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More concretely, the concept that chess simulates war is simply outdated.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
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.
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).
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.
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.
That is a very good point. In order to understand this sort of thing, you need to take a look at the very real differences between men and women. We do not fully understand what these differences are, but we know some of them. For example, when exposed to cold temperatures, men will die of hypothermia more rapidly than women, while women will get frostbite more rapidly than men. This results from the fact that women reduce the blood flow to the extremities more rapidly when exposed to the cold more rapidly than men do. This results in women maintaining their core body temperature longer.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Chess is also racist because white always goes first.
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.
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"
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.
yes, because the american kids often--though not always--have a conscious choice whether to put effort into the competition. and these kids also receive the same education, if they choose to, as every other kid.
you have to realize that chinese society is highly competitive because of the population. education is a constant battle among peers. talents like the girl in this article was "manufactured" for lack of a better word. they were picked out at an early age and entered into the athlete training system, in which hard training is the routine day in and day out because these kids are also competing within themselves for the top spot in sports. only a few make it--good for them. the rest end up being dropped out.
problem is that the athlete manufacturing system has a different--reduced--education curriculum. in china standardized exams dictate where students stand in job markets, and a different curriculum spells doom for those not taught as such. this reduced curriculum makes it very hard for the athlete dropouts to merge back into the ordinary crowd to compete. the later the dropout, the worse, since they wasted more time on athletic training.
any visible international competition has its counterpart training program in china. aside from sports, there's also programs for math olympiad, physics, computer sciente, etc. kids in those programs fare better because those subjects are within the academic curriculum and are valued by the chinese universities.
i know, because i was one of them.