Warning: Rampant groundless speculation follows. My brother and/or anyone else should feel free to contribute their own ideas or simply ridicule mine.
The first thesis I will never write was about the similarity between Bobby Knight and Bobby Fischer (that’s my third Reassembler post ever).
My second unwritten thesis is about the similarity between language and chess. The un-done research piece of this thesis is a search for a correlation between chess ability and facility with multiple languages.
Chess seems like an artificial, ultra-simplified version of a language, in some respects. It’s got components (the pieces = morphemes/phonemes/semantics) which must obey certain possibly arbitrary rules (grammar) to construct output (play, or a game, like speech) which can be correct or incorrect (illegal moves = ungrammatical speech) but furthermore may be adjudged a legal-but-poor. Good, better, best. Beautiful. So there’s correctness according to the rules, and according to the internal logic of chess which makes some moves bad, but also according an aesthetic, subjective dimension.
It resembles language, yes, but also math in certain aspects. Math’s rules seem non-arbitrary to me; that’s a critical difference from chess but perhaps not from language. Linguistics features, or used to feature, observations about universal rules of grammar shared by all languages and debate about whether those rules arise from some hardwired aspect of the human brain. I.e. a biological basis for certain restrictions on how any language must be structured.
Music – now is that closer to math or to language? The basis of chords and keys is mathematical, or maybe it would be more correct to say they can be described mathematically. (Howard? George? Harvey? Matt? Anyone else wanna dive in here?) This stuff has percolated in my mind for years. It resurfaced yesterday in part because of a conversation with my co-worker Kate Walsh.
For an American I am pretty good at chess, percentile-wise, though my play is more volatile and ‘appealing’ in the barbaric sense than it is in the sense of correctness.
Like most of my colleagues, I am “good at language” (that’s why we’re writers and editors) but not so “good at math”.
I learned German pretty well (although my Langue was ahead of my Parole) but I never understood musical keys particularly though I played tenor saxophone for about six years; I could learn to play by rote, but never quite grasped the whys behind music or calculus or trig or the treble clef.
Ah, the mysteries of the mind. I suppose this has all been hashed out by Pinker and others – I’ll get around to reading someday…
I’ve thought about this too, but have not come to any conclusions more constructive that what you’ve written. (It’s fun to draw analogies, yet what’s to say we’re not pulling these analogies out of our ass?) I’m still on Chapter 3 of The Language Instinct (Pinker). It will be a while until I finish, but, even when I do, I don’t think it will provide any revelation. Most of my formal eduaction is in math/science/engineering. I might read books about the brain, but I don’t really know anything about the brain. This is the pessimist in me talking. Pinker’s second book about language, Words and Rules, might provide additional insight.
Chess is chess. There is no analog. Although, here’s an empirical observation: nodoby ever seems to talk about “language prodigies,” but people talk about music and math prodigies all the time. Why’s that?
When I finish The Language Instinct maybe I’ll have a more optimistic view about this topic; unfortunately, I’ve got a number of books being read in parallel, as well as chess study. Last night I lost to Epp in what, for me, could be an instructional game, and I’m determined to start seriously analyzing my losses. This analysis and the study it spawns could take hours. Who has time to read about how the mind learns? Just do it. :) (Maybe Nike was on to something.)
Howard
I hear about language prodigies at least as much as math and music prodigies. Perhaps the difference is that language prodigies are not usually labeled as “prodigies”. Instead, they are simply described as “able to speak X languages fluently by the tender age of Y”.
The thing that strikes me about all of these areas is how naturally they are acquired by young minds. Kids in multi-language environments have no trouble learning two, three, even four languages. Good writers seem to have one thing in common; they were voracious readers when young, and still are. Chess prodigies immerse themselves in the game with countless blitz and/or bughouse games, constant tactical problem solving, etc. Music prodigies practice for hours on end, each and every day. And math weenies, well, they’re just weird. :)
But this brings up another thought I’ve had; is excellence in these areas anything special? I think everyone is capable of, and in fact exhibits, excellence in whatever they do the most of. Car mechanics know more about the systems of an automobile than I could ever hope to. Secretaries know every key shortcut in Excel, and people are amazed that I know (and understand!) the syntax to the “find” command in Unix.
We’re all geniuses.
-Matt
As the late Dutch GM Donner used to say: “You can compare many things to chess, but you can’t compare chess to anything.”
Peter – that’s funny. Although I try. Describing a classic chess game in terms of football makes it more accessable to the non chess-junkies.
Matt – I don’t understand the question. (heh.) No actually, I agree that “there are all kinds of smart.” I have no sense of direction; somebody wanna tell me a sense of direction is not a valuable form of intelligence, regardless of what IQ Tests measure?
Greg & Howard. Good thoughts also. I am reminded as an aside of the strip where Calvin says “I’m so brilliant – I think I must be a child progeny.” And Hobbes rolls his eyes and says “Most of us were.”
Chess and football have a lot in common, although I’ve never seen anyone tear an ACL playing chess. Both have three distinct phases (opening, middlegame, ending; offense, defense, special teams), both obviously require substantial strategy, planning, trying to play to one’s strengths and to exploit the opponents weaknesses, etc. Heck, NFL announcers are always saying that there’s a chess match going on, so the analogy must be valid!
I love math and English. I consider myself more than proficient in English–reading, writing, and teaching, and I did make it through college Calc with a B….I don’t know the first thing about chess. The only thing I can compare it to is other things I don’t know about…for example, chess is like Unix–I don’t know the first thing about either. ;-)
I’m bilingual, always had an easy time with math and I play a handful of instruments…and I suck at chess. Case closed. ;)
Greg,
My wife is a bilingual (American Sign Language is her second language) speech therapist, and we’ve been debating the benefits of teaching our daughter Sign, as well as a third language. The debate has always been around the time and money costs of such a task — there’s nothing prodigious about our daughter’s intelligence. Because my wife has always been around bi- and tri-lingual people her whole life, teaching our young daughter three languages didn’t seem like such a remarkable task. (In the end we’re not doing it, based on time and money reasons rather than for her lack of ability.) It always seemed to me that the brain was somewhat hard-wired for language (a la Pinker), thus speaking multiple languages that were learned at a young age does not seem that impressive to me. Math and music, OTOH, seem to require more advanced concepts that necessitate prodigious genetics. Just a layman’s thought.
BTW, I think you’re on the right track about the frequency of rating reports. It certainly does make the ratings more accurate. As long as the kids play a lot, and as long as the number of games is a lot, the kids should have an accurate rating.
Howard
Ah, nature versus nurture, a classic and frequently divisive debate.
Prodigious intellect aside, it seems reasonable that you acquire whatever you’re surrounded with, be that multiple languages or a musical household.
That’s why I leave my chessboard out all the time, so my daughter will become an expert by proximity/osmosis. :)