio.com/Praeger/product.aspx?pc=A5938C">Nurturing Children’s Talents: A Guide for Parents</a>,” children need a talent manager, most often a parent, to nurture talent growth. I make this case as an educational psychologist who specializes in learning and talent development.</p>
<p>Let’s take a closer look at these talent factors and parents’ influence.</p>
<h2>1. Early start</h2>
<p>The seeds of talent are usually planted early and in the home. One study revealed that 22 of 24 talented performers – from chess players to figure skaters – were introduced to their talent domains by parents, <a href="https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1058967">usually between ages 2 and 5</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/258033/original/file-20190208-174864-1ejswup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/258033/original/file-20190208-174864-1ejswup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258033/original/file-20190208-174864-1ejswup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258033/original/file-20190208-174864-1ejswup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258033/original/file-20190208-174864-1ejswup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258033/original/file-20190208-174864-1ejswup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258033/original/file-20190208-174864-1ejswup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Many phenoms get an early start, research shows.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/mother-daughter-playing-tennis-608993510">Purino from www.shutterstock.com</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Some of those parents were elite performers or coaches themselves. One was national championship volleyball coach <a href="https://journalstar.com/sports/huskers/volleyball/john-cook-earns-national-coach-of-the-year-award-from/article_9ac14a39-1aa4-53e9-ba03-78a54965b54b.html">John Cook</a>, who <a href="https://www.theindependent.com/sports/cooks-closer-after-lessons-on-off-court/article_b213b98a-35e6-11e2-bbcc-001a4bcf887a.html">raised All-American volleyball star Lauren Cook</a>.</p>
<p>“I think my daughter had an advantage because of my job,” <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02783193.2018.1466841">coach Cook said</a>. “She grew up around volleyball. When she was a little kid, we set up a mini court in the basement and would play volleyball on our knees.”</p>
<p>Some parents were not linked to the child’s eventual talent area but provided a nurturing early environment that sparked a talent interest. Such was the case for Adora Svitak, an accomplished child writer and presenter. </p>
<p>Adora published two books by age 11 and made hundreds of international presentations, including a <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/adora_svitak?language=en">TED Talk viewed by millions</a>. Adora’s parents, John and Joyce, were not writers or presenters, but they set the stage for Adora’s accomplishments. As her mother describes, they read “interesting and fascinating” books to her for more than an hour each night. “Reading really helped shape Adora’s love for learning and reading,” she said. </p>
<p>In addition, they encouraged Adora’s early writing, offered guidance, helped her publish her books and arranged speaking engagements. Joyce eventually quit her job to manage <a href="https://www.adorasvitak.com/">Adora’s career</a>. She <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Nurturing_Children_s_Talents.html?id=PaE8uQEACAAJ">said</a>, “It is a full-time job, and it can be hard. But, I don’t just manage somebody; I manage my daughter.”</p>
<h2>2. Expert instruction</h2>
<p>Parents go to great lengths to provide or arrange expert instruction. Chess grandmaster <a href="https://ratings.fide.com/card.phtml?event=2047896">Kayden Troff</a> learned how to play chess at age 3 while observing his father, Dan, and older siblings play.</p>
<p>With few chess resources near their Utah home, Dan assumed chess-coaching duties. To do so, Dan studied chess 10 to 15 hours a week during lunch breaks and after hours. </p>
<p>He read books, watched videos, and studied grandmaster games that allowed him to create a book with specialized lessons to instruct Kayden during nightly training sessions. Eventually, when Dan could no longer keep pace with Kayden’s growth, he arranged for Kayden to take lessons from grandmasters via the internet. </p>
<p>To pay for lessons costing US$300 a month, Dan, a banker, and his wife worked extra jobs as custodians and spent 400 hours organizing an annual chess camp.</p>
<h2>3. Deliberate practice</h2>
<p>Practice among the talented is never casual, it’s deliberate: goal-directed and beyond one’s comfort zone.</p>
<p>State high school swim champion <a href="https://swimswam.com/nebraska-200-im-state-champion-caroline-theil-gives-verbal-texas-a-m-aggies/">Caroline Thiel</a> described her taxing practice routine this way: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Some days in practice you’re just so exhausted. You’re sore and your entire body aches, and it’s hard to find motivation. Your brain shuts down but your body keeps going through the muscle aches, heavy breathing and throwing up. People don’t realize how hard swimmers practice; they think we just jump in the pool and swim a few laps.” </p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/258039/original/file-20190208-174851-gynzdr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/258039/original/file-20190208-174851-gynzdr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/258039/original/file-20190208-174851-gynzdr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258039/original/file-20190208-174851-gynzdr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258039/original/file-20190208-174851-gynzdr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258039/original/file-20190208-174851-gynzdr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258039/original/file-20190208-174851-gynzdr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258039/original/file-20190208-174851-gynzdr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Becoming a champion swimmer takes arduous practice.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/young-children-swimming-backstroke-pool-lane-1188286228?src=vQPOLBXxK6jnqLHBHeH4Ww-1-4">Kekyalyaynen from www.shutterstock.com</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>4. Center of excellence</h2>
<p>When I asked Jayde Atkins, a national high school rodeo champion, why she is so talented, she said, “Look at all I have, I should be good.” Jayde was <a href="https://rodeonews.com/association/meet-the-member-jayde-atkins/">raised on a horse ranch in central Nebraska</a> and began riding at age 2.</p>
<p>Her parents, Sonya and J.B., are riders and professional horse trainers who taught her the ropes and practiced with her for hours each day. The Atkins had well-bred horses and a big trailer to transport them to nearby towns for rodeo competitions. The family ranch was a self-made center of rodeo excellence.</p>
<p>Most talented performers do not a have a center of excellence outside their back door. In those cases, they may travel to get to one. Consider three tennis players from Lincoln, Nebraska, my hometown. With their parents’ blessing and support, <a href="http://reckeweytennis.com/about-us.html">Jon and Joel Reckewey</a> left home as teenagers and moved three hours away to Kansas where they trained at the prestigious <a href="https://journalstar.com/sports/lincoln-tennis-player-sock-at-the-top-of-his-game/article_0f457569-1211-58b6-8d12-0c40e6e46966.html">Mike Wolf Tennis Academy</a>.</p>
<p>Wimbledon and U.S. Open doubles champion <a href="https://www.kcur.org/post/how-kansas-city-based-team-helps-tennis-player-jack-sock-compete-around-world#stream/0">Jack Sock</a> traveled weekly to that same tennis academy as a boy before his entire family eventually relocated to Kansas. With parents’ support, budding stars often gravitate to centers of excellence, where top coaches and rising stars flock.</p>
<h2>5. Singleness of purpose</h2>
<p>Talented people display a singleness of purpose. </p>
<p>One chess parent I interviewed told me, “The extraordinary time we put toward this one activity takes him out of a lot of fun and games.” Another parent said, “He’s not interested in school; he’s interested in chess. He just lives and breathes chess.” That same parent said, “We once took chess away (because of low school performance) and he was miserable. It was like yanking out the soul.” </p>
<p>When I asked chess parents why their children dedicate themselves to chess the way they do, they were unanimous about how much joy and satisfaction their children got from pursuing chess.</p>
<p>Parents support this singleness of purpose. However, on occasion, they may find themselves supporting more than one passion. For instance, McKenzie Steiner is an all-state softball player and rising country music star. Her father, Scott, was McKenzie’s longtime softball coach, logging thousands of hours a year on the diamond and practicing pitching in the backyard, and also serving as her country band assembler, promoter and manager. </p>
<h2>Talent journey</h2>
<p>Although stories of pushy parents abound, the parents I spoke with recognize that children must drive the talent train with passion and hard work and that parents can only help keep the train on track. They helped because they saw a need that only they could meet. They would no sooner ignore a talent need than a medical need. And, of course, they help because they love their children and want them to be fulfilled.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/111041/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kenneth A. Kiewra does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>For a child to excel in a particular field, specific conditions are essential. A scholar of educational psychology explains what those conditions are.Kenneth A. Kiewra, Professor of Educational Psychology, University of Nebraska-LincolnLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1061592018-11-09T11:46:09Z2018-11-09T11:46:09Z5 things to know about Fabiano Caruana and his quest to become world chess champion<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244047/original/file-20181106-74778-4fokz9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">American grandmaster Fabiano Caruana, shown here at the 2017 Tradewise Gibraltar Masters tournament, could become the first American-born world chess champion since Bobby Fischer.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">David Llada/American Chess Magazine</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>When Bobby Fischer became the first American-born world chess champion in 1972, it spurred a dramatic increase in interest in chess. For instance, after Fischer’s world championship victory against the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky, membership in the United States Chess Federation <a href="http://www.uschess.org/images/stories/Yearbooks/2017yearbook.pdf">swelled</a> from just under 31,000 in 1972 to more than 59,000 the following year.</p>
<p>Could there be a similar effect if Fabiano Caruana defeats reigning world champion Magnus Carlsen, of Norway, in London this month to become the first American-born world chess champion since Fischer? In a Q&A with education editor Jamaal Abdul-Alim, Daaim Shabazz, an <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=_uHxozkAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">international business professor</a> and <a href="http://www.thechessdrum.net/welcome.html">chess journalist</a>, explains what a Caruana victory could mean for the United States, where an estimated <a href="http://www.fide.com/component/content/article/1-fide-news/6376-agon-releases-new-chess-player-statistics-from-YouGOV-Fide">35 million people</a> are regular chess players. </p>
<p><strong>What characteristics enabled Fabiano Caruana to become a contender for the world chess championship?</strong></p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243758/original/file-20181103-12015-1mlezuc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243758/original/file-20181103-12015-1mlezuc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243758/original/file-20181103-12015-1mlezuc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243758/original/file-20181103-12015-1mlezuc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243758/original/file-20181103-12015-1mlezuc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243758/original/file-20181103-12015-1mlezuc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243758/original/file-20181103-12015-1mlezuc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243758/original/file-20181103-12015-1mlezuc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Fabiano Caruana, shown here at age 10 in 2002 in Bryant Park in New York City, where he challenged 15 players simultaneously. He won 14 of the matches.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Associated-Press-Domestic-News-New-York-United-/1fe221ebb6e6da11af9f0014c2589dfb/27/0">Bebeto Matthews/AP</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>One of the things I saw in Fabiano early on was not being afraid to play the strongest competition available. He didn’t fear losing. I once saw Caruana lose a game when he was around 9 or 10 and he didn’t seem to carry any of the usual childish pouting from a loss.</p>
<p>This self-control may have been developed because of his early diet of competitive open tournaments. In these competitions you must forget about a bad result quickly or risk distraction in the next game. In a recent interview, he mentioned his ability to <a href="https://www.twitch.tv/videos/244841784?t=12m16s">come back from losses</a> as one of his top strengths.</p>
<p>In his November 2018 Chess Life article “Caruana versus Carlsen,” Grandmaster Ian Rogers described Caruana’s <a href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/static_files/files/342/nov2018cl_%28dragged%29.pdf?1541523016">“hard-working, calculation-heavy, fearless style.”</a></p>
<p>I believe this to be an essential trait in his psychological makeup. Given the comments made in a <a href="https://youtu.be/_39_E_uL1i4?t=539">recent interview by Chess.com</a>, he seems self-assured in his chances against Carlsen. </p>
<p><strong>What are Fabiano Caruana’s odds of winning?</strong></p>
<p>In many chess circles, Carlsen is the considered the favorite. Surprisingly, <a href="https://twitter.com/STLChessClub/status/986723875240243201">some predictions are as high as 75-25</a> in his favor. A September <a href="https://en.chessbase.com/post/carlsen-vs-caruana-looking-back-and-looking-ahead">ChessBase.com poll</a> put Carlsen’s advantage at 56-43. I have looked at articles <a href="https://www.chess.com/article/view/will-fabiano-caruana-beat-king-magnus">showing a number of games between the two</a>, but some offer the safe prediction that the match would be close. Caruana stated at the 2018 Sinquefield Cup that his “<a href="https://www.chess.com/news/view/caruana-i-think-my-chances-are-about-50-50">chances are about 50-50</a>.” </p>
<p>As one who has <a href="http://www.thechessdrum.net/blog/2014/09/11/is-caruana-the-next-contender/?fbclid=IwAR39bO8KxH1vvxgWBdiDyFqtoscQlEb2MOffqwVtzTF4gK5lFK9uAZDf1Gk">closely followed</a> Caruana’s rise to the top of the chess world, I believe Carlsen is in for a fierce battle. What makes it interesting is that both players are at different trajectories. In the past couple of years, Carlsen has not shown the same dominance that led him to be the top-rated player seven years ago. </p>
<p>Meanwhile Caruana gradually ascended to the number two position some years ago, but battled inconsistency. In the past couple of years, he has stabilized his play, won various top-level tournaments and – as of November 2018 – Carlsen is only <a href="https://ratings.fide.com/top.phtml?list=men">three rating points</a> higher than Caruana. The margin is so close that it makes them virtually indistinguishable in terms of their chess ratings, which indicate their strength as chess players. Carlsen has a definite advantage in match experience and tenacity, while Caruana’s advantage may come in his composure and theoretical preparation. In my view, Caruana has an even chance.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243760/original/file-20181103-83632-8bgy16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243760/original/file-20181103-83632-8bgy16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243760/original/file-20181103-83632-8bgy16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243760/original/file-20181103-83632-8bgy16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243760/original/file-20181103-83632-8bgy16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243760/original/file-20181103-83632-8bgy16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243760/original/file-20181103-83632-8bgy16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">World champion Norwegian Grandmaster Magnus Carlsen plays American Grandmaster Fabiano Caruana in St. Louis in August. It was their last match before battling for the World Championship title.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/2018-Sinquefield-Cup-Magnus-Carlsen-vs-Fabia-/d492dd2b9c294b53a2998bd0c960e648/4/0">Dilip Vishwanat/AP</a></span>
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<p><strong>What will be the impact of a Caruana victory?</strong></p>
<p>On an international level, a new champion would shake the seven-year grip that Carlsen has had as the world’s top-rated player. This may prove healthy for the global expansion of chess as players from other nations see that they have a chance at the title.</p>
<p>When Fischer broke Soviet domination, it also had similar globalizing effect.</p>
<p>Also, chess may gain more appeal as an educational tool. Caruana was homeschooled and spent time traveling abroad – as did Carlsen – so more people may consider home schooling as a way to position their children for success in life.</p>
<p>On the other hand, a Caruana win may not have a lasting impact on the general public. As <a href="https://www.chess.com/member/danielrensch">Daniel Rensch</a>, an international master and vice president of content at Chess.com, stated in the Fall 2018 edition of American Chess Magazine: “November may come and go with no tangible change for chess in the U.S.”</p>
<p><strong>Will a Caruana victory have the same impact as the Bobby Fischer victory in 1972?</strong></p>
<p>Nothing can replicate the <a href="https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18228004">“Fischer boom”</a> that occurred after his politically charged Cold War era victory over the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky. With the world gripped in an ideological battle, chess had two combatants who were polar opposites. </p>
<p>The mercurial Fischer mostly worked alone while Spassky had the weight of the Soviet empire behind him. The match almost didn’t happen, but last-ditch attempts by high U.S. chess officials got Fischer on a jet to Reykjavik, Iceland, and he won a thrilling match charged with controversy. However, Fischer became the darling of the world and spawned a wave of interest in chess never seen before.</p>
<p>Whether a Caruana victory can spark the same interest in chess remains to be seen. However, his genial persona should do much to dispel the faulty notion – sometimes reinforced by media and popular culture in movies such as “<a href="http://www.thechessdrum.net/blog/2015/10/03/movie-pawn-sacrifice-fair-to-fischer/">Pawn Sacrifice</a>” – that chess is a game for rarefied geniuses who tend to be socially awkward.</p>
<p>If Caruana wins the championship, it could also lead young players to stick with chess longer than they would otherwise.</p>
<p><strong>If Caruana loses, how long will it be before we see another American contender for the world chess championship?</strong></p>
<p>Given America’s <a href="http://www.thechessdrum.net/blog/2016/09/15/the-anatomy-of-usa-gold-at-16-chess-olympiad/">recent re-emergence to prominence in chess</a>, even if Caruana loses the championship, we could see another contender within a decade. Caruana is only 26 and currently the No. 2 player in the world, so he’ll be back.</p>
<p><a href="http://wesleyso.com/">Wesley So</a>, a Filipino who represents the U.S., is a possibility, and I believe <a href="https://hikarunakamura.com/">Hikaru Nakamura</a> still stands an excellent chance to compete for the world championship.</p>
<p>Incidentally, there is a wave of talent emerging in American chess, but the question is one of retention. While at the 2018 Chess Olympiad in Batumi, Ray Robson, a three-time member of the Olympiad team and recent graduate of <a href="http://www.webster.edu/spice/chess-team/accomplishments.html">chess powerhouse Webster University</a>, told me his plans to focus on chess in the coming year to see how far he can go. I reminded him of the young grandmasters like <a href="https://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-column/2018/04/09/coppell-chess-prodigy-compete-us-chess-championship-st-louis">Jeffery Xiong</a>, <a href="https://new.uschess.org/news/gm-sam-sevian-wins-philadelphia-international-four-im-norms-achieved/">Samuel Sevian</a> and <a href="https://new.uschess.org/news/interview-cake-gm-awonder-liang/">Awonder Liang</a> nipping at his heels. He acknowledged this and also mentioned several foreign arrivals, such as Cuba’s top player <a href="https://grandchesstour.org/gm-leinier-dominguez">Leinier Dominguez</a>, who is now living in the U.S. </p>
<p>There are many scenarios, but American chess will have world champion contenders in the near future.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/106159/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Daaim Shabazz does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Daaim Shabazz, an international business professor and chess journalist, explains what’s at stake as American grandmaster Fabiano Caruana fights for the World Chess Championship in London this month.Daaim Shabazz, Associate Professor of International Business, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1063102018-11-09T11:45:25Z2018-11-09T11:45:25ZMyths and unknowns about chess and the contenders for the World Chess Championship<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244596/original/file-20181108-74775-1y38rie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Reigning Chess World Champion Magnus Carlsen, left, from Norway, and American challenger Fabiano Caruana will face off in the World Chess Championship, which begins Nov. 9 in London.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Britain-Chess-World-Championship/cb70fb4f09de45d3849ab90dab335bfd/7/0">Matt Dunham/AP</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>If Fabiano Caruana wins the World Chess Championship match against champion Magnus Carlsen this month, he will be the first American to hold the championship title since Bobby Fischer won it in 1972. The match between Caruana, age 26, and Carlsen, age 27, of Norway, takes place in London, England, from Nov. 9 to 28.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://new.uschess.org/international-events/couch-potatos-guide-2018-world-chess-championship/">winner will take home about US$700,000 – or 50 percent more than the loser</a>.</p>
<p>Here are five myths and unknowns about the world chess championship contenders and the game of chess.</p>
<h2>1. Parents name their babies after chess champions</h2>
<p>When Woman Grandmaster Jennifer Shahade and her husband, Daniel Meirom, learned that they were having a son, she told her father that she would name the baby either Fabiano or Magnus. “It started as a joke and then we realized how much we loved it,” Shahade told The Conversation. Shahade’s son Fabian was born in January 2017, before Fabiano Caruana became the challenger for the World Chess Championship but after Shahade had admired Caruana’s 7-0 win and sportsmanlike attitude in the <a href="https://uschesschamps.com/2014-sinquefield-cup">2014 Sinquefield Cup</a>. </p>
<p>Other parents may have had the same idea. According to the <a href="https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/index.html">Social Security Administration</a>, the name “Magnus” first made the list of the top 1,000 baby names in the United States in 2013, the same year that Magnus Carlsen became world chess champion. It will be interesting to see if the name “Fabian” – or “Fabiano” – experiences a surge if Caruana wins the match and becomes the World Chess Champion. </p>
<p>Status: Unknown.</p>
<h2>2. Chess is not a sport</h2>
<p>People may not think that it requires much stamina to move chess pieces and pawns from one square to another. However, as mentioned in my 2006 book <a href="https://www.abc-clio.com/ABC-CLIOCorporate/product.aspx?pc=F2132P">“Children and Chess: A Guide for Educators</a>,” chess players sitting at the board experience a quickened heartbeat and higher blood pressure, similar to what athletes experience when they compete in their sports.</p>
<p>Many, if not most, chess players <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/sports/bobby-fischer-chess-caruana.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimesworld&fbclid=IwAR12tfOTjQ2caDeOrcxWRBoB0030kMWrTVZueTACeKHg3wVhXaayGLIpL-8">view chess as a sport</a> and approach it as such. For instance, the 2018 U.S. Open chess champion Timur Gareyev – a grandmaster known for playing numerous players at once while blindfolded – has promoted the <a href="https://new.uschess.org/news/timur-gareyev-to-attempt-blindfold-world-record/">benefits of exercise for chess players</a>.</p>
<p>Carlsen and Caruana stay in top physical shape to meet the demands of chess. Carlsen <a href="https://new.uschess.org/news/who-is-magnus-carlsen/">plays soccer, basketball and tennis</a> and also enjoys hiking and skiing. Caruana also plays basketball and soccer and partakes in <a href="https://new.uschess.org/news/who-is-fabiano-caruana/">indoor rock climbing</a>.</p>
<p>Status: Myth.</p>
<h2>3. You need 10,000 hours of practice to be a chess master</h2>
<p>The 10,000 hour rule has been popularized by books such as Malcolm Gladwell’s <a href="https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/malcolm-gladwell/outliers/9780316017930/">“Outliers: The Story of Success</a>.” However, according to <a href="https://www.crcpress.com/The-Psychology-of-Chess/Gobet/p/book/9781138216655">“The Psychology of Chess</a>,” a new book by University of Liverpool psychology professor <a href="https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/psychology-health-and-society/staff/fernand-gobet/">Fernand Gobet</a>, some need less than 10,000 hours.</p>
<p>Though grandmaster is an even higher title than “master,” Carlsen became a grandmaster at age 13. Caruana got his grandmaster title at age 14. “The quickest players needed only 3,000 hours of deliberate practice to reach master level,” Gobet wrote, based on his research using data from the World Chess Federation. On the other hand, some chess players spend 25,000 hours of deliberate practice – and never make master. Gobet arrived at these findings in a <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226396370_Deliberate_Practice_Necessary_But_Not_Sufficient">study</a> conducted with his then-Ph.D. student Guillermo Campitelli.</p>
<p>Status: Myth.</p>
<h2>4. Starting chess as an adult gives you an advantage</h2>
<p>While one might think that adults have the edge in improving at chess, due to their emotional maturity for handling wins and losses and their fully developed intellects, it just is not so. “Starting young clearly helps,” Gobet told me in an <a href="https://www.utdallas.edu/chess/files/interview-fernand-gobet.pdf">interview for Chess Life magazine</a>. “In our <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226396370_Deliberate_Practice_Necessary_But_Not_Sufficient">study</a>, individuals who started playing chess at or before the age of 12 years old had 1 chance out 4 of becoming a master, as compared to 1 chance out of 55 for people who started to play after the age of 12. So, there is truth in the saying that ‘You have to start young at chess to become really great at chess.’”</p>
<p>Status: Myth.</p>
<h2>5. Chess helps prevent Alzheimer’s</h2>
<p>An <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=117588&page=1">ABC news story</a> published March 6, 2018 stated, “Chess, jigsaw puzzles and other mentally challenging activities may help prevent Alzheimer’s disease, a study published today says.” A 2013 <a href="https://en.chessbase.com/post/checkmating-alzheimers-disease-210513">ChessBase News article</a> likewise cites chess as one of several mind sports that “will be beneficial to an older adult.” Yet rigorous research that specifically examines the impact of chess on Alzheimer’s does not exist. Right now, chess just seems a likely way to maintain mental agility as one ages.</p>
<p>Status: Unknown.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/106310/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alexey W. Root does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>With the World Chess Championship set to begin Nov. 9 in London, Alexey Root, who teaches online courses about chess in education, tackles some myths and unknowns about the royal game.Alexey W. Root, Lecturer in Education, University of Texas at DallasLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1021322018-09-11T09:10:36Z2018-09-11T09:10:36ZThe benefits of prison chess clubs<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235063/original/file-20180905-45135-prvg10.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/chess-game-255260497?src=XB9pIVT0jzEduzk_c8Wdgw-1-16">Shutterstock.</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Chess is a cheap and tactical game, and is claimed to <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-chess-players-can-teach-us-about-intelligence-and-expertise-72898">develop</a> the part of the brain responsible for planning, judgement and self control, and even <a href="https://www.chess.com/blog/PRINCESTER/7-surprising-health-benefits-of-playing-chess">to help prevent</a> dementia. So it’s no wonder that thousands of prisoners in the UK are now part of <a href="https://en.chessbase.com/post/chess-in-prisons-makes-a-difference">chess clubs</a>. </p>
<p>Working with people in prison and tackling reoffending is one of the biggest challenges society faces and I’ve <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Sport_in_Prison.html?id=NJ2LAgAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y">long argued</a> that physical activity, sport and games have a unique and important role to play. </p>
<p>In prisons, just as in wider society, the impact of sport and games can be far reaching. Participation can not only improve health and behaviour but can <a href="https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/733184/a-sporting-chance-an-independent-review-sport-in-justice.pdf">directly contribute</a> to efforts to reduce reoffending. It can provide a route for offenders into education and employment but also reduce violence and conflict, develop communication and other skills, and promote positive use of leisure time.</p>
<p>Recognising this, organisations and clubs are increasingly collaborating with prisons to develop programmes that promote activity and tackle reoffending in a range of ways. These include football clubs such as <a href="https://www.chelseafc.com/en/foundation/social-inclusion">Chelsea</a> and <a href="http://www.evertonfc.com/community/youth-engagement-programmes/the-projects/safe-hands">Everton</a>, rugby clubs including Saracens and Northampton, and other groups such as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/2017/dec/01/everyone-finished-and-took-a-lot-of-pride-prisoners-on-the-parkrun">parkrun</a>, <a href="https://www.ittf.com/2018/03/02/transforming-lives-brighton-table-tennis-club/">Brighton Table Tennis Club</a> and the <a href="https://www.chess.co.uk/chess-behind-bars/">English Chess Federation</a>. </p>
<p>Evidence suggests that some less mainstream sports and games have a positive impact in prison settings, particularly for those who are otherwise sedentary or simply reluctant to engage. Positive outcomes have been demonstrated and documented in prison populations by offering <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14729670701485832">adventure activities</a>, <a href="http://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/22836/3/Hemingway.pdf">animal assisted therapy</a>, <a href="http://daneshyari.com/article/preview/94446.pdf">yoga</a> and <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Chess_Behind_Bars.html?id=dsHJswEACAAJ&source=kp_cover&redir_esc=y">chess</a>.</p>
<h2>Sporting principles</h2>
<p>In mid-August 2018, I published a <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/sport-a-pillar-of-youth-rehabilitation-minister-publishes-independent-review">review</a> commissioned by the Ministry of Justice into the use of sport and physical activity in youth and adult prisons. I visited and audited the provision of prisons, young offender institutions and secure children’s homes throughout England and Wales, speaking with staff and those in their care. I invited responses to a public consultation and met with community groups and dozens of people whose lives have been changed through sport in prison. </p>
<p>Although much still needs to be done, I also reported some of the positive sporting achievements which have already taken place in prisons and which have provided the motivation and skills for people to turn their lives around. These achievements are all the more remarkable given the levels of despair and brutality often encountered within the prison system. One example of good practice involved the use of chess in prisons.</p>
<p>Aside from the social and cognitive benefits of promoting chess in our prisons, in one of the secure children’s homes I visited as part of my review, the clinical team told me about their use of a programme, informed by support given to people who had suffered trauma, to work with some of the most challenging children in their care. As part of this, the psychology team developed a series of tools using examples and principles from sports and games to develop behaviour management plans. </p>
<p>I learnt about how one staff member was using chess as both an analogy and a practical example in his one-to-one clinical work with one of the most challenging young people in the centre. I was told about how the rules of chess were used to inform therapeutic sessions, and how the game itself was a calming influence. The child had responded positively and aside from the direct therapeutic benefits of the sessions had also taken up chess as a hobby.</p>
<p>Because prisoners are a diverse group with diverse needs, the sports and games offered in prisons also need to be diverse. Older prisoners are the fastest growing population within English and Welsh prisons, and there are now <a href="https://data.justice.gov.uk/prisons">more over 60-year-olds</a> in prison than there are under-21s. This means that “meaningful activity” in prisons should constitute physically active as well as less active team and individual sports and games.</p>
<p>At a time when staff shortages and regime restrictions mean that efforts to escort prisoners from their residential wings to a gym or sports area are regularly thwarted, a readily available, purposeful activity such as chess should be a welcome addition to – but certainly not a replacement of – the limited existing activities available within prisons.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/102132/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rosie Meek has previously received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council and various other external research funders. She is affiliated with the Liberal Democrats' Crime and Policing policy working group.</span></em></p>Games such as chess should be a welcome addition to the activities available for prisoners.Rosie Meek, Professor of Criminology & Psychology, Royal Holloway University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/961722018-05-23T22:53:40Z2018-05-23T22:53:40ZJudges sentence youth offenders to chess, with promising results<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/219860/original/file-20180521-14987-eb19q6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Preliminary research into the Chess for Life Program in Alberta, Canada, shows that youth who are sentenced to chess instruction after committing non-violent crimes are learning useful life skills. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Since January 2018, every Friday afternoon, one campus classroom in Canada is transformed. Tables are set up with two chairs facing one another; a chess set invites players to begin. An interactive white board shows a game in progress. Off to the side, another board is set up with a “chess problem.” </p>
<p>At half past one, the players begin to show up. The room fills with noisy young voices, sharing how their week has gone and clamouring for cookies and juice. </p>
<p>The scene is like any youth gathering, with one difference: Group home workers and probation officers are in attendance. </p>
<p>All of these youth are involved in the criminal justice system and are attending what’s known as the Chess for Life Program at Alberta’s University of Lethbridge as part of their sentence. </p>
<p>Sentencing practices for youth who engage in non-violent crimes have traditionally adopted a punitive approach — for example, ordering time in a juvenile detention centre. However, research suggests that <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2017.01.005">punitive models have little impact on reducing the chances of reoffending</a>. </p>
<p>In fact, <a href="http://www.ojjdp.gov/pubs/248513.pdf">punitive sentencing can result in poor social outcomes, low rates of employment and higher school dropout rates</a>. </p>
<h2>Chess for Life</h2>
<p>Some people suggest a more rehabilitative approach to sentencing is needed. For example, youth could be sentenced to programs that provide opportunities for developing life skills and establishing more positive relationships. This may result in increased levels of self-confidence, <a href="https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles/framwork.pdf">reducing the chance of reoffending</a>. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/cj-jp/yj-jj/tools-outils/back-hist.html">Alternate sentencing initiatives</a> focus on fair sentencing practices that are appropriate and support the reintegration of youth back into the community.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/219858/original/file-20180521-14953-p6suq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/219858/original/file-20180521-14953-p6suq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/219858/original/file-20180521-14953-p6suq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/219858/original/file-20180521-14953-p6suq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/219858/original/file-20180521-14953-p6suq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/219858/original/file-20180521-14953-p6suq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/219858/original/file-20180521-14953-p6suq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">A research team at the University of Lethbridge is exploring how chess as an alternate sentence impacts how youth view themselves.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span>
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<p>Within the Young Offenders Branch of the Alberta government and the province’s Assistant Deputy Minister’s office, there is a movement towards alternate sentencing for youth involved in non-violent crimes. As a result, Alberta’s Ministry of Justice and the faculties of education and health sciences at the University of Lethbridge have teamed up to deliver a unique program as an alternate sentence: Chess for Life. </p>
<p>Chess for Life is a 25-hour chess instruction program lead by longtime chess players Dr. Lance Grigg and assistants Riley Kostek and Josh Markle. Youth learn opening, middle and end-game strategies while playing the program leaders and each other. </p>
<p>While the youth may not know it, they also are developing skills in reasoning, problem-solving, paying attention, planning, focusing and decision-making. </p>
<h2>‘Every move has a consequence’</h2>
<p>Although all of this sounds great, there is little research into the influence learning to play chess may have on self-regulatory functions and on the life choices youth make. </p>
<p>To address this gap, our research team, led by Monique Sedgwick and Jeffrey MacCormack, is conducting a study that explores how youth caught up in the criminal justice system, and participating in the Chess for Life Program, view themselves as they learn how to play chess. </p>
<p>So far, we have observed that the youth, for the most part, like to come to instructional sessions. They say they really like how quiet the room is and that for the couple of hours they’re in the classroom, things slow down and it’s just chess. </p>
<p>They can leave the distractions, challenges, hurt and pain of their day at the door. </p>
<p>We’ve also noticed the youth have become more thoughtful. They ask good questions about moments in the game — questions that demonstrate they are developing problem-solving and planning skills. </p>
<p>They now know why the four middle squares of the board are important; we all need a strong centre. Before they move a player, we hear them plan their moves by working through the consequences of moving a piece in a particular way. </p>
<p>Perhaps the most revealing comment one youth has shared — reflecting the positive influence of the program — is that he wishes he had “learned to play chess a lot earlier.” </p>
<p>In life, like chess, every move has a consequence.</p>
<p>Although the study is in preliminary stages of collecting data, initial observations suggest the Chess for Life program is a good alternate sentence choice for helping these young people get their lives back on track.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/96172/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In Alberta, an alternative initiative sees youth who commit non-violent crimes sentenced to 25 hours of chess instruction with a University of Lethbridge professor.Monique Sedgwick, Associate Professor of Nursing, University of LethbridgeJeffrey MacCormack, Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology, University of LethbridgeLance Grigg, Associate Professor of Education, University of LethbridgeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.