Slashdot Mirror
Record Set For World's Youngest Chess Champion
Pickens writes "Hou Yifan, a 16-year-old chess player from China, became the youngest world chess champion on Friday, in the final of the Women's World Chess Championship held in Antakya, Turkey, toppling a record held since 1978. Currently, the top-ranked woman is Judit Polgar of Hungary, who is thought to be the best female player in history but Polgar, once ranked No. 8 in the world among all players, men and women combined, does not compete in women's tournaments and did not play.
No one really knows why the best female players are typically not as good at chess as the best men. One theory, common among some top male players, is that men are usually more aggressive by nature than women, and are therefore better suited to a game that simulates warfare. Another, cited in at least one university study, is that the talent pool among women has not been big enough to produce many great players."
...In which case she'd actually be 12.
The same argument is sometimes applied to certain fields like math, etc., where men seem to be more successful than women. On average, men and women perform at the same level; the difference comes in the distribution. Men supposedly tend to cluster at the really high and really low levels, so while 4/5 of the best may be male, 4/5 of the very worst will also be male. It's a thought-provoking theory, and there is actually some evidence for it, but there is also plenty of evidence against it and it isn't one to make lightly. Like many other areas, it is likely really smart women are tragically funneled elsewhere or pushed to do something "more appropriate."
More concretely, the concept that chess simulates war is simply outdated. Civilization, Warcraft III, and half the console games these days simulate war. Chess is an artful mastery of planning, brainpower, and pattern recognition that cannot be matched, but it's NOT warfare, not the way it matters.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
Classy Slashdot, real classy. You post a news item about the youngest female chess champion and spend half the summary wondering about why the best female players are not typically as good at chess as the best men. Admittedly, it's only verbatim reposting of part of TFA (thanks NYT for also being classy!). Would another part not have done? Say,
Ms. Hou said that she received training and financial support from the Chinese government. She studies chess four to five hours a day, and also attends high school. She said that she sometimes fell behind in her work, but her teachers understood and tried to help her out.
or if you really wanted to talk about men
The record among men is held by Garry Kasparov, who became world champion in 1985, when he was 22.
Now, I don't have a problem with the facts, if the top women are indeed not as good at chess as the top men. But it seems rather small to spend half the summary pontificating on that rather than telling us a bit more about the champion.
No one really knows why Slashdot posts summaries that are at best disingenuous and at worst deliberately inflammatory. One theory, common among top Slashdotters is that inflammatory stories get more comments than report-the-facts posts.
Rant over, I really need to lighten up. Merry Christmas all!
If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
Getting your kid involved in dangerous stunts like these is uncalled for. This kid could've choked on a game piece, or something
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
While the sex breakdown of high level chess players is interesting, the idea that the sort of adaptations that suit a primate for small-group physical violence are good for a board game seems risible at best. If anything, I'd ask the question "How is it that some males manage to overcome adaptations suited to physical violence and sit still, for long periods of time, performing abstract mental operations as dispassionately as possible?(and, particularly at the middle and high school levels, many don't, which is why they are out on the playground punching each other and being diagnosed with ADD rather than in class...)"
It is never a good sign for a theory when it can be turned into a persuasive sounding "just-so story" for either possible outcome: Since the leaderboard is full of men, you get "zOMG, chess is a wargame!". Were it full of women, you'd get "zOMG, chess is dispassionate and does not reward aggression!"(or, the other possibility, the evolutionary psychology brigade would march in to inform us that chess' brand of cerebral competition is well matched to women's well-known propensity for sophisticated verbal and interpersonal competition and alliance formation and poorly suited to men's more straightforward brand of violence).
There is obviously something going on; but I'd suspect that it is much more closely connected to whatever it is, social or biological, that drives the sex breakdown of high level mathematics departments; not whatever it is that drives the sex breakdown of combat units.
Not the world's chess champion, but the women's chess champion, which is altogether a lesser prize because the level of competition is so much lower.
Men and women are exactly the same and equal in every single way conceivable and the only reason there are more or less women in one field or recreation than another or why there are any perceived differences in aptitude or interest are purely due to evil, vile, horrible, sexist, chauvinist, males. (Oh, don't forget that women make up something like 55% of the population, so they're hardly in a "minority" position on anything).
May I suggest politely, that women, in the main, have /two/ paths to success, (or evolutionary strategies) whilst men may have merely one. /competent/ male, while few males have managed a similar trick in reverse, and that these two strategies compete with each other in a way that dilutes the pressure to be competent. Fabulous women out-compete women who are merely competent in propagating their genes. I would wonder whether, in any species, both genders can adopt the same evolutionary strategy, this is likely not the case, as sexual reproduction leads to mutual exploitation by definition (as each gender conspires to make the other partner more responsible for the child rearing)
That is that Women can, by merely looking fabulous, simply attach themselves to the success of a
Kasparov at 22 became the youngest unified chess champion. But he is not the youngest ever -- Ruslan Ponomariov won the Fide chess championship in 2002 (during the split, in a knockout format).He was 18 at the time.
I'm afraid we'll have to get used to "world records" from China.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
New summary:
No one really knows why the best estrogen players are typically not as good at chess as the testosterone players. One theory, common among some top testosterone players, is that testosterone usually induces more aggressive behavior by nature than estrogen, and is therefore the better suited hormone for a game that simulates warfare. Another, cited in at least one university study, is that the talent pool among estrogen filled players has not been big enough to produce many great players."
There's a trend in hunter-gatherer societies that males tend to be the hunters, while females are the gatherers. It turns out, each sex has advantages in these areas. Males tend to be much better at navigating while blindfolded, and females are much better at remembering which objects were in a room. Whether this is an adaptation to or a cause of the hunter-gatherer trend is debated.
Back in college my evolution teacher said he used to try to illustrate these differences during lecture, but his students never showed any difference. For a while this puzzled him until he realized that upper level biology majors are not representative of the population at large. To get to that level of education you generally have to be adept at both skills.
I would postulate that a similar situation is happening in chess. Women may be less aggressive as a whole, but I doubt you can say that specifically about women who excel at chess.
Men and women are different?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Chess requires high IQ, the variance (not average) of IQ (and lots of things) is higher among men than women so you get more male idiots and geniuses. In other words, more men are further away from the average than women - be that better or worse. Hence better top performers in many areas of human activity. Also, more male bottom performers. It's not exactly surprising that women have less variance since they have two different X chromosomes, so the effect of every gene on the X chromosome is the average of two genes from the gene pool, while in men the effect of every gene on the X or Y chromosome is just the effect of 1 gene. So a good X or Y gene gets full effect in a man and a bad X or Y gene gets full effect in a man. In a woman the X genes have two copies so both bad and good genes are likely to be counteracted by the second copy of that gene on the other chromosome. Women don't have a Y chromosome which also means they can't differ in their Y chromosome, again reducing variance.
Chess is also racist because white always goes first.
I am told that one gets better at chess by playing better chess players. If this is so, then two groups with different chess skills would stay that way. Call it history and positive feedback.
Only someone who sees (classifies) people by the color of their skin would make such a statement.
Every single way conceivable? Just a random thought, but it's sure a lot easier to put somebody into shock by twisting testicles on a male than a female...
Because you think that American or European top gymnasts achieve their feats with no sacrifice? And what happens to those who don't make it to the olympic team? Professional sport is probably the most competitive activity one can imagine, and vae victis.
In chess there are no such thing as men's tournaments -- women can join any tournament. It is just men who cannot play in women's tournaments. So the argument that women simply are barred the opportunity to play against stronger competition doesn't hold water. In fact, Hou Yifan herself has played in many large tournaments with mixed genders, but has never done as well as she does in women's only events.
Statistics? Why are men better chess players than women?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Past studies have shown that the range of men's brains is wider. Thus both the smartest and dumbest people alive tend to be men. Men are not only wired to take more risks, but their physiology also seems to toss the dice further when putting their genes together.
In mammalian groups, typically the reproductive quantity difference between the top male and bottom male is larger than that of females.
This is because the top male can mate many times with multiple females, while the top female can only crank out and raise slightly more than her typical competition. Thus, the reproductive rewards and penalties are more extreme for males.
This results in males being risk takers by personality and by construction. Recombinant DNA appears set up to take bigger gambles on male design; and this means that for any skill test, the more extremes of the spectrum will tend to be male.
Table-ized A.I.
It isn't PC to discuss differences intelligence, even when there may be some truth to be found there. There is plenty of evidence that the mental abilities for men and women are slightly different - and a slight difference in the average population can turn into a big difference at the extremes. For example, men are, on average, better at manipulating 3D objects in their heads; they are also (again, on average) slightly better at mathematics. It is possible that this (or some other) particular facet of intelligence is applicable to chess.
However, what I really wanted to point out is this: have you ever known really good, young chess players? The ones I have known are, frankly, not "normal". They are almost monomaniacal about chess. To become this obsessed about something may require a certain mental abnormality. Another mental difference: some studies have shown that women tend to be "saner" than men, meaning perhaps that they may be less susceptible to such obsessions.
Last, random thought: why is it so non-PC to discuss differences in mental abilities? No one disputes that there are physical differences. We don't have men and women competing together in sports. Even where both may be equally good, the physical differences lead to completely different styles (think: floor gymnastics). We are built differently - why should it be surprising if our brains are wired differently too? To the contrary: Vive la difference!
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
And there is no mention about the chess prodigy Magnus Carlsen:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Carlsen
who was ranked first at the ELO Fide page at the age of 19 !
Since chess competition between men is much tougher, it's really an amazing achievement (Judit Polgar is 49th: http://ratings.fide.com/top.phtml?list=men )
Are you forgetting that 2010 was the year Magnus Carlsen became the youngest ever FIDE top-rated chess player in the world?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Carlsen
This did happen in January, so you could be forgiven for not remembering so far back. :-)
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
My theory would be segregation. The vast majority of chess-players are male, generally. But despite the lack of any obvious reason why men and women shouldn't compete on equal terms, any female chess players who come along get shoved into girl's and then women's tournaments, which means that they don't get to play so much against the vast majority of chess talent, and they're not encouraged to aspire to be better than the world's best players. And strong competition and high aspirations are two important factors in sporting success.
A small talent pool in which to find champions can go quite far in explaining the lack of successful chess-playing women. Having to find rivals in that same small talent pool seems enough to explain the rest. Maybe, instead of generating "women's world chess champions" of no real credibility, the female chess world should ditch its attitude of inferiority, and look to its best player for inspiration.
Wow, the feminists you know are surprisingly mild. I'm more used to hearing that women are superior to men in every single way conceivable.
...when Judit was 12, with just Judit with a blindfold, 10-0 in a 10 game match.
Judit Polgar is the best femal chess player in history, by a long margin. Let's stop the propagation of this nonsensical news.
I am told there is a thing called "chess software" that allows even a child in a remote part of Rwanda to not only play well above his skill level but to progressively select a skill level just above his own as he improves. I am also told there is a thing called "the Internet" that allows players to play against any other player in the entire world at any time, regardless of location, provided they have "Internet access".
Massive citation required for the correlation of race and IQ? Just enter "racial differences in IQ" into Google, and you will have more citations that you can deal with, on both sides of the equation. Start with the references available in Wikipedia. Follow that up with "The Bell Curve" - this book offends people precisely because it carefully documents the existence of such differences.
The problem is not whether racial IQs are different. The problem is that we are not allowed to scientifically investigate this question. By PC dictate, races must have identical intelligence distributions, and no dissent from this view will be tolerated. Truth be damned, we don't want to offend anyone...
Consider the continuing catastrophe that is Africa. If it should happen that part of the problem is a low average IQ for blacks, one might think it essential to find out why this difference exists. If the factors are primarily environmental, that sets the general approach to dealing with the situation. If the factors are primarily hereditary, then completely different solutions are required.
Sticking our collective heads in the PC-sand, by prohibiting any discussion of the topic, is just stupid.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
What I've heard (and am too lazy to look up right now) is that although men and women have similar IQs on average, men have a greater percentage far below the line and a greater percentage far above the line.
I come here for the love
Just like in the west, it is not "the goberment" that does the random picking. It is the parents.
This article has a nice quote regarding that.
"If my children don't get picked to carry on in gymnastics," Li says, "I'll move them to diving."
Parents are the ones dead set at making their kid into the next [insert competitive activity here] prodigy.
So they pack their kids to specialized training schools at the age when they are barely aware of the world around them.
And yes, they don't put a gun to their heads - but that is purely because an adult doesn't really need a gun to make a 4-year-old do what he/she is told.
And you don't need to produce optimal results (which is a ridiculous goal in itself - they are aiming for SUPERIOR results) - or do you really think that there are hundreds of gold medals to be won in gymnastics at every Olympic?
As the gymnastics teacher in one of those videos says - that is the thick bottom end of the pyramid.
Only the super-best get to go to the Olympics. But every kid whose parents THINK that they can afford to ship him/her to one of those schools (Note that the entire family wears their coats when at home. Heating is for the western capitalist pigs.), WILL get the chance to start the training at the age of 4.
I just love that last part of the video, where you get to hear the little girl's mother talking about how she has "wished for a successful kid since she got married".
And then how she speaks, while cluelessly smiling, about her 6-year-old daughter always complaining that she doesn't want to go the gymnastics school - yet she stands ready to go each morning, and when asked why she goes if she doesn't want to she replies "that if she doesn't go, she will have to run 30 laps as punishment".
She often cries when alone in bed at night, but she says that her parents want her to go to the gymnast school - so she does.
And in the evening, the girl studies English - so if all this doesn't pan out, she can at least be a doctor.
It is always wonderful seeing parents live their unfulfilled dreams through their children.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
No, in any group that becomes a significant majority -- be it male, female, white, Christian, atheist, or whatever -- will tend, without active prcoesses counteracting it, to discriminate in subtle and not-so-subtle ways against the minority. An atheist in an all-Christian setting, or a Christian in an all-Muslim setting, or a white guy in an all-African-American setting, or a guy in an all-girl setting (e.g., social work) -- all of them will tend to experience discrimination. There will always be a range of people -- some who actively combat it, and try to be inclusive, some who are total assholes to the minorities and don't feel bad about it, and a mix of people in between. How the minorities fare will depend on the distribution of the people in the majority.
And I have to say, in my experience, CS guys, and especially FLOSS guys, suck at this. Instead of keeping an open mind, actively looking for any roadblocks which may limit women becoming involved, and rooting those out, the vast majority of men I see respond just like you do. They jump to the simplest and most convenient explanation without actually talking to a woman or looking at the facts, and then get defensive and refuse to consider another perspective.
Think of it this way. Even if it were the case that there is a biological component to the different performance between men and women in certain fields (chess, computers, math, &c), isn't it possible that there are also other causes, which are sociological in nature, and therefore can (and should) be changed? And wouldn't it make sense to do whatever we can to try to remove those barriers, so that women who do have the ability can participate and contribute?
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
You mean, she hasn't played as well (i.e., her ability seems lower), or she hasn't placed as well (i.e., many people placed higher than her)?
If she (or other women) actually play less well at mixed-gender events, I'd suspect some kind of subtle (or not-so-subtle) sexist overtones that made it uncomfortable for women.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
Weaker woman's tournaments are the reason, Judit Polgar, the strongest ever woman chess player does not compete in women's only tournaments. On the flip side, I seem to recall her sister, Susan Polgar (who was a Woman's world champion herself) write in favor of having a woman's only field as well. Her argument was having only mixed tournaments, would lead to vicious cycle. Basically, she thought that if there were no women's only tournaments, a lot of women players would perform badly and a lot of them would not get a chance to qualify to play, and as a result would drop out of chess.This would discourage a lot of women entering the field. The diminishing size of the pool of players would in turn lead to fewer high ranking womens players, and so on.
The former World Champion Garry Kasparov wrote that, based upon her games, "if to 'play like a girl' meant anything in chess, it would mean relentless aggression."
describing Judit Polgár.
He also said:-
"She has fantastic chess talent," said Kasparov. "but she is, after all a woman. It all comes down to the imperfections of the feminine psyche. No woman can sustain a prolonged battle."
He also played he and cheated (caught on film), and when she beat him he walked out in a fit.
Bobby Fisher refused to play her:-
"No, they're Jewish."
And for those with an interest in gender, intelligence and breeding....
Judit Polgár (born July 23, 1976) is a Hungarian chess grandmaster. She is by far the strongest female chess player in history. In 1991, she achieved the title of Grandmaster (GM) at the age of 15 years and 4 months. She was, at that time, the youngest person ever to do so. Polgár is ranked number 49 in the world on the November 2010 FIDE rating list with an Elo rating of 2686, (was) the only woman on FIDE's Top 100 Players list, and has been ranked as high as eighth (in 2005)
She and her two older sisters, Grandmaster Susan and International Master Sofia, were part of an educational experiment carried out by their father László Polgár, in an attempt to prove that children could make exceptional achievements if trained in a specialist subject from a very early age. "Geniuses are made, not born," was László's thesis. He and his wife Klara educated their three daughters at home, with chess as the specialist subject. From the beginning, Laszlo was against the idea that his daughters had to participate in female-only events. "Women are able to achieve results similar, in fields of intellectual activities, to that of men," he wrote. "Chess is a form of intellectual activity, so this applies to chess. Accordingly, we reject any kind of discrimination in this respect."
They have more wo not woh.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Fearless prognostication: Celebrity chess players and Chinese Government backing just might produce talented women players -- not 200 ELO trailing either.
The question is why fewer women would choose to play chess then; you haven't really answered the question, just shifted it slightly.
Personally I think women are just less interested in chess, which is probably genetic.
If you've ever been to a children's chess club, you'll notice that the ratio is something like 9 boys to 1 girl. The driving force in a child's chess career is the parents - they are the ones who organise everything, who finance everything, who transport the children between home and club and national events. Competing in national events requires thousands of miles of weekend travel every year - a considerable investment of time for any family. At this age (pre-puberty), there is no particular reason to think that there should be any substantial genetic differences. For some cultural or personal reason, parents of girls seem less willing to push them towards playing chess, and do not have a chess career ambition for their daughters. You may be right in that there is a genetic component, but we will never know for sure, until the parents of girls act the same way as they do for the boys, and act in a focused way to drive their children's careers forward. I am sure that if we had the same number of parents pushing their young daughters as they push their young sons, then there would be many more successful female chess players.
Ultrasound machine plus home computer equals in utero chess training.
Kids learn faster than adults -- a well-trained, well-programmed embryo should learn the rules quicker than anyone.
It's mainly a problem of interface design. After that, throw enough processor power at the problem, and this baby will trounce Deep Blue from the womb!
-kgj
"Any female chess players who come along get shoved into girl's and then women's tournaments."
I did not know that. The thought saddens me.
"Female chess world should ditch its attitude of inferiority, and look to its best player for inspiration."
Amen to that.
Furthermore, women and like-minded men should start shaming anyone who takes a "no girls allowed" attitude .
-kgj
Well articulated, and quite intesting. Thanks.
-kgj
...then men would consider mastery in chess at the same level as mastery in knitting. We wouldn't care.
Women are naturally superior at all sorts of things which we have defined away as trivial. For the most part, I suspect that most women don't care about mastery in chess.
When is she slated to go to Battle School?
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
Maybe it's just me but I always have trouble seeing baseball players as "athletes".
Baseball is a sport, not an athletic event.
No sig today...
Why is there a separate competition for women? I kind of understand that in sports, but why in chess?
I'm sure you, like me, wondered if she is hot.
http://www.google.com/images?q=Hou+Yifan&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=tokaTcjwEIL4sAORt5DOAg&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=3&ved=0CD4QsAQwAg&biw=1351&bih=773
She's not the best looking chick in the world, but I'd do her (after she turned 18, of course)
Be seeing you...
It's true that there is simply a larger pool of male chess players.
How about bridge though. No shortage of female players at the casual level or the club level or the tournament level.
There are plenty of decent female professionals.
There are very few who would be ranked in the top 20 or so in their country. In the US, Helen Sobel would have been on the short list of best players in the US in her prime. And it was a lengthy prime. I don't think many would rank her above Shenken, but most would rank her above Charles Goren (her frequent partner).
Dorothy Hayden formed a very strong partnership with B. J. Becker (a superb player who formed very strong partnerships with a pretty fair number of partners) for a few years (Becker would represent the US with a different partner a few years later. Hayden started to play primarily in women's events). Since then the only woman to represent the US at a top level was paying 5 world class players to support her (not that she's alone in buying a world title. More than a few men have done the same thing)