Slashdot Mirror
Chess Players 'Are Paranoid Thrillseekers'
Tardigrade submitted a brief little article that claims that chess players are paranoid thrillseekers. It's a fairly amusing little piece and definitely
makes me wish that my high-school chess club would have got into epic
battles with the groups that were capable of stretching us into pretzel
shapes, if only for the thrill. Maybe I'm just being paranoid.
Personally, I suck at chess, and even I know what an absorbing game chess is. It is a battle, and one does not forget that, especially if you consider yourself an intelligent person. It's a war of mind vs. mind, may the most intelligent (and least easily distracted) being win.
While it lacks the immediacy of video games, and the brutality of (mock?) physical combat, chess is a war waged in miniature, where one must consider logistics and the strength and position of both your forces and your opponent's in order to come to a victory. Even when your forces are decimated it is possible to achieve victory by the use of clever tactics.
But what really makes this not news is that any game can have this sense of immediacy. While realtime games have a little bit more of it, they work in generalities, where chess works in absolutes: You know exactly how the field will act, you know exactly what each piece is capable of. It's like fighting a war on a perfectly ordered (and symmetrical) battlefield with identical forces and perfect intelligence, a situation no one will ever be in, within the confines of reality. But if you focus, any game can become your reality - For a while.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
When I was a kid, strategic encounters of all sorts were likened to chess matches, so it seemed to me that getting good at chess would just make me a more savvy competitor in all sorts of situations.
;-)
After a while, I began to understand that the way to win in chess was to become "fluent" in the patterns of chess itself, and that those patterns didn't really have any important analog elsewhere.
Once it appeared that putting a lot of effort into mastery of chess wasn't doing anything for me besides making me better at chess, I gave it up.
Shortly thereafter I replaced it with programming. Talk about "out of the frying pan, into the fire...."
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
chess is all about testosterone, arousal (Article).
[Transcription of 1-900-CHESSXX.]
"...Dial 512 to accept these charges and continue"
[Beat. Beep-boop-bop.]
[Ring. Ring.]
<deep husky voice> "Hi there. I'm Edith."
<heavy breathing. audible swallow.>"...I'm Paul."
E. Mmmmm, Paul. I like that name. Wasn't Morphy's first name Paul.
P. Oh YES.
E. Tell me...how long have you played chess?
P. S-since I was eleven.
E. Want to tell me about your first time.
P. W-well, I don't know. It was with my father. He didn't play all that well. I started beating him not long after that.
E. Want to hear about my first time?
P. Oh yeah, tell me about your first time, Edith. How old were you?
E. My first time was at the tender age of fourteen.
P. Really?
E. Yessss. Before then, I hardly knew the names of the pieces.
P. How well do you play now?
E. Oh, better than you, probably.
P, excited. Really?
E. Yes, I'm a genius you know. Want to hear about my first time?
P. Yes, tell me about it.
E. My sister's friend was over. He was a Geek. Are you a geek, Paul?
P. Yes, yes, I am.
E. I love geeks. They excite me. My sister's friend was the first geek I met. He introduced me to Linux. He also taught me chess.
P. You use Linux?
E. Well, technically it's not Linux, I use my own kernel.
P. You kernel-hack?
E. I guess you could call it that...
P. What do you mean?
E. Well I don't bother with Torvaldis's source-tree.
P. Oh, Edith. Tell me what you do.
E. I mess with kernel directly.
P. mmmm.
E. Oh, it gets very messy. Straight assembly. Pur hex.
P. Oh-ooh. Tell me about your sister's friend.
E. He taught me chess. By the end of the first hour I was seeing three, four moves ahead of him. By the time I was seventeen, four years ago, I was placing in the nationals.
P. Oh, man. Are you really that good?
E. Want to try me?
P. <inhales deeply> e2?
E. e3 Paul.
[rest censored]
Hmmm. Possibly this is true for North America, however, the best players in the world are from the former Soviet Union and as far as I remember the game was highly valued even by the worst hooligans on the streets. Is that weird to you?
You can't handle the truth.
Surely this is the same for anyone who's any good at nearly anything? For example, re-writing as:
...makes exactly the same amount of sense. Aren't they just saying that to be good in most things you need to have a mind? Why should Chess be unique in this?
More competitive F1 drivers have been shown to score highly for unconventianal thinking and paranoia
Cheers,
Ian
As a previous post reminded me, I fell in love with chess about 4th grade, and kept going strong until I suddenly realized in 7th grade that it was totally artifical - there was no "porting" its lessons to real life.
And that's when I gave up on Chess - when I realized that it was a completely constrained, artifical environment just like I was creating for myself in Real Life. The thing about chess is that its almost completely a game of recognizing previously-identified patterns of play, then countering them with a pre-selected strategy. Not until you get to beyond Grandmaster is there room for innovation. And even then, its constrained to a couple of moves in a 30-move match.
What I look for in my games nowdays is the element of outside interference - items not in the control of either player (or any player, in the case of MP games). That's where the real creativity and brilliance comes in - the capability and flexibility to cope with situations which could not be reasonably forseen (though adept planning will make coping much easier).
I wish we would have more games for kids in this manner - ones which not only met that "Creative Problem Solving" mantra, but also give their players a taste of what they'll need to really know: how to expect the unexpected (and unpredictable) and to cope with them.
Chess is fun, insofar as it teaches good pattern recognition and a disciplined mind. I would argue, though, that if you haven't move beyond it after a couple of years, you really are hurting yourself.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.