Inside the Grandmasters' Brains

dunkerz writes: "The BBC News site has an article on how the great chess players play so well: they use a different part of their brain (or so German scientists say)."

Comments

Pattern matching

[fava]

Its been known for many years (how many I don't know) that the best chess players rely on pattern matching rather than analysis to decide which move to make.

This is why a grandmaster can play dozens of people simultanously and win most of the matches, spending only a few seconds at each board before moving on to the board. In essence they are treating each turn on each board as a seperate puzzle, without considering what came before it.

What is interesting is that computers play chess much like amateurs do, by analysing each move and trying to think ahead. However computers are much faster than your average chess player and therefore can suceed at a higher level that a person can.